Original subtitles

Films are always a window into an era or a time or a place

or a man's mind.

And no one was ever really a more dominant filmmaker

of his era.

He made some of the greatest movies

in the history of cinema.

And they're foundational...

...in the craft of cinema, the way they're made,

how they're made.

And they're fucking great entertainment.

Want some fireworks?

In behalf of the Academy, I present you with this award.

Capra's personal story is a story about one man

who overcame a lot of opposition

to go from being an Italian peasant

to a major American movie director.

These films I were making were my way of saying,

"Thanks, America", if you can understand

that kind of a cliché.

Gee whiz, so many things happening all at once.

The kid from Sicily

had developed a way of showing America

that all Americans loved.

His career has an extraordinary decline.

It's not that you don't have darkness.

Real darkness comes forward in these movies,

but when we look into Frank's films

he says we can endure, we can survive, we can suffer

and triumph and live through it.

It's not a perfect world,

but there's a place for you in it.

That really makes him America's filmmaker.

And that's why people watch It's a Wonderful Life

every year at Christmas.

It's not because they're sentimental.

It's because it is a life-saving movie.

If you find something real and true in the moment

in which you're living,

and you do it well and entertainingly,

it will always remain contemporary and universal.

I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr Paine.

These stories are always applicable to our lives.

But they're even more so when we forget how to hope.

The world is going through terrible, terrible turmoil.

We need to be reminded that it can still work.

When you tell us about being the son of immigrant parents

and we know about your birth in Palermo, Italy,

your Sicilian background, your arrival in America.

What propelled you, what drive was in you?

It's difficult to look back and wonder

and you can only just conjecture,

but I did want an education.

I was ashamed of my parents

because they couldn't read or write.

I wanted to get out of that ghetto.

Speaking of the time when you were 10 years old,

you said, "I hated being poor,

"hated the ghetto and hated America".

-You were a Sicilian immigrant. -Yes.

I came here when I was six years old

just old enough to see and not understand.

He told me the boat journey was so traumatic and powerful...

...it wiped all the memories of Sicily out of his mind.

He didn't understand, he told me as a kid,

why his parents would tear him away

from their comfortable surroundings in Sicily.

Coming over in steerage, there's no air,

there's crowded bodies, there's people being seasick,

there's a minimum of food. It's a long trip.

I would think, an overwhelming and frightening experience

for a child.

When he sat down to write the story of his life...

...all the things he had done, the years he had lived,

the first words he put to paper were,

"I hated being poor".

I saw the rich people in America

and I saw the poor people that we were.

I saw my father and mother suffering

and working and I saw everybody else.

And I thought they were much happier where they came from.

This was my feeling at the time. I hated this country.

I hated how my family was being treated.

It was a hard time.

I don't think his memories of that time ever left him.

He found America to be a dog-eat-dog, tough place.

He lived in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood,

but education was his way out.

Most kids didn't go to high school in those days.

The kids from his social class.

So he went to Manual Arts High School,

he cleaned the blackboards, you know,

and he was a janitor at the school,

and kids looked down on him for that.

And I interviewed Esther Gleason Schlinger,

who was the class historian,

and she said she dated Frank Capra in high school,

but her parents broke it up because he was an immigrant.

And she said she liked him, but she said he was a nice boy.

He was just a terrible wop.

I really felt anger on his behalf.

"Terrible whop", that's how they saw him.

That was his first shock of trying to assimilate

into the mainstream in American life.

Frank Capra did not merely perceive himself as an outsider.

In many ways, he was.

Even at the height of his fame...

...after all of the accolades and awards

that he had earned, Collier's magazine

could run a profile of him and casually describe him

with ethnic slurs.

I said, "When did you stop being ashamed of your parents?"

He said, "I haven't yet".

Capra was from an era where you were supposed to

melt down your differences and become an American,

which meant obliterating your past.

And one of the manifestations of that

was he kind of looked down on his own family.

The young Capra made it happen.

He certainly hated being on the outside,

being on the bottom, which he was,

and that rage, for better and for worse...

...is what's going to propel him the rest of his life.

After Frank left college,

like a lot of people who go to college,

he didn't know exactly what he was going to do next

and he spent a lot of time doing odd jobs, travelling around,

trying different things, doing different things.

And this gave him experience of America.

This is where my love for Americans started.

When I was about 22, 23, 24,

when I didn't have a job, I couldn't find job of any kind

and I did a lot of running around in Utah and Oregon,

and California.

