The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter Special Edition: Frank Capra at Columbia
The following review is too large to include in the monthly DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter, so we have chosen instead to publish the review as a Special Edition instead
Lots of Frank Capra movies
Frank Capra made twenty-six feature films for Columbia Pictures and producer Harry Cohn from the Dawn of Sound to World War II, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has collected twenty of them in its twenty-seven-platter Blu-ray boxed set, Frank Capra at Columbia (UPC#043396635937, $231). The movies are presented on seventeen of the eighteen separate Blu-ray jackets within the beautifully designed box, which is tilted back a little to stand up on a shelf and open like a miniature cabinet, revealing the jackets arrayed in chronological order. The set weighs just under five pounds. Almost half of the films are in 4K format (each film that is in 4K comes in a jacket with a standard BD platter as well), and eleven of the films have a total of fifteen alternate commentary tracks. All of the movies are in black and white, and in a squared full screen format. All of the dialog films are monophonic and all of the movies in the collection are accompanied by optional English and French subtitles. Some of the silent films have original monophonic audio tracks, but some have fresh stereophonic musical accompaniment. For the silent features, the English subtitles make note of the musical transitions (and later, other sound effects, etc.), while the French subtitles translate the intertitles. Curiously, Cohn and Capra’s 1928 The Matinee Idol, which we reviewed on a Columbia DVD in Jul 99, has not been included.
Capra began making films in the silent era, notably establishing himself by overseeing a pair of successful features starring the comedian, Harry Langdon. The skills he acquired executing visual slapstick would serve him well for the remainder of his career, especially as he began to master integrating that humor with narratives that called for more than constant comedy. It was also fortuitous, in a way, that his career rose with the onset of the Great Depression, since his ability to communicate empathy for America’s social stress became one of the principal hallmarks of his films and indeed, his ‘brand.’
In 1928 Capra began working at Columbia, and made a half-dozen silent features in that year alone. So This Is Love deftly straddles humor and action drama, all for the sake of romance. Shirley Mason is a clerk in a delicatessen who attracts the attentions of two men, a successful prizefighter played by Johnnie Walker and an artist and clothing designer played by William Collier, Jr. There is no need to spell out the details of the plot but to simply explain that the film ends with an elaborately staged fight before a big crowd, where Collier’s character has been substituted in the last minute for the fighter Walker’s character was supposed to be battling. The 56-minute film may be missing parts of a scene here and there—at one point in particular the image, which is generally in excellent condition, gets quite rough and the décor of the room where the scene is set changes substantially—but still plays out quite smoothly. The humor is effectively integrated with the action, but never interferes with the serious moments of humiliation and caring. The fight scenes are competently and rousingly staged, and from the beginning of the movie to its end, the emotions of the characters within the film reach out and carry the viewer’s sympathies and fears from one sequence to the next. All three characters are distinctively developed, as are several supporting characters and a few background extras. Upon a close examination of his oeuvre, one realizes that Capra was a Zen master when it came to casting. From the starring role to the smallest glimpse of an extra in a crowd, he had an uncanny instinct for placing the right performer in front of the camera for the right part, something that would eventually become, along with his glorified humanism, the signature Capra touch.
Other than those rougher patches, the image is free of significant damage and is consistently sharp, with well defined contrasts. There is a workable stereo piano score that is best kept at a modest volume. Silent film enthusiasts Stan Taffel and Bryan Cooper provide a commentary track. They talk quite a bit about the various cast members and even some of the bit players. Walker also starred in Matinee Idol, and they mention it several times, even suggesting that the two films would make a fine double bill, so it is all the more baffling as to why Sony did not include Idol in the set. They clearly admire So This Is Love, but they are not above disparaging some of the production touches inherent to the early days of filmmaking. “I like that he’s fighting in a V-neck sweater and pleated pants. You know, it’s a choice.”
The action scenes in Capra’s 1928 silent, The Way of the Strong, are exhilarating. The film is about mobsters, and they not only use machine guns, but guns protected by large iron shields, as do the police. The 58-minute film also has several decent stunts, showing characters climbing up walls to avoid detection. Clearly, Capra could have been Howard Hawks if he’d wanted to. A mobster played by Mitchell Lewis has a badly scarred face—hence, his character’s name is ‘Handsome’—and has been successfully hijacking bootleg deliveries to other mobsters and making a fortune selling the booze himself. He falls in love with a blind violinist played by Alice Day, who cannot see how repulsive he is, and has her touch the face of the his joint’s piano player, played by Theodor Von Eltz (his first name appears on the credits and advertising without the concluding ‘e’ most reference sources have assigned to him), while pretending she is touching his. Eventually, the rival mobsters kidnap the girl and there is a battle between the gangs at the end. Margaret Livingston is also featured, as the other mobster’s moll, although even he gets a thing for the blind girl as soon as he sees her. Like So This Is Love, it is an efficient, well made film, with vivid characterizations, touches of humor, and well-executed romantic entanglements backing up the action.
The picture quality is in even better shape, with fewer incidents of wear. There is another piano score, but this time it is augmented with a violin, thus contributing to the narrative. Taffel and Cooper supply another commentary, talking about the cast (Lewis had a key moment later in The Wizard of Oz), describing the efforts that went into preserving the film, speaking a little more about Capra’s skills and career, and dissecting the individual scenes (including trying to figure out where some of the location work was shot).
The first tears—of joy, mind you—arrive at the end of Capra’s wonderful 1928 silent, That Certain Thing. The film is a delightfully constructed romance, working its way around a common silent film trope—the counter girl meets the millionaire’s son—to deliver fresh twists and turns of its own. Viola Dana is the heroine, and Ralph Graves, who looks a lot like Capra, is the son, who is disowned by his father when the two marry after a whirlwind romance. They eventually get back into the father’s good graces, and it is the reconciliation that is both touching and uplifting. In the meantime, the 64-minute film is filled, once again, with distinctive bit players (including an unbilled African-American actor who exudes a remarkable sense of dignity as the family chauffeur during the few moments he is on the screen), deftly timed comedy sequences and a romance that is based upon a true partnership between the boy and the girl.
The picture quality is even more improved, with some portions looking sharp and spotless, and others a little more in keeping with the era but still in decent shape. There is another stereo piano score that is best held to a modest volume.
