Key Genres:
Comedy, Comedy Drama, Americana, Romantic Comedy, Romance,
Comedy of Manners, Drama
Key
Collaborators: Joseph
Walker (Cinematographer), Robert Riskin (Screenwriter), Gene Havlick
(Editor), Stephen Goosson (Production
Designer), Barbara Stanwyck (Leading Player), Thomas Mitchell (Leading Character Player), Dimitri Tiomkin
(Composer), H.B. Warner (Character Player), Jo Swerling (Screenwriter), Walter Connolly (Leading Character Player)
Highly
Recommended: Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Recommended:
The Bitter Tea of General
Yen (1933), It
Happened One Night (1934), Meet John Doe (1941)
Worth a Look: Long Pants (1927), The Miracle Woman
(1931), Lady for a Day (1933), Lost Horizon (1937), Arsenic and Old Lace
(1944), A Hole In the Head (1959), Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
1,000
Greatest Films:
It
Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
"Like
Chaplin, Frank Capra began his
film career as a simple, effective comic talent and progressed
to 'message movies'. And, as with
Chaplin, the populism of his later films demonstrated both a
decline in humour and disturbing political ambiguities." - Geoff
Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
"Many of Capra's most famous films can be read as excessively
sentimental and politically naive. These readings, however, tend
to neglect the bases for Capra's success - his skill as a
director of actors, the complexity of his staging
configurations, his narrative economy and energy, and most of
all, his understanding of the importance of the spoken word in
sound film." -
(Charles Affron (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
1991)
"Nowadays,
the mere mention of Capra's name is enough to make literate and
learned film-writers dip their pens in bile. But when, between
director and actor, you actually pump the breath of life into
impossibly idealized Everymen, as Gary Cooper, James Stewart, or
Barbara Stanwyck did, a powerful emotional current is given out
from the screen. The fact that they have nothing to do with the
real world has absolutely no bearing on that." - David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999)
"I
think of the medium as a people-to-people medium, not
cameraman-to-people, not direction-to-people, not
writers-to-people, but people-to-people...You can only involve
an audience with people. You can't involve them with gimmicks,
with sunsets, with hand-held cameras, zoom shots, or anything
else. They couldn't care less about those things. But you give
them something to worry about, some person they can worry about,
and care about, and you've got them, you've got them involved." -
Frank Capra (Directing the Film, 1976)
Last
updated:
11/01/2008 01:31 AM.
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bill@theyshootpictures.com.
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