And met the farmers, the barbers, the poker players,

and just fell in love with Americans

because of their wonderful independence.

He bungles his way toward the film industry

and, you know, everybody bungled their way.

You can't plan to be in an industry

that doesn't exist.

There's almost a gold rush atmosphere to early Hollywood.

It was still quite possible to start at the bottom

and work your way up.

And I can see why Frank Capra would come to a place like that

and say, "This is for me",

because that's what he was looking for.

A place where he could break in and remake himself.

I didn't know a piece of film from a piece of toilet paper.

Really.

I was fascinated by this thing called film.

And so I tried all these things.

And I... All by myself, I'd stay in that cutting room.

There were newsreel men that would come in with their stuff,

and I'd develop it for 'em.

People from the university would come over

and there were films about their dogs,

their children, everything else

that they wanted to put together.

This is where I learnt about film.

A lot of directors have a creation myth,

which is a fabricated story about their beginnings.

I spent years researching his apprenticeship

in the motion pictures.

He claims in his book that he walked off the street

in San Francisco into a building

because there was an ad for a film director

for a short film and he got a job as a director by bluffing.

He knew nothing about film directing.

Just bullshit.

He had worked a whole series of humble jobs

leading up to becoming a director.

Capra worked as a janitor

at the Christie Brothers Film Company.

I said, "What were you doing?"

He said, "Cleaning up the horse shit".

That's the way he started,

cleaning up the horse shit, the humble thing you could do.

And then he was an assistant director

for companies in Hollywood.

He was an assistant cameraman.

He directed some of the Screen Snapshot series,

which were documentary films about Hollywood.

And to me, it's much more inspirational

that you start at the bottom.

In these early days, he learnt very quickly.

He learnt by watching what others were doing,

and it turned out he had a real gift for visual gags.

Not word gags, but visual gags.

So he could think in images.

And that was the beginning, really.

I never had such fun in my life.

The fun of creating something, it just grabs you.

Your heart beats fast when you create something.

And then later on, when one of my pictures

would happen to be playing and I'd pass by

and I'd hear them laugh like hell through the picture.

Oh, boy, I'll tell you, that's the payoff of payoffs.

You're looking down

on the intersection of Hollywood and Vine,

one of the most talked about four corners on Earth.

If you were to take your stand here and wait long enough,

you'd eventually see every outstanding star

in show business.

The Hollywood that we think of in our imaginations

and basically the Hollywood

that existed up until a few years ago

was this world of studios, of sound stages

and giant teams of people to run these movie cities.

Now, not every studio

had the financial muscle to make movies

on the level of let's say, an MGM...

...or a Fox.

Or a Paramount.

There were also a couple of minor studios,

and informally, they were known as Poverty Row.

They weren't poor. They were poorer by comparison.

And at the top of this second tier is Columbia.

Capra was on his way up

when he arrived at Columbia in 1927.

So he's a baby director beginning with a baby studio.

They're equally matched.

You put Frank Capra into an atmosphere like this

and I think he said, "Okay, I can do something with this".

Because Columbia also, year by year,

would do at least a couple of features with a real budget.

The history of Frank Capra and Columbia

is completely intertwined.

It's definitional for both.

There would be no Columbia today.

I wouldn't be sitting in the job that I'm in without Frank Capra.

And I think there would be no Frank Capra

in the way that there was without Columbia.

Columbia didn't have the resources

that these other studios had.

Because of it, there was more freedom at Columbia.

And that may be surprising to a lot of people

who know something about Harry Cohn.

Harry Cohn ran the studio. He basically ran it alone,

although he had a few stalwart executives.

Cohn had his fingers in everything,

and to that degree,

didn't have full control of any one picture.

He would delegate,

and rather than delegating to a producer,

he would delegate to a director.

Frank needed Cohn and Cohn needed Frank.

The unimposing little fella nearest to the camera

may not look like a great director,

but don't let that fool you.

The name's Capra. Frank Capra.

Frank takes his fame very seriously.

Very seriously.

Creativity doesn't want to be managed,

and it doesn't want to be restricted.

It wants to be free and unbridled.

And that's the very delicate art of managing creativity.

Now, it's ironic to use the word "delicate"

in connection with a SOB like Cohn,

who was a notorious, absolute bastard.

But he had vision

and he actually understood filmmaking and he knew talent,

and his early faith and investment in Capra

was because Capra was talented and he recognised it

and he backed him.

The big studios could afford to have stars under contract.

At Columbia, they don't really...

They have a couple of stars under contract.

And they can't compete with MGM on that level.