Advancing to a full 91 minutes and integrating a few sound effects and snippets of song vocals with an orchestral score, Capra’s 1928 Submarine makes use of access to U.S. Naval resources in a very impressive mix of action and melodrama. Graves and Jack Holt are best friends, who work on salvage operations. When Graves’s character gets transferred to be first mate on a submarine, they lose touch and Holt’s character gets married to a girl he meets in a dancehall played by Dorothy Revier. He gets sent off for a week’s assignment, however, and she gets bored, so she goes to the dancehall and picks up Graves’s character, who is back in town for the first time in over a year. They fall for one another, Holt’s character finds out, but then there’s an accident on the sub and only Holt’s character can rescue Graves’s character and the crew from the bottom of the sea as the oxygen runs out. Capra appears to have had carte blanche with the Navy, and does an excellent job mixing that footage with his studio sets. The performances are terrific, the male-bonding-amid-female-inconveniences drama is crisply handled and the action is thrilling. And it is the first title in the set to be giving 4K treatment.
The presentation on the standard Blu-ray platter looks fine, and the film works perfectly well, but the added sharpness of contrasts and smoothness of movement manifested on the 4K platter is captivating when you toggle back and forth. The film becomes more involving and exciting. On both, the original monophonic score is reasonably strong, with minimal noise and distortion, but at a key moment, the music transitions to a fresh stereophonic recording, and only goes back when a sequence involving sound effects arises. The shift in and out of the augmented music is done so smoothly and integrated so well with the drama that you are barely aware of it, even though the track not only has a mild dimensionality, but is completely free of adverse noise. It is as much a tribute to how well the original soundtrack has been restored as it is to how conscientiously the new music has been added.
Submarine demonstrates that Capra could match Hawks when it came to action and adventure, but he also had one weapon in his entertainment arsenal that Hawks never had, and that was his mastery of sentimental melodrama. The wonderful 1929 semi-talkie, The Younger Generation, begins as a conflict between a brother and a sister for the affection of their parents, and it gradually and methodically works its way through the narrative until, in the final act, it generates one tear-inducing scene after another. Capra knows when to point the camera at one actor and leave it alone, and that is what he does with Jean Hersholt, who plays the patriarch, a Jewish peddler on New York’s Lower East Side (stories about Jewish life were something of a genre unto themselves in the early days of film, as many of those involved in the industry were eager to explore and even promote their heritage; Capra was an Italian Roman-Catholic, but clearly understood the immigrant experience) whose son, played by Ricardo Cortez, takes over the business and turns it into a successful importing firm. His daughter, played by Lina Basquette, loves the boy next door, who never got along with the brother, and when the daughter marries him and he has a brush with the law, the daughter become estranged from the family, a situation acerbated by the brother’s underhanded domineering. Running 84 minutes, the film plays out with Capra’s confident mixture of humor, atmosphere and dramatic conflict, so that by the time he really starts playing the heartstrings you have a thorough familiarity with the characters and sympathy for their interests. Have a box of Kleenexes handy, and in fact, you should probably order a case if you decide to get the BD set.
While the film still has silent movie sequences with an original orchestration, augmented by sound effects and crowd noises, there are also scenes with dialog. How these were chosen seems to be partially dependent upon dramatic impact and partially upon logistical accountability. Unlike the films of lesser directors at the time, the movie does not stop dead in its tracks when the characters begin speaking, even though such scenes are clearly more confined and static than those relying on the intertitles to convey the dialog. Instead, Capra uses the opportunity to slow the drama down and allow the emotions characters are feeling and expressing to really sink in. It is also worth noting that while antique in its nature, the audio is consistently strong and clear, with minimal background distortion.
The film is on two platters again, in 4K format and as a standard BD. The image on the standard BD is softer and while it is technically less grainy, since the grain is more clearly defined on the 4K presentation, it feels grainier, because the grain is less a part of the texture of the film projection and more of a distraction to its detail. The 4K image is smooth and contrasts are effectively defined. Additionally, since the film plays upon the dichotomy between the Old World environment that the parents were accustomed to and the slick coldness of the son’s Upper East Side mansion, softness in the image is used deliberately as another, subliminal way to separate the two.
An ideal double bill with Submarine, Graves and Holt team up again in the 1929 Flight, and this time Capra secured the cooperation of the U.S. Marines. The first half of the film is set at a training base in Pensacola Florida (although the hills in the background suggest otherwise), where Holt is a sergeant and Graves is a trainee who fails his first solo. They both like the same nurse, played by Lila Lee. The second half is set in Nicaragua (which also seems to have the same hills), where the Marines have been sent at the request of the government to help put down a group of rebels—excuse us, bandits. Graves comes along as a mechanic, but circumstances eventually leave him in control of a plane. Along with the terrific flying footage and an energetic battle scene, there is a moment worth noting because we’ve never seen it replicated in any of the many other films we’ve watched over the years. An injured man is propped up a little bit, but is basically lying on the ground, in the jungle. The hero is attending to him, trying to make him comfortable, and one of the things he has to do again and again is wipe the swarming ants off the man’s body. Eww, right? But dramatically, it’s a fantastic touch. As Capra became more successful, he gained the power to let his films breathe a little. They became longer, and Flight runs 116 minutes, giving the narrative time to build up the characters and convey both the romance and the sense of adventure the movie imparts. You don’t feel impatient with it even though the battle scene doesn’t begin until the final act. Instead, with the boot camp scenes, the flying, the exotic locale and the basic Courtship of Miles Standish romance, you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth.
The picture quality is generally fine. There are a couple of brief glitches, and the image is a bit soft in spots, but there are no overt shortcomings. There are a couple of lingering intertitles, but the film is a full talking feature, and the sound is in workable condition. At one point, when a pair of men are trying to talk over airplane engines, their conversation is translated with modern English subtitles, and it is hard to say if that is a substitute for something else or just an acknowledgement that it is difficult to hear what they are saying. The volume of the dialog does tend to go up and down a little bit, and there are several other passages where we felt obligated to briefly activate the optional subtitling in order to find out what was being said. Generally, the sound is okay, and certainly the gunfire and the plane engines come through loud and clear. The military music is a little wobbly, but no more so than what one might expect from a film of its age. An interesting silent trailer running a half-minute without clips from the film has been included.
Flight is billed first on the individual jacket cover and in the detachable master list on the box jacket, but the platter menu has it on the right, as if it were the second feature, even though the companion film on the platter, Ladies of Leisure, came out in 1930. The queen of pre-Code sizzle, Barbara Stanwyck, stars in the full-fledged sound film, without an intertitle to be seen. Graves, still looking like Capra, plays the son of a wealthy railroad man who wants to be a portrait painter. He’s a good kid, much more conscientious than the crowd he hangs out with in his penthouse apartment and when he meets Stanwyck’s character after they both duck out of parties they don’t feel like attending, he hires her to be his model. The rest of the 100-minute film is about them realizing that they love one another and figuring out what to do about it, with the final act being a breathless, seat-gripping series of cross-cutting sequences where you find yourself, in more than one instance, shouting at the screen.
