A Wonderful Career
12/21/06
One evening in 1926, a young man knelt praying in the last pew of Sacred Heart church in Los Angeles. He was asking for God's help in taking on a new career role, an awesome responsibility and opportunity, that of directing a movie.
The young man had come a long way to this moment. To escape the brutal poverty of immigrants, he had spent twenty hours a day working multiple jobs and earning a degree in Chemical Engineering at CalTech. His dream was to be an engineer or scientist, but life kept getting in the way. A gangster had offered him $20,000 to apply his chemical engineering knowledge to developing no-stink stills. In the days of Prohibition, $20,000 was an enormous sum that the young man and his family could have sorely used. However, he realized that accepting the offer would make him a slave to evil. He walked away from it and eventually stumbled into movie making.
As a writer and film editor, the young man fell in love with motion-picture production. He persuaded the profane and vulgar head of disreputable Columbia Studios to let him direct a movie, not only direct it, but have absolute control over it.This was a first; letting one person make a movie his way has never been the rule in Hollywood.
So having finished his prayer, Frank Capra got up and went to work. That first silent movie he made, The Strong Man, was a masterpiece as were most of the films he would make over the next 35 years. Along the way he contributed much to the art of movie-making, getting rid of the pasty white make-up used by actors, making the dialogue recorded on the sound-track (which many thought was a fad) more natural, speeding up the action, taping audience reactions at previews so he could cut out material the test-viewers didn't like. Capra was also a pioneer in using film to instruct soldiers ( the Why We Fight series of Word War II) and high-school students (Hemo the Magnificent).
However, Frank Capra is remembered and loved for his vision. Directing for him included doing a lot of the script-writing and he was the closest thing Hollywood ever had to a Catholic philosopher. He wanted to serve Mankind by making movies and he was decades ahead of his time in thinking about human dignity. He liked to work with stories in which a shepherdlike figure--a figure who often needs shepherding himself--enters and prevents disaster and straightens out things that have gone awry.
Of course the greatest example of the Capra esprit and skill is It's A Wonderful Life. It was Capra's personal favorite and his best. So much of his life experience--including being offered a very tempting but morally encumbered $20,000--was written into the script. In the wake of decades of depression, world war, Fascism, Communism, segregation, exploitation, he wanted to say, "God loves you, Little Man. Hang in there."
There's a reason Capra-movie fans remember all the characters--even those in minor roles--and have the feeling that there's so much more to the tale being told. Capra intended it to be that way. Every character, he said, has his own story, like every person.
Capra was also ahead of his time in thinking about life issues. In Arsenic and Old Lace(1941), Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), a celebrity who believes that marriage (and by implication, traditional morality) is baseless, rediscovers the importance of right and wrong when he learns that his aunts are fatally poisoning friendless old men. The aunts are not typical murderers; they are sweet old ladies who believe they are doing kindness by ending lives. Arsenic and Old Lace is among the most brilliant treatments of a moral issue without any preaching and with loads of humor. It has also become more timely as many murderers today are nice folks who believe they are doing kindness by ending life.
Sadly, Frank Capra retired from movie-making years before he should have. Changes in the movie industry and in the tastes of the people who buy tickets prevented him from making movies the way he wanted. However his life and work are there as inspiration for that day when other Catholic philosophers sit down at the keyboard to write scripts or take a seat in the director's chair.