So how are they going to find a star?

Well, they find a star director in Frank Capra.

So, with the infrastructure of Columbia,

Capra ascended.

And with the talent of Capra's stardom,

Columbia ascended.

These are the early days of his career.

He's doing everything.

And it was because of that versatility that he pulls off

a series of movies that we don't really associate

with Capra films.

A movie called Dirigible.

A movie called Flight.

A movie called Submarine.

These were action pictures

that probably would seem more like, you know,

a Raoul Walsh movie than a Frank Capra movie.

He didn't just make one kind of film.

He has war films or military films.

There's the north station, over there.

How about The Bitter Tea of General Yen

or how about The Miracle Woman?

I mean, he tries different things. Forbidden.

One of the most beautiful sort of woman's pictures

or as someone might say, soap operas of its time.

But it's a beautiful film. It's tender and human,

and really very beautiful.

Hello, Al.

"Sit right down, Mr Holland.

"I can't tell you how glad I am to see you."

Where have you been all this time?

Here and there, mostly there.

I've looked for you in every jail in the state.

I got time off for good behaviour.

Would it shock you to know my heart's been broken?

It's been going "potato" for the last couple of years.

-Who's your lady friend? -Yeah, honey.

Go on. My head's bloody, but unbowed.

-You're married? -No.

Niece?

No.

You're a governess?

Yeah. And I think I better be getting her home.

Now that evening is here,

suppose we go to a world premiere

held at Grauman's Chinese Theatre?

A first showing in Hollywood

is an event of worldwide interest.

When I say that Cohn and I had the same job,

I should have been more specific.

It wasn't just to make a slate of pictures,

it's to make hits.

Harry Cohn wasn't going to keep the bankers from his door

if he didn't make hits, and believe me,

the reason he loved Frank Capra was because he made hits.

And Frank Capra didn't become a rich man,

rich and successful man,

without enormous commercial success.

A film director is lucky

when what occurs to him and her as being a good film

also happens to occur to enough of the audience

also as good.

Capra's great talent was that what occurred to him

as a story he himself wanted to see...

...and the way in which he told it

happened to be extremely appealing to others.

He just had the talent.

Discouragement, fear, failure.

Only a few years ago, these dogged the nation.

Depression, haunted America.

It was a desperate, desperate time,

the likes of which we hadn't seen before

or since in this country.

Capra's movies came along, and they connected very directly

to what people were thinking and feeling.

And they do not deny the Depression.

But they provide escape by giving you laughter, victory...

...charm, glamour and a great story to absorb you

so that you forget your troubles.

My name is Smith.

That you seem to have been able to stand for the last month.

I'm white, male and over 21.

I've never been in jail.

That is, not often.

And I prefer Scotch to bourbon.

I hate carrots, I hate peas, I like black coffee

and I hate garters.

I make 75 bucks a week and I got 847 bucks in the bank.

And I don't know yet whether your eyes are blue or violet.

That's because you're too far away, Stew.

I guess the picture, correct me if I'm wrong, that really

many critics say started the Frank Capra style

was Platinum Blonde. Would you agree?

I think Platinum Blonde

and American Madness, those two, yes.

I begin to go into the social stuff.

I always said Union National was a phoney bank.

Union National?

You have money in that bank, too?

Yes. Something wrong?

-Run! -You're telling me!

Give all the men in your plant

a couple hours off to get their money out.

Tell Mrs Hardy to tell everyone in the apartment house.

All right, I'll get it. I'll bust a few noses.

Holy smoke. I'll get right down there if I have to fly.

Run down there and get your money at once.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness.

The audiences see his films as extraordinarily contemporary.

They see his films as depicting a Depression-era America...

...that they either recognise or aspire to.

That's what they want America to look like,

people who help each other.

Matt, look! There's Mr Jones!

I'm putting my money in this bank!

I know what I'm doing!

Open up. I want to put some money here.

I don't want to take any out!

Certainly, Mr Jones. Teller...

They're starting to come in already.

Yeah, yeah, well, listen. Don't waste any time.

Get all the money you can lay your hands on.

Who's this?

Come on out here, pawnbrokers. Take a look.

We've been waiting 50 minutes.

Come on. Take a look at this.

See a demonstration of faith that's worth more

than all the collateral.

Come on, boys. It'll do your heart good.

Look at that. They're shoving their hard-earned money

across the counter with a 10-1 chance against them.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that

the American studios were always producing films

for a global audience.

His films that we think of as so quintessentially American

were huge hits wherever they played.