Pre-Code romances have a unique, saucy tone that is in some ways innocent, but is in other ways teasing and adult in a manner that American movies would not rediscover for several decades. Indeed, it is the dynamic between ‘good’ behavior and uninhibited behavior that often forms the central theme of such films, the power of which was lost when the nature of the ‘bad’ behavior had to be watered down. There is nothing blatant in the film, but there are implications and loose bra straps, and every shot of a bed has a double meaning. Lowell Sherman and Marie Prevost play the best friends of the two principals, bringing an adept amount of humor to offset the seriousness of the romance and class division issues that drive the plot. Graves gives a competent performance, as does almost everyone under Capra’s guidance. But when Capra got a hold of a genuinely talented performer, like Hersholt or Stanwyck, he would often just step back and let them do their thing, brilliantly. Later in the 100-minute film, Stanwyck’s character has to become emotional and she delivers those feelings with everything she’s got, but earlier in the film, as Graves is busily doing different things to try and stay interesting for the camera, all Capra has to do is cut to Stanwyck doing absolutely nothing at all, and you know everything that is going on in her character’s mind and heart. Even in her youth, she was already one of America’s greatest actresses, and she would remain so for the rest of her life.
The picture is in terrific shape. There is a hiccup now and then, as if a frame or two were missing, but otherwise the image is smooth and clean. The monophonic sound is in very good condition for the film’s age. An excellent commentary is included from film expert Jeremy Arnold, who provides thorough background and career summaries of the cast and the crew, deconstructs Capra’s approach to various scenes, and supplies other fascinating information. He talks quite a bit about Stanwyck, not only pointing out that this was her breakthrough role, which she had secured only through the hustle her husband, Frank Fay, had to use when her initial screen test bombed, but also explaining that the relationship between Stanwyck and Fay was the basis for the original A Star Is Born, and that her performance in the film was the key event that revealed to the world what a phenomenal acting talent she was.
Vaudeville comedian Joe Cook’s name doesn’t just appear above the title of the 1930 Rain or Shine, it dominates it as if it should be a part of what the film is called. Cook plays the manager of a failing traveling circus arriving in a town where they already owe money they don’t have. Running 88 minutes, there are basically two films here. One is a very impressive circus movie with fantastic action scenes and amazing cinematography. Cook actually has skills as a juggler and acrobat (even if he is supported here and there with wires), and does some very dangerous stunts, while Capra pushes the envelope, moving the camera through crowds and using extended takes without a cut. The stunts are thrilling and witty, and Capra takes full advantage of the circus environment. Those parts of the film are truly dazzling. The other half, however, are the burlesque routines performed by Cook and his fellow comedians, and these are just deadly. Imagine the Marx Bros., only not funny. It is as if Capra feels contractually obligated to shoot the segments and just wants to get them over with as quickly as possible. The staging is dull, and the humor is duller.
For a handful of years, Hollywood tried desperately to hold onto the foreign market after sound came in. That is why films such as Submarine would have a soundtrack with music, sound effects and even singing, but would retain intertitles for the dialog sequences, so that the intertitles could easily be swapped out and replaced by foreign language translations. Although the Domestic version Rain or Shine has substantial spoken dialog, an International version was also created and it is such a different movie that it is has also been included on the platter. Running 68 minutes, the narrative is streamlined and altered at a couple of key points, and there is footage and gags that don’t even appear in the Domestic version. Although our favorite shots in the film—the longish camera shots of characters walking through the circus grounds—have been shortened (and alternate takes are used for some other shots), the stupefying comedy routines have also been eliminated, and the film plays much, much better. It is amusing, exciting and over before it becomes tiresome.
The Domestic version has some wear and a few thin vertical lines running through it. The International version is even more battered and has more lines. Although both versions are fully viewable, unlike most of the other films in the collection, they show their age. On the Domestic version, the sound is reasonably clear, and both versions have the same musical score, opening and closing with a tune normally associated with MGM, Singin’ in the Rain. An 11-minute appreciation of the film is also included.
Holt, Graves and the United States Navy are back for another impressive military adventure, the 1931 Dirigible, which is presented in 4K. Fay Wray is also added to the mix. The film runs 100 minutes and is a monumental production. Some of it was shot at the infamous dirigible port in Lakehurst, New Jersey, but other portions were shot in a genuine snowbound environment that could accommodate parachutists, and there are decent-sized inserts with extras added to the stock footage for the ticker-tape parade scene. What the film really doesn’t have is a decent drama. Technically, there is a plot, and there is an abundance of adventure and fantastic special effects, but the triangular romance that worked so well as a foundation for the action in Submarine and Flight is shallow, through no fault of the performers. Holt’s character is the captain of a dirigible and Graves’s character is a hotshot pilot who is famous for breaking all sorts of records. Wray is the wife of Graves’s character, but frustrated when he continues to double down on his quests for additional fame. He takes a team to land at the South Pole, but he crashes and Holt’s unit has to rescue him with the blimp. The film only succeeds, or overcomes its duller moments, by the audacity of its premise, the validity of its location work and the elaborate effort that went into its stagecraft and special effects.
The transfer looks gorgeous. Even the image on the standard BD looks terrific, and the crisply detailed image on the 4K presentation is amazing for a film of its age, which adds to the pleasure of the aviation sequences as well as the pristine dramatic interludes. The standard BD also contains a trailer, which is not present on the 4K platter. The trailer is fascinating, presenting an imitation newsreel clip of a genuine stunt from the film shot at Lakehurst, where a bi-plane latches onto a hook hanging below a dirigible in flight. That Lakehurst would later become the location for one of the most famous newsreel clips of all adds to the chill of the trailer’s presence.
Stanwyck rightfully has her name above the title in Capra’s 1931 The Miracle Woman, playing a radio evangelist. In the opening scene, her character chastises her late father’s congregation for failing to support him, and the range of emotion that she goes through, believably, delivering her sermon is so thrilling you forget all about bi-planes and dirigibles and everything else. It is not so much that Capra is directing her, it is that he is skilled enough to know how to present her and allow her to utilize her amazing talent. Sam Hardy plays her manager and also gives a rousing performance, another example of Capra’s impeccable casting (think Robert Preston, only a real creep).
This is as good a time as any to mention how often Capra’s films include scenes involving suicide (only a handful films in the collection do not contain a contemplation or execution of the act)—it seems that more of his films do than do not, even after the Production Code tried to stifle such a potent dramatic tool. David Manners is a blind composer who is about to jump out of the window when he hears Stanwyck’s character preaching on the radio through another open window. As much as the film belongs to Stanwyck, it also belongs to Capra. It is the first movie in the collection that is truly recognizable as a Capra film. It is spectacularly directed. Columbia may have been known as a bargain basement studio and Cohn as a skinflint, but Capra seems to have had an unrestrained budget. Manners’s character attends one of the shows Stanwyck’s character holds for her followers and it is glorious in its excess, with a band, a chorus and real lions on the stage. At the same time Capra is basking in the abundance of production value, however, he is also turning his camera onto the audience, and capturing one ideal bit part character actor after another—each one unique and giving a fledged performance for the few seconds of the camera’s attention. Not one of them is generic.
Running 90 minutes, the film is Capra’s first masterpiece, and the first film to have all of the elements one associates with a ‘Frank Capra film.’ It is also one of Stanwyck’s finest performances, perhaps her greatest of all, before she took on the iconic affectations associated with her stardom. Her character is far more vulnerable and palpable, for example, than her character in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, and more realistic than her characters are in comedies, regardless of how much one loves them. Only in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas does she achieve the same complex mix of genuine desire and fragility, but even that character does not have the magnificent mask of hypocritical command she displays for her character’s followers. It may be phony, but it is phony in a very real and believable way. The core of the film is the love story that develops between Stanwyck and Manners’s characters, and its simplicity is perfectly offset by the decorations that give the movie its cinematic grandeur. The finale, for example, is as spectacular as the concluding spectacles in several of Capra’s previous films, only this time it means even more, because everything building up to it has been so deftly measured, from the quirkiness of the supporting players (even Manners’s character is a little weird—he has a ventriloquist’s dummy that he uses to express his true desires at times) to the finely articulated development of the romance. About 3 minutes before the end of the film, there is a cut to black, followed by an epilog. The epilog is a little disheartening, but only because you’d rather the film had continued some more before trying to wrap everything up, even though it was time to do so, but it is the one vaguely disappointing beat in an otherwise perfect drum roll, marching toward the pantheon of cinema.
The image is consistently soft, and while some of that is conceptual, it is also age related. The picture is clean enough and detailed enough to convey the film’s grandeur and its intimacies, but the presentation feels weaker amid so many immaculate transfers in the collection. There is a nice 7-minute appreciation of the film by Ron Howard, who also talks about how Capra inspired his own awareness of directing.
Robert Williams stars as a reporter who marries an heiress in the 1931 romantic comedy, Platinum Blonde, another 4K presentation. Loretta Young, who has top billing, has a much smaller part as the reporter’s ‘best friend,’ and third billed is the actress who essentially defined her career by playing the title character, Jean Harlow as the heiress. Sadly, Williams passed away the same year the film was released and had only a half-dozen roles under his belt, but in keeping with Capra’s mastery, he is perfectly cast (he’s like Lee Tracy, but with a bit more refinement), his character hustling his way to a story and then doubling down once his foot is in the door. It is Harlow who is the most impressive, however, balancing the real feelings her character has for the reporter with her comfort in the lifestyle she has grown up with, and of course, Young makes you melt every time she is on the screen, as the reporter’s true soul mate. Running 89 minutes, the film does not have much humor on paper, but in the hands of the cast under the guidance of Capra, it is a delight to watch the characters cope, adjust, scheme, learn and grow, as they skewer the rich and discover that love defies both wealth and anarchy. It is worth noting that one scene, functioning as the kind of punchline to a running gag in the film, depicts a homeless individual living outside of the mansion, the first hint in the collection that economic disparity has led to national economic despair.
The picture is distinctively sharper on the 4K presentation, since the standard BD presentation looks softer and blander. There are some hidden splices, including a couple during a key dramatic moment, but generally, the image is in good shape, free of wear and reasonably sharp.
The next platter has two films, but this time they are offered up in their correct chronological order. The first—presented on the left on the menu—is the 1932 American Madness, a brisk, incredible thriller with a fantastic cast, while also demonstrating that Capra’s talent was already at its peak—it would remain there for more than decade. The Depression may not be directly present in the film, but it informs the narrative in several different ways. Set over the course of 48 hours, the film is also a trial run for the masterpiece that Capra made after he left Columbia, It’s a Wonderful Life.
One of the finest American actors of his generation, Walter Huston, plays the president of a bank who is being pressured by his board of directors to merge with a larger bank in order to protect its assets in troubled times (Huston delivers an Economics 101 lecture to the board in defense of his character’s liberal lending practices, but since it is Huston, you don’t mind sitting still for it). The stars are all wonderful and are, once again, exquisitely cast. Pat O’Brien is a senior cashier and the central hero of the film, with Constance Cummings, Kay Johnson and, unbilled but in a fairly decent-sized part, Sterling Holloway. The film runs a quick 76 minutes and is about a run on the bank, which occurs after a robbery (that O’Brien’s character is falsely accused of aiding) fuels false rumors of insolvency. It is Capra’s elaborate depiction of how the rumors begin and then how the run grows to a near riot that separates the film from a standard crime suspense drama. Not only is each step in the panic articulated from a number of different viewpoints, but the crowd filling the oversized bank lobby is enormous, and is filled, as we pointed out in the earlier films, with exhaustively chosen and placed extras. The pandemonium may seem random, but Capra has it covered by every angle, and then puts it together in the editing with a meticulous and unrelenting momentum. The last half-hour of the movie has you at the edge of your seat, twisting one of those tissue boxes into a pretzel of anxiety.
The picture generally looks okay, and some shots look terrific, but there is some fleeting wear here and there, as well, including a couple of vertical lines and a splotch or two. Overall, though, it is fine, and when you need to see all of the faces, you can see them quite clearly. One commentary track features motion picture historian Steven C. Smith, who provides an excellent talk about the film’s production (Capra took over the movie from Allan Dwan), Capra’s biography and equally detailed profiles of the primary cast members. He also includes a recorded interview with Victoria Riskin, daughter of screenwriter Robert Riskin, and they discuss his career and artistry. Smith also goes into detail about the stock market crash in 1929 and the subsequent banking crisis, and how the film was so timely when it appeared that it was utilized by marketers to aid in boosting bank consumer confidence.