And that's interesting, and they seem to have

the same meaning for audiences in France,

audiences in the UK that they had for

audiences here in the US.

And it was now this time that you began your association

with Robert Riskin.

It was a very happy and very long association.

We both vibrated to the same tuning fork.

We collaborated on everything

and we both kind of had that same idea of comedy.

Human comedy, not gag comedy.

And that's a great thing,

when you can get two people that agree.

Capra had an exceptional eye for good writing,

and he knew the importance of a good script.

So, in the early '30s, when he starts landing

some really exceptionally talented screenwriters,

he was ready to go.

Later in his life, Capra would, sort of, take credit

for pretty much everything in his films.

But early on, he was smart enough

to put together the best crew he possibly could.

The cameraman, Joseph Walker, who was on so many of his films,

and Barbara Stanwyck and other actors

who really helped to create the world that he made.

So I think that the Capra film

stands for a wide crew of people.

When It Happened One Night was released into theatres,

believe it or not, initially, it didn't do that well.

But then something happened.

People started coming back.

The ones who saw it liked it enough to go back,

and they told their friends.

Capra liked to say years later that "people made that movie"

because it was the ticketholders...

...the punters who just kept coming back.

Any time you're going back to, you know, the production

of a Hollywood film during the classic era...

...there can be a lot of myths attached to it.

In this case, it's safe to go with the stories

because they're not really myths.

Nobody wanted to make this movie.

Certainly, it's two stars had to sort of be dragged

kicking and screaming.

Clark Gable was there because he was being punished by MGM.

He had been asking for more money

and MGM kind of told him to go sit in a corner

and think about what he did.

And Claudette Colbert only agreed to do it

when she was given an exorbitant salary

for doing so.

Next time you drop in, bring your folks.

At some point during the filming of It Happened One Night,

it started to hit people

that their kind of loosey-goosey attitude

towards making this movie

was actually producing something rather special.

Claudette Colbert said in later years

that when she read "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" scene,

she thought it was kind of ridiculous.

Couldn't understand how everybody on the bus

would know the lyrics to one song.

But then, when she actually got in there and was filming it,

she happened to catch the eye of her maid

who was standing somewhere behind the cameraman,

and her maid was loving it.

And Claudette thought, "Wow. Okay.

"We really may have something here."

Movies of any type are often about an idealised portrayal.

Life as you wish it were,

not necessarily life as it really is.

So, when they get on the bus and start singing

"The Man on the Flying Trapeze", that's when you really know

that this is a movie about people coming together.

There's not a lot of the Depression

in It Happened One Night, oddly enough.

A train goes by as they wait at the crossroads

and on the train are some hobos.

The Depression is now passing through the film.

"Hello, audience.

"Yes, we remember there's a Depression",

but, you know, you're talking about something else

in this movie.

A love story.

A love story where a woman who has money

and a guy who doesn't learn about each other,

and you learn that not having money is okay.

In fact, it's noble.

It's better than being rich.

Where'd you learn to dunk? In finishing school?

Now, don't you start telling me I shouldn't dunk.

Of course you shouldn't. You don't know how to do it.

Dunking's an art.

Don't let it soak so long. A dip, and into your mouth.

You leave it in too long, it'll get soft and fall off.

It's all a matter of timing. I'll write a book about it.

-Thanks, Professor. -Just goes to show you.

Plenty millions and you don't know how to dunk.

These rich people couldn't dunk doughnuts.

I mean, there's no future in life if you can't dunk.

She doesn't even know what piggybacking is.

Are the shower's in there?

They ain't out here.

She has to learn to be an American,

and not a rich person.

That is really what this is about.

She has to learn to be like other Americans.

A person without money.

You want to shower around here, you'll stand in line.

Money is not important. It's not the thing.

It's a reassuring message for American audiences.

Well, today, it's easy. It's a rom-com, right?

There weren't a lot of 'em back in the day.

It's a star-driven rom-com. It's very simple.

It's When Harry Met Sally... or any one of the movies

that Tom Hanks made with Meg Ryan.

At the time, it was way more than that.

It was genre-breaking. There really weren't a lot of 'em.

It was class-based romance. It was pretty racy.

It's scene after scene after scene of perfectly staged

drama/comedy.

It's a movie where everything came together.

The screenplay, the casting. Not this one but that one.

We tried to get this one, but he was unavailable.

Mr Meyer forced Gable on Harry Cohn, whatever it was.

This looks like the best spot.

We're not going to sleep out here, are we?