Capra’s son, Frank Capra, Jr., provides a second commentary, prompted by film expert Catherine Kellison. They talk about Capra’s background and how he started working for Columbia, and they discuss the film at hand and how Capra became involved with it. They also go over the film’s story, point out specific touches of style and casting that Capra specifically brought to the film and reflect in general on Capra’s attitudes toward the situations the film depicts. Also featured is a 25-minute appreciation of the film that goes over the advances it represented in Capra’s style, and explains how the film mirrors the life and success of California banker A.P. Giannini, who founded Bank of America and was closely entwined with the movie business.
Stanwyck returns for the second film on the platter, the problematic 1932 romantic adventure, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, playing the fiancée of a missionary in China during a time of civil war who is separated from her future husband during a battle and awakens on the train of a bandit general. Her character is held captive in the general’s ‘summer palace,’ in elegant surroundings with access to a wardrobe that matches the digs. She also becomes witness to intrigue and espionage, while the general, becoming obsessed with her, kind of takes his eye off the rebellion ball. The general, however, is played by Nils Asther, one of several dated aspects to the film that prevent it from connecting with modern viewers in quite the same way it connected with viewers in the Thirties. Stanwyck’s character even has a make-out session with him, although it is presented as a ‘dream’ to prevent members of the audience from having heart attacks. Running 87 minutes, the film has some wartime action—which Capra is always quite adept at presenting—and its exotic locale is drenched in atmosphere. Other than conforming to unfortunate stereotypes, the performances are fine, and the film is a viable blend of romance, suspense and escapism. Most of Capra’s other films have aged perfectly well, however, but this one has not, although some viewers will undoubtedly find that its strengths justify its weaknesses.
The film is loaded with unusually fuzzy close-ups of Stanwyck, but that is apparently an attempt to convey a dreamlike mood for the entire endeavor. There is minor wear to the source material, but the image looks fine most of the time, and the hazy views of the garden at night, as Stanwyck’s character watches couples across a pond embracing, nails the tone Capra is striving for with complete deliberateness. Also featured is a 9-minute appreciation of the film and Capra’s filmmaking choices.
Movie costume design expert Kimberly Truhler provides a commentary, comparing Grace Zaring Stone’s source novel to the narrative, going over the basics of the film, providing a little bit of background information about the stars (she suggests that the film was an expression, in part, of Capra’s obsession with Stanwyck), and pointing out the various ways in which the film was taunting the yet to be enforced Production Code. She does go into a little more detail about the outfits, and once in a while she makes note of another pertinent style choice. “Capra shows us its raining outside. The rain is called out in the novel, as well. But Capra also really liked to use rain in scenes where there’s sexual tension. It’s used in It Happened One Night, for example.”
The next platter again contains two films presented on the menu in their correct order. The first, the 1932 Forbidden, is a great pre-Code warm-up to Stella Dallas for Stanwyck, who stars with Adolphe Menjou and a very young but already typecast (although he is nastier than usual) Ralph Bellamy. When the film begins, her character is a mousy librarian who takes a vacation for the first time and sails to Havana, meeting a lawyer on the boat played by Menjou. Since the pleasure of the 85-minute film is the arc that Stanwyck’s character travels, across several decades, the remainder of the plot is best left to be discovered. All of the performances are excellent—even Menjou breaks through his usual defenses and really opens up in several moments—and the film is a classic romantic melodrama filled with topics that would be verboten in a couple of more years, so far as Hollywood was concerned. The fact that the story manages to leap ahead in years periodically while maintaining its throughline is one more example of Capra’s skill in knowing what to show an audience and what not to show.
The picture is in very good shape, with no more than a momentary evidence of age here and there. Capra archivist Jeanine Basinger provides a commentary, deftly talking her way through the film’s narrative as she summarizes the careers of the cast and crew, and goes to great length to point out why the performances and Capra’s direction are so exceptional. She also delivers a cogent summary of Capra’s career. “Capra’s attitude toward politics and power figures is almost always negative. I’ve never felt that the interesting part of Capra’s films are the politics. What I appreciate about him is his humor, his storytelling ability, his economy, his humanity and optimism, which I know some people do dislike. But whether you like Frank Capra films or don’t like Frank Capra films, he is a master craftsman. Absolutely a master craftsman.”
The companion film on the platter is one of Capra’s genuine masterpieces, the 1933 Lady for a Day. It was a match made in movie heaven when Capra chose to adapt a Damon Runyon story, since both artists excel in the celebration of quirky urban characters. He also elicits an outstanding performance from May Robson, as the Depression era street-corner apple seller who doesn’t want her station in life to spoil her daughter’s potential marriage. Warren William is the gangster who looks on her as a lucky charm and comes up with an elaborate scheme to get her out of her jam. Guy Kibbee, in one of his very best performances, aids in the deception, and Glenda Farrell and Ned Sparks are also featured. Running 97 minutes, the film counts for another two or three Kleenex boxes, but it is a joyful concoction that is perfectly timed, perfectly dressed, perfectly acted and perfectly executed from beginning to end. Capra even remade the film later on for MGM in widescreen and color, as Pocketful of Miracles, and that’s not a bad movie, either, but not even Bette Davis could accomplish what Robson accomplishes with the role, embodying it with every part of her soul.
The picture looks terrific. There are a couple of quick, hidden splices and an errant marking or two, but overall the image is sharp and smooth.
The last five films in the collection are each in 4K format, with a companion standard Blu-ray platter in the jacket. The 1934 It Happened One Night, which certified Capra’s talent within the industry by being the first film to nail the top five Oscars for the year, is also available on a standard Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection (UPC#715515119610, $40). Each Oscar was deserved. Both Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert give precision performances. Colbert is slightly old for her part, but that only magnifies how screwed up her character is, and how ready and waiting she is for maturity once someone comes along to show her the way (she also played Cleopatra that year, which added to her acting creds). Gable’s timing is superb, and his emotions are meticulously delineated as his reporter character gradually falls in love with her as they schlep across the back roads of the Atlantic seaboard, trying to avoid the rest of the press and the detectives her character’s father has hired, which serves as the foundation for Rifkin’s witty script.
Capra’s direction is wonderful. The production designs are at once extravagant and instinctively realistic, and his camera setups can often make the mundane seem exciting. Quite famously, one scene has been said to have destroyed the sales of men’s t-shirts, because Gable is shown not wearing one, but that was not a reflection on his style choices. Rather, within the scene, Gable does a striptease—to the delight, one is sure, of lady viewers throughout the world—and it seems clear that although he wanted the scene, Capra wanted it to move along quickly, so once the shirt is off, Gable can get directly to his pants and shoes, rather than fussing with an undergarment. Running 105 minutes, the film is a true American classic, offhandedly exploring social and economic strata as it systematically develops its believable romance between characters played by compelling movie stars. As with many of his previous films, Capra also has the crosscutting in the final act down to a science that keeps you on the edge of your seat well before the delightful conclusion.
Each of the three presentations is a bit different. The Criterion presentation is the weakest, looking somewhat darker than the other two, although even it is a substantial improvement over the scratch-filled Columbia DVD we reviewed in Feb 00. Sony’s standard BD has better detailed contrasts, but is still a bit soft at times, while the exhilarating 4K presentation is immaculate in the bright sunlight and smooth in the darker night scenes so that you are less aware of how soft it might be. On all three, the sound is reasonably strong and substantially superior to the DVD.
Each platter also has a different set of special features. The 4K platter, which has the usual English and French subtitling, is accompanied by a commentary track from film critic Julie Kirgo that covers details about the shoot as she follows the narrative along, and also talks about Capra and the stars. “Gable was being punished. This is how he came to play this part. He didn’t like the script, either. He was under contract at MGM, and he had been going to Louis B. Mayer and saying, ‘I need to be doing less work.’ And he was right. I mean I think in like 1931 he made eleven movies. He was really being worked hard. Plus, he was playing the same kind of role over and over again. Mostly dramas, playing kind of sinister lover boys or gangsters, you know. Kind of scary. And I think one of the reasons is that in this era—oh my god, and certainly imagine if he were around in our era—the guy was a man. He was not a boy. There was, I think what we see in this movie is the emergence of a bit of a playful boy, but prior to that he was just, almost, scarily virile. So he hadn’t had a chance to play a part like this, and I think probably he wasn’t quite sure could do it, so he didn’t want to. He considered that the movie was going to be a dud. He was begrudging about the whole thing. And so, [he and Colbert] were just sort of dragged into doing this.”
The Sony standard BD has additional Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German audio tracks, an additional twenty-one subtitling options, the Capra, Jr. commentary that appeared on the DVD, the trailer and still frame memorabilia collection that appeared on the DVD, the 11-minute appreciation of the film by Capra, Jr. that appeared on the DVD (and reiterated some of the things he said in the commentary), and the original 60-minute Lux Radio Theatre broadcast with Gable and Colbert that appeared on the DVD. There is also a rewarding 39-minute conversation between film critics Molly Haskell and Phillip Lopate deconstructing the film’s strengths and suggesting it should be considered a screwball comedy (actually, the first one).
Criterion’s supplement comes with the same 11-minute appreciation of the film by Capra, Jr. and the same 39-minute conversation between Haskell and Lopate. They have also included a comprehensive 1997 profile of Capra and his career, Frank Capra’s American Dream, which originally appeared on the flipside of the Matinee Idol DVD. Running 96 minutes, it is narrated by Howard, and includes enthusiastic appreciations of Capra’s artistry from a number of prominent filmmakers while it steps its way through the chronology of his career.
The story goes that Capra bluffed his away into directing his first silent short, the 1921 Fultah Fisher’s Boarding House, which appears as well on the Criterion BD. Running 12 minutes, the film is a very impressive adaptation of the poem, The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House, by Rudyard Kipling, with its stanzas, used solely as the intertitles, sometimes superimposed upon the images. It is accompanied by a very pleasing stereophonic piano score. All but two of the poem’s eighteen stanzas are used (one is placed out of sequence). While the piece may be little more than a depiction of a brawl in a dockside sailor’s bar, Capra is already taking advantage of his fascination with supporting characters, cued by Kipling’s colorings. Not a single moment in the film is offhand, as each player, even if he is on screen for just a few seconds, is a separate tale in his appearance and framing. The parallels between poetry and motion pictures, particularly silent motion pictures, have always been compelling. We don’t know enough about silent films to state definitively how unique Capra’s creation is, but we cannot think of another work that so closely inhabits the writing it has been based upon (Walt Disney’s Casey at the Bat?). Nevertheless, the piece was a clear shot across the movie world’s bow that many more exceptional films would be forthcoming from Capra in the decades ahead.
Best of all, however, and reason enough to obtain the disc, Criterion has included the 1982 American Film Institute Salute to Frank Capra, which we reviewed on LD in May 93. Running 59 minutes, it is a star-studded program that is better than an Oscar telecast when it comes to ogling the Hollywood greats, from Colbert and Stanwyck to Steve Martin (“I guess of all the people here tonight, I share the most memories with Mr. Capra, for he and I have known each other for over 80 years…”). At the end, Capra gives his talk, thanking many of the people who supported his life and career, including the individual members of his family, a number of the stars that he worked with, Rifkin, his cameraman, Joseph Walker, and so on, but tellingly, he never mentions Cohn. He also tells a heartening story about his passage to America from Sicily when he was a very young child, and the profound moment when his father brought him up on deck after the fortnight journey and he saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. Either by choice, poetic license or deliberate neglect, he does not make the connection between the Statue and the Columbia Pictures logo.
You may not remember this, but Gary Cooper’s character plays a tuba in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and on the 4K presentation especially, the full, clear, smooth and guttural sound of the instrument comes flowing out of one’s speakers as if it had been recorded yesterday rather than in 1936. Cooper’s character lives in an idyllic rural town representing what came to be called ‘Middle America,’ and is brought to New York in a whirlwind when a wealthy uncle leaves him a fortune. Once there, the lawyers for the estate attempt to manipulate him and a reporter, played by Jean Arthur, deceives him to cover his country-boy-in-the-big-city foibles, only to fall in love with the purity of his soul. Among the many marvelous character performers, frog voiced Lionel Stander has an early but significant part.
Running 116 minutes, the film taps into the resentment the general populace felt for the elite, resentment magnified by the Depression, and while the basic dynamic is universal, Capra found a way to give it a distinctively American perspective—using the concept of democracy as a justification for economic parity. The film culminates in a memorable courtroom scene where the sanity of Cooper’s character is questioned when he begins giving the money away to strangers. Cooper was one of the great American movie stars. Seemingly soft spoken and exceptionally patient, his characters would nevertheless rarely give ground unless they had to. The film may stand out because of its populist message, but it was an initial hit and has endured as a classic entirely because of Cooper’s screen presence and legacy, and how well Capra created a story and a character to fit around his talents.