I don't know about you,

but I'm going to give a fairly good imitation of it.

The famous scene where they go to sleep under the haystacks.

Beautifully shot.

And the desire between them is so palpable.

The other thing he controlled masterfully was rhythm.

And so often, his movies move fast,

but he also knows when to slow down.

And in that film, when they almost kiss

and then Gable stands up and lights a cigarette instead

and goes to sleep in the other haystack.

And you cut back to her and she's looking at him,

"Oh, you dope, why didn't you kiss me?

"Why didn't you kiss me?"

And it just quietly fades out on a close-up of her.

It's so beautiful.

Just so beautiful.

It wasn't really anything anybody thought

was going to be successful,

and there were a lot of problems going along with it.

And Frank said, "You know, maybe we should abandon this.

"I mean, nobody seems to want this.

"Everybody says a bus story is never going to work."

At that time, Columbia was still

making its way off of Poverty Row,

and it became a giant hit for Clark Gable.

It was transcendent in the history

and the life of the studio,

and it's the first of only three movies ever

in the history of Hollywood

to have won all five of the major Academy Awards.

Picture, director, writer, actor, and actress.

So it pulled Columbia up into the big leagues.

Frank Capra rang the gong of Hollywood

in a way it had never been rung before.

It Happened One Night won all five top prizes.

This was a singular thing

that this young man

at a low-budget, Poverty Row studio

hit the top, hit the top.

Those five awards nearly killed me.

I mean, you know, you shake the Oscar tree

when you get the five major awards.

What are you gonna do for an encore?

This was my problem,

and I got it so early in my life, you see?

Capra went to pieces kind of after he became successful

with It Happened One Night.

He said suddenly people know who you are in Asia,

you know, I mean, it's a whole different feeling.

I read all kinds of things, but everything seemed trivial

and puerile after that, and I feigned sickness.

Not to make any more pictures. I wanted to quit for a while.

I was afraid, actually afraid to make another film.

He's a director who, like many others at that time,

was working nonstop.

So It Happened One Night, of course, sets him up to fail

as much as it sets him up to succeed.

He almost died of peritonitis

and he was really ill, seriously ill.

So I feigned sickness, but in feigning sickness,

I became sick, and I was really about to die

when a friend of mine

brought in a very faceless old man who came in

and said to me, "Mr Capra, you're a coward".

And I said, "Coward? I'm sick".

And he said, "No, you're a coward.

"You were given certain gifts

"and you're not using them.

"You have been given a gift to reach hundreds of millions

"and for two hours, and in the dark.

"You're a coward. You're an offence to God.

"You're an offence to humanity."

And he just got up and left.

Things do seem to change.

Capra himself told a clearly apocryphal story

about while he was convalescing,

being visited by a little man whose name we don't know.

We know nothing about him.

Who told him to get up and get to work

and stop feeling sorry for himself

and to start to make films that meant things.

He had to renew himself.

He had to recharge himself,

and no one really knows the why of this,

and although he alludes to these things

and discusses them in his autobiography,

talked about them in interviews,

you don't really understand

exactly what is going on here with him.

He is a man who feels things and fears things.

As I got to know Frank over the years

and we spent a lot of time

talking on the telephone together,

we talked about his illnesses and his crises.

And I would just say that he knew he was vulnerable.

There's always something in you or in your life

that can bring you pain.

Some of it is simple health.

Other things are deeper than that.

And I think that's probably all I would want to say about that.

Capra realised how many people he was speaking to,

and how successfully he was coming across.

So he wanted to make sure he was saying something

important about the way that we lived.

And it's that spiritual rebirth that fuels

the next run of Capra's great movies.

I was doing it unconsciously.

But consciously,

the first film that I was going to make

where I attempted to say something

was Mr Deeds Goes to Town.

An individual that reached deep within his resources

and come up with the wits and the strength

and the knowledge to defeat his environment.

Well, that's hope.

-Say something. -Tell your story. Go ahead.

-Go ahead. -Tell him.

Mr Deeds,

the boys here wanted me to say a little something.

Just wanted me to say that...

Well, they want me to say that we think you're swell.

And that's no baloney.

-Say something more. -Give me a chance, fellas.

We're all down and out. A fella like you comes along,

it kinda gives us a little hope.

From Mr Deeds on, my films are pretty much alike.

I mean, the same things kept cropping up in them.

-That's him. -Are you Longfellow Deeds?

-Yes. -Sheriff's Office.

We got a warrant to take you into custody.

A what?