The differences between the standard BD platter and the 4K platter are minimal, although the sharpness of the 4K delivery does shine through now and then. Faces in crowd scenes are particularly distinctive, and then there is that tuba…
The 4K platter comes with a nice commentary featuring film historian Steven C. Smith and Riskin’s daughter, Victoria, whose mother, incidentally, was Dirigible’s Wray. Smith slips in highlights of the careers of the cast members and aspects to the film’s construction, but they mostly spend their time talking about Capra and about her father. Interestingly, there is a sequence in the film where a psychiatrist talks about manic depressiveness (what he describes, quite vividly in the film, is bipolar behavior), and they discuss the emotional downswing that Capra went through after the enormous personal success of It Happened One Night, and how he was gradually coaxed into making his next film. Victoria goes into many personal details about her father’s life, Wray’s life and their marriage, which only ended because Riskin was a smoker and passed away at an early age. It is a terrific glimpse of how ‘normal’ the lives of the famous and glamorous actually are, and a very touching talk.
The standard BD platter has alternate French, Spanish, Portuguese and German audio tracks, an additional fourteen subtitle options, a trailer, a collection of color lobby cards in still frame, and an 11-minute interview with Capra, Jr. The DVD we reviewed in May 00 had a less consistent image than either platter, and came with a sporadic commentary featuring Capra, Jr. that is replicated on the standard BD.
If you are only familiar with Capra from It Happened One Night and the films that came afterward, then his 1937 adaptation of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon will seem like an outlier, but as the Capra at Columbia set underscores, adventure films were very much a part of his sample reel, and anyone who sits through Dirigible or The Bitter Tea of General Yen will hardly bat an eye at the far-flung fantasy in Lost Horizon. As an opening title card explains, the 133-minute film was restored after some of the source material had been lost, so that while the entire audio track exists, there are some brief scenes, about 6 minutes’ worth, that are supported only by the dialog track and appropriate still photos.
Although the film’s opening scenes are quite exciting, much of the film is made up of leisurely conversation, relying upon its fantasy setting and premise to justify its pacing. Ronald Coleman is a world figure and diplomat whose airplane, barely escaping Chinese bandits, is hijacked and then crashes in the Himalayas. He and the other passengers are immediately rescued, however, and taken to a utopian valley amid the towering mountains. The people there are peaceful, live extraordinarily long lives, and are free of avarice and greed. Women are generally referred to as property, but you can’t have everything. The film is naïve not in the sense of ignorance so much as in the sense of folk art, a grand examination of an idyllic, stress-free world based upon the supposed goodness in men’s hearts that everyone pays lip service to but very few actually practice. In that the film did not fade into obscurity upon its release and boxoffice disappointment (relative to cost), but has instead left an indelible impression that has survived for several generations in the general consciousness demonstrates that Capra succeeded in creating the right balance between ideas, production designs and adventure. The film transports viewers to an alternate reality for a couple of hours, and is readily available should one want to visit its dream world many times over.
Jane Wyatt co-stars, and Thomas Mitchell and Edward Everett Horton have a barely disguised, lightly comical relationship in supporting parts. Although the film’s source material is basically a little soft much of the time, with sequences that are even a bit more worn looking, the picture on the 4K presentation is sharper than the picture on the standard BD and gives the viewer a better chance at remaining involved in the abstract talk about happiness and contentment. Both versions are crisper than the DVD we reviewed in Feb 00.
The standard BD has additional French, Spanish, Italian and German audio tracks, twenty-two more subtitling options, and three trailers. Carried over from the DVD, film restorer Robert Gitt and film critic Charles Champlin supply a commentary track going over the cast and the crew, but also detailing the various longer and shorter version of the film that have existed, and how they play, for better or worse. Also carried over is a minute-long comparison example of how the source material was cleaned up, a minute-long look at how the film’s titles were altered after the start of WWII, a 3-minute ‘alternate ending’ that was used during the film’s first couple of weeks in theaters and a comparison to the ending that has been on it ever since, 9 minutes of additional outtakes that were not part of the original film, and a thorough 30-minute examination of how the very elaborate production was executed.
Capra’s 1938 adaptation of the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart stage hit, You Can’t Take It with You (billed on its opening title card as, ‘Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You’) was his second film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, although it was one of those compromise choices that some folks complain about in hindsight (the pickings for that year were not as strong as they were the following year). Running a full 126 minutes, the film is a showcase for character actors doing quirky things, including Dub Taylor (in what remained one of his few major screen appearances—he got the job because he could play a xylophone), Donald Meek, Ann Miller, Mischa Auer, Charles Lane, Harry Davenport, Ward Bond, Eddie Anderson and Spring Byington. What probably nailed it for the film’s Oscar was the casting of Edward Arnold as a wealthy banker and Lionel Barrymore as the eccentric owner of a property (where most of those other characters live) that Arnold’s character needs to consume to complete a larger deal. The scenes with the two of them together, sparring and scene-stealing, are not only precious, but become more so with every passing year. James Stewart plays the son of Arnold’s character and Arthur plays the granddaughter of Barrymore’s character, their romance being the glue that sticks everybody on the screen at the same time. Capra opens the film up a bit—there is a grand fireworks explosion and other gags that would be difficult to pull off on the stage—and he moves from one character to the next like the conductor of an orchestra overseeing instrumental passages in a comical symphony. He also offers up a stronger populist message than Kaufman and Hart conceived, although clearly the pointlessness of excessive wealth was always part of the story, right down to the title, and will continues to resonate in America so long as social disparity remains unresolved.
During one scene, the characters sit around a dining table that has a basket of fruit in the center. On the 4K presentation, a fly is clearly enjoying the display, while on the standard BD, it is a small black blur that you barely notice hopping from fruit to fruit. The standard BD image is to some extent grainy and blurry in comparison to the 4K image, which is aged, but still in very nice condition. The improved image helps considerably with the film’s pacing, particularly since some of the jokes are past their expiration date and are therefore only of interest to the fly. On the whole, sure, the film is too star-packed to dismiss—if you aren’t dazzled by Arnold and Barrymore, you certainly will be unable to resist Stewart and Arthur—and some of the humor is still quite cute, but it is definitely a film that requires 4K to underscore its strengths and gloss over its weaknesses.
The standard BD platter comes with alternate French, Spanish, Italian and German audio tracks, an additional twenty-one subtitling options, a trailer and a 26-minute collection of memories from Capra, Jr. Capra, Jr. repeats most of the stories on the commentary track he shares with film scholar Cathrine Kellison. He also delineates the differences between the play and the film, and both share the trivia they have accumulated about the stars and how the film was staged.