A warrant for your arrest. You have to come along with us.

These were films like Mr Deeds Goes to Town,

Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe,

and other films that are clearly

making statements about life as it's lived in America

at that time.

About politics, about industry, about the law, about media.

Because I wanna give money to people who need it,

they think I'm crazy.

That's marvellous. That makes everything complete.

I guess what we learnt here

is a kind of Frank Capra movie, isn't it?

What we learn is that wealth is not the American Dream.

It's about contributing to your community,

to your country.

It's an honourable sense of being a good man.

Mr Deeds.

You haven't yet touched upon the most important point.

It's all a fantastic idea of yours

to want to give away your entire fortune.

It is, to say the least, most uncommon.

It's like the road out in front of my house,

it's on a steep hill.

Every day I watch the cars climbing up.

Some go lickety split up that hill on high,

some have to shift into second and some sputter and shake

and slip back to the bottom again.

Same car, same gasoline, yet some make it and some don't.

And I say the fellas who can make the hill on high

should stop once in a while and help those who can't.

That's all I'm trying to do with this money.

Help the fellas who can't make the hill on high.

And after careful deliberation, the committee have voted

that the best direction for a motion picture

during the year of 1936

is awarded to you, Frank Capra,

for your direction of the picture

Mr Deeds Comes to Town.

Retake, boys. It's "Goes to Town". Can't have that.

Capra had to wait about a year

to even get to make Lost Horizon.

I really think he thought this was going

to be a grand statement, a real artistic achievement.

After Mr Deeds, Capra was feeling

a greater sense of responsibility.

He was dealing with big issues, big subjects.

He was being seen as a political force

in the United States, a cultural force.

Welcome to Shangri-La.

You see, we are sheltered by mountains on every side.

It's a strange phenomena for which we are very grateful.

I simply like the fact that Lost Horizon

is a utopian movie at all.

It's magic.

Those have kind of fallen by the wayside.

Dystopia is what we get now.

The problem with that film is it's a theme picture.

It's not as much about the characters

as the characters are dwarfed

by the big themes and the big sets.

It is our hope that the brotherly love

of Shangri-La

will spread throughout the world.

Capra went way over budget and almost bankrupted Columbia.

Harry Cohn had to call all the employees together

on a soundstage at one point and say,

"We can't pay your cheques for this week",

because they were so short on cash.

-What's happened? Where's Bob? -He's going, my child.

In those days,

there were bank lendings involved

and it wouldn't have been hard for a runaway picture

to sink a studio.

So I think the production problems

on Lost Horizon

took a great toll on both sides.

And it fractured the trust.

And trust is hard won and easily lost.

Harry Cohn took the picture away from Capra

after a while because Capra couldn't bring it down

to the length that Cohn wanted.

It was not the success and winner of Oscars

that they thought it would be.

It was sort of the beginning of the end

between them, probably.

Well, I don't start a film unless I have something to say

and know what I'm gonna say.

He went down among the people.

And there he found

a nugget.

Capra movies are about good people

up against overwhelming opposition.

...to Senator Jefferson Smith.

It's generally one person against the media,

the government, popular awareness.

These insurmountable projects

that make them, in a way,

almost like fairy tales, you know.

How is Saint George going to slay the dragon?

There's no way, you know. This is a hopeless situation.

I can't help feeling that there's

been a big mistake somehow.

I don't think I'm gonna be much help to you

down there in Washington, Senator.

I used comedy and laughter as a way of becoming

very friendly with the audience,

or making the audience very friendly with the film,

and with the characters in the film.

It's comedy directors who typically are most adept

at drama and pathos.

That's his brilliance with casting,

is that he's a comedy director.

That's his brilliance with pacing, with rhythm,

is that he's a comedy director.

It's in comedy that you learn the control of those things.

It's really hard to calibrate things

to get those laughs from the audience

and it takes time and it takes talent,

experience and screening.

You've got to screen your pictures a lot.

If you entertain them with laughter,

then you have them at a point

where they might sit still for a message.

Hello, Senator. I was just passing through.

I thought I'd like to meet you.

Sit down. You met all the boys here,

-I suppose. -Yes, sir.

They tell me you've been right on your toes

ever since you got here.

That's fine.

You know, some people told me that you were dumb.

I think you're smart.

What fascinated you most about the story of Mr Smith?

Well, the story of Mr Smith is the story

of a young nobody that gets put into a position of trust

and is an idealist.

And he doesn't like what he finds.

And he doesn't like

this compromise and making do and this rubbing one's back.