The set concludes with another masterpiece, the 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which essentially takes the fantasy assumptions of Lost Horizon and applies them specifically to the idealizations that America was founded upon. What is brilliant about the film is the casting of Stewart as the young novice senator who believes in the literal meanings of those ideals and the British actor, Claude Rains, as the senior senator, steeped in the actual business of political power. Arthur actually gets top billing as Stewart’s cynical secretary, who melts in the face of his pure spirit. Mitchell co-stars as a sort of sidekick for Arthur’s character and Arnold plays a political boss and the true villain of the film. In just a decade of sound films, Hollywood had accumulated quite a few wonderful character actors, and seemingly the best of them all made the film’s roll call. From former silent star Harry Carey to future second banana Jack Carson, every shot seems to include another familiar but perfectly positioned face, one that advances the narrative whether or not dialog is exchanged. Kibbee owns the first 12 minutes of the film, as the governor who appoints Stewart’s character to the Senate (he is only seen twice after that—once from behind, although his baldpate says everything that needs to be said), and Ruth Donnelly is utter perfection as the governor’s wife. Eugene Pallette, Beulah Bondi (as the mother of Stewart’s character, her exchanged glance with Rains not only reveals a hefty otherwise unsaid backstory, it lingers much longer in your memory of the film than it has any right to), H.B. Warner, Grant Mitchell, Charles Lane, Dick Elliot, Dickie Jones and an up and coming William Demarest, to name just a few, create such a familiarity that the film itself seems populated by movie America.
All Americans love America and its ideals. The problem is that they interpret those ideals in different ways. If anything, that contradiction has been magnified by modern communications. Made in a less wired environment, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is about loving what America stands for, with a passion rigorously articulated by Stewart and abetted by the warmth of Arthur’s smile, using the disintegration of Rains’s character as a punctuation to the film’s emotional expression. A movie is a self-contained work that takes small portions of the world at large and organizes them not just to tell a story, but to transport the imagination of the viewer. What Capra created is so emotionally exhilarating—and through that exhilaration, so expressive of what America ought to be—that it reinforces a belief in those ideals, leaping over the passage of time to take the abstract concepts the Founding Fathers integrated in their governmental structure and to then remind the viewer—past, present and future; liberal and conservative—why their love is not in vain.
The picture on the 4K release is the best looking in the entire set. The image is often vivid and immediate, and even when it is compromised by the limitations of the cinematography, the image still looks clean and smooth. During a key moment when Stewart’s character first breaks down, there are several hidden splices that make his movements, seen in a long shot, look jerky, disrupting, very slightly, the emotional flow of the scene, but it is a minor, age-related flaw that has been covered over as best as it possibly can be, and otherwise the film’s image is gripping. The picture on the standard BD is okay, but not quite as spectacular. We reviewed a Columbia DVD in May 00 that didn’t look nearly as good as either of them. The 4K presentation has a nice minute-long montage of memorabilia and another Kirgo commentary, again reiterating parts of the narrative but going into detail about the players (she mischaracterizes Stewart’s role in Anatomy of a Murder, claiming he’s the prosecutor; of Rains, she says, “He was famed throughout his career for his absolutely beautiful voice, which was kind of a combination of velvet and gravel.”), the film’s production, a thumbnail history of the filibuster, and the movie’s success (the film was very popular in France before the Nazis shut it down).
The standard BD has alternate French, Spanish, Italian and German audio tracks, eight additional subtitling options, and two trailers. A very good Capra, Jr. commentary (also with optional subtitling) is carried over from the DVD in which he goes into, among other things, the vehemence with which the Washington press corps greeted the film (something Kirgo also covers in detail). Also carried over from the DVD is a 12-minute Capra, Jr. featurette that provides sort of an executive summary of what he discussed in the commentary. The Frank Capra’s American Dream documentary that appeared on Criterion’s It Happened One Night disc is resurrected again, as well. Also featured is an 18-minute rumination upon Capra’s later career by Capra, Jr., a 19-minute piece about Capra’s collaborators and how he worked with them, a 13-minute reminiscence of knowing Capra by Basinger (who also describes Capra’s specific talents), and a very nice 26-minute piece with Capra, Jr. about Capra’s family.
The final platter contains a fairly good 2023 profile, Frank Capra: American, structured similarly to Frank Capra’s American Dream and covering the same material, his upbringing and early films at Columbia, taking a long look at It Happened One Night and in particular a sequence in the bus where the passengers all pitch in for a sing-along of The Man on the Flying Trapeze, and then looking at the impact the film’s success had upon his consciousness, as he began to turn more toward ‘message’ movies. He still ended up winning a third of the Oscars for Best Direction that were issued in the Thirties, but his timeout to serve in the war effort threw him off his game, and even though he created more masterpieces that were in tune with the times (you can’t get any more noir than It’s a Wonderful Life), he had trouble coping without the Columbia umbrella to protect him from the elements and he essentially lost his way when it came to creating motion pictures. The documentary concludes on an upbeat note, with Capra writing a bestselling autobiography and basking in the accolades for his career that it triggered. The 93-minute film is accompanied by a trailer and the same subtitling options as the films in the set. The interviews are letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1, but most of the clips (not all of them) have their original squared aspect ratio. The clips of films included in the set are sometimes not as nice looking as those films in the set look. The sound is generally centered, although there is one surge of curiously stereophonic background music.
What the documentary never brings up, however, is a key factor in the kickoff of Capra’s subsequent popularity. In the late Fifties, back when there was only one telephone company, that company felt it still had to do good deeds to be popular, and so it hired Capra to make a series of science documentaries that were originally broadcast on television, but quickly found their way into classrooms across America. Basically, there was not a Sixties schoolchild in the United States who was not charmed and even riveted by Hemo the Magnificent and Our Mr. Sun, not so much for their content as for the way that content was presented—it was probably the only series that kids looked forward to seeing again and again each year. And then, in the Seventies, as those kids became adults and moved away from home, It’s a Wonderful Life fell (relatively briefly, but the timing was ideal) into the public domain and was broadcast on syndication television constantly, especially around the holidays, when being away from home lowered the defenses toward its message. Even if those young people still didn’t know exactly who Capra was, they were primed to be attracted to his style, and thus when he resurfaced and more of his films came into the spotlight, those movies found a waiting fanbase, a fanbase that should eagerly embrace the Capra at Columbia disc set. As one commentator reflects in the documentary’s segment on Lost Horizon, “I simply like the fact that Lost Horizon is a utopian movie. Those have kind of fallen by the wayside. Dystopia is what we get now.”
*****
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