And particularly doesn't like graft.

And he doesn't like power. So he began to fight it,

and the machine just steamrolled right over him

and flattened him right out.

And with the aid of a girl

who took an interest in him, he got up on his feet

and fought back and won.

He found it deep within, inside,

he had the moral, the mental

and enough wit and everything else

to win out over his environmental difficulties.

You mean you tell these men and Senator Paine what to do?

Why, yes.

Joe Paine has been taking my advice for the past 20 years.

You're a liar.

Mr Smith Goes to Washington was released

at the same time that Hitler attacked Poland.

It was a time of great crisis,

and Americans really needed to come together

to not only save the country in the Depression,

but later join the Allies

to save the world in World War II.

And those crises came back to back.

How to join together to be part of a worthy cause

that's bigger than yourself,

and at the same time, how to do that

without losing hold of

what's important to you personally?

Americans had to answer these questions

at the moment Capra was making a movie.

They were urgent questions.

They were not theoretical questions.

I mean, even whether they were consciously addressed

or unconsciously addressed by Americans,

they were living with them day to day.

How big is this thing? Where's it going to be?

How many boys will it accommodate?

You've got to have all that in it, you know.

Yeah, and something else, Ms Saunders.

The spirit of it, the idea...

How do you say it?

-That's what's got to be in it. -What?

The Capitol Dome.

On paper?

I want to make that come to life for every boy in this land.

Yes, and I'll light it up like that, too.

You see, boys forget what their country means

by reading "the land of the free" in history books.

When they get to be men, they forget even more.

Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books.

Unlike other filmmakers at the time,

people saw in his films

a model of what they hoped their lives would be.

They saw his films as aspirational in some ways.

They saw his films as comments

on what it's like to live in modern America.

Men should hold it up in front of them

every single day of their lives and say, "I'm free".

They see the problems that they're experiencing.

The government wasn't responding to their needs.

The law certainly didn't do that.

Capitalism seemed to have run amok.

It wasn't helping anyone.

Capra was always, always in touch with the audience,

not just in terms of what they wanted in entertainment

but who they were emotionally as Americans.

Were you some kind of a populist,

or was there something in the fact

that you had been a poor kid yourself

and somewhere in the American,

you'd found your way upward?

The kind of pictures I made from It Happened One Night on

were my way of saying, "Thanks, America,

"for giving me the opportunity", because only in America,

it can happen that a son of illiterate parent peasants

could get this kind of an education that I'd had.

And then be allowed to use whatever talents he had.

You can't quit now.

Not you. They aren't all Taylors and Paines in Washington.

That kind just throw big shadows, that's all.

You didn't just have faith in Paine

or any other living man.

You had faith in something bigger than that.

You had plain, decent, everyday common rightness,

and this country could use some of that.

He had a love for people.

You see it in the faces of Capra's people.

If you look at a Capra movie,

it is cast down to the smallest part.

The faces speak so clearly of character.

It was very important to me who played the smaller parts.

I treated all the small parts as star parts.

I use people. I love people.

Capra's films have an expansiveness to them.

They seem to speak to the desires of many people

in the audience, but they also have incredible limits, too.

And we can see that

in the overarching whiteness of his films

and his unwillingness to talk

about anything other than whiteness

for the most part.

The expansiveness, the broadness of Capra's films,

we always have to keep in mind

that there are those limits, too,

that certainly weren't unique to him,

but that perhaps he could have done a much better job at.

This John Doe meeting's gonna be

one of the biggest things that ever happened.

And why they're coming from all over.

Trains, boxcars, wagons.

Frank Capra movies will frequently show

people being kind and wonderful

and even noble on an individual basis.

But large groups of people are frequently sinister

by contrast.

One of your critics has argued

that implicit in all of your films

is a distrust of the majority.

I'm not against a crowd of individuals.

I'm against the mass.

I'm against the mass conforming.

I'm not against a crowd of individuals.

And I think that the majority does tend to be the herd.

They can be conformed and channelised

and allow themselves to be channelised.

And it's only those guys that stick their heads up, say,

"I don't want to go this way. I want to go this way".

And that I'm interested in,

and I think the world is interested in

and I think that the humanity is interested in.

I think this reflects Frank Capra's

peculiar, if not political outlook,

than his kind of intellectual outlook.

He, you know, loved humanity on a one-by-one basis.

Not so much in vast numbers.

Heroes in the film are very individualistic

and very self-sufficient,

and that was his experience in life.

He was an immigrant, he was an outsider

and I think he's therefore very inherently sympathetic

with the individual versus the system.

The political dimensions of the films

are kind of all over the place.

Robert Riskin, who wrote so many of those first great films

was very much an FDR Democrat at this time.

Capra was a Republican.

But he was a Republican

at a time when there was a progressive wing of that party

that was marked by a sort of critique

of the excess of capitalism.

So that made it possible for him to make films

with New Deal Democrats.

And together they could kind of produce an America

that seemed both apolitical and political at the same time.

Both left and right, I suppose,

can all see some value in standing up for the individual,

being oppressed by society and fighting corruption.

-Order, gentlemen. -Mr President!

I stand guilty as framed,

because Section 40 is graft.

And I was ready to say so. I was ready to tell you

that a certain man in my state, a Mr James Taylor,

wanted to put through this dam for his own profit.

A man who controls a political machine

and controls everything else worth controlling in my state.

Yes, a man even powerful enough to control Congressmen.

And I saw three of them in his room

the day I went up to see him.

-Will the Senator yield? -No, sir, I will not yield!

My films were more to uplift

the people from their everyday miseries,

than to sort of change things.

I was aiming at

the general folds of humanity,

and sort of trying to glorify the compassionate,

the forgiving, the merciful, and so forth.

The interesting thing about

a man like Frank Capra, with his success...

Everybody's always going to define him.

He hated that.

I was a Capra fan,

a great admirer of his films.

So, I called up Capra

and I said, "I'd like to interview you".

Went down to Palm Springs. He lived in La Quinta nearby.

And I went to his home.

He had a sprawling white ranch house

with a gigantic American flag.

And we were talking and he was giving me

his whole Frank Capra rap about

the little guy against the system.

He was telling me how he hated bankers and rich people.

And then, a man came to the table.

He had this envelope full of pictures of Capra

playing golf with President Gerald Ford.

And he spread them on the table,

and Capra said, "Oh, God. Look at Gerry Ford.

"He's such a great guy."

There was a picture in particular that struck me,

that Capra was putting,

and Gerald Ford was holding the pin for him,

and I thought this was amazing. What a symbolic picture,

the immigrant with the president holding the pen for you.

That's kind of the ultimate American dream.

The guy said, "I'll make copies of the pictures for you",

and Capra said, "Thank you very much",

And then, he turned to me and he said, "Where was I?

"Oh, yeah, I was telling you how I hate bankers and rich people."

And he launched back into his rap without a pause,

and I thought, "This guy is not what he seems to be".

People, for a long time,

assumed that the movies that they had seen,

which were ultimately loving about America,

embraced a certain type of liberal politics.

And then, people started to look more closely at him,

and they discovered that there was another side to Frank Capra.

There was a side that thought people should be out there,

pulling themselves up by their bootstraps like he did.

So, he was a complex person,

and I think, at some point,

people started seeing that as a flaw,

that this the kind of rock-ribbed conservative

was existing alongside the movies that they had loved.

Penny,

why don't you write a play about ism-mania.

-Ism-mania. -Yeah, sure.

You know, communism, fascism, voodooism.

Everybody's got an ism these says.

I thought it was an itch or something.

Well, it's just as catching.

When things go a little bad nowadays,

you go out and get yourself an ism,

and you're in business.

I've got it. It might help Cynthia

to have an ism in the monastery.

And why is that?

For the best-directed picture of the year,

You Can't Take It with You,

on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

we present to you, Frank Capra, this award.

As you know, this is the third time you have won

this highest of our awards,

and in all sincerity from my heart,

I thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr Niblo.

I'm very happy to have this again.

Thank you.

He, quite conceivably, by 1935 or so,

was the most famous filmmaker in the world,

or certainly, one of two or three.

Frank Capra really turned this aspect of self-promotion

into something of an art,

and he used that as a tool

to create, horrid word, a "brand", if you will.

In the late 1930s, he's on the cover of Time magazine,

and I think he's the first director

on the cover of Time.

And the tagline for that cover is,

"His stories can't top his story".

And inside, they told the story

of a little boy who comes from Palermo,

who has a terrible life, makes it big.

So, I think his life, as it was understood in the press,

by the people who went to see his films,

was really an important part of why his films

were so appealing to so many at that time.

They saw in him a person who they could relate to,

understand, and who they felt understood things

the way that they did.

Hollywood reaches far, carrying its cargo of dreams

to almost every city and village in America.

It seemed to me, there was some kind...

Film offered some kind

of a social cement, if you will, for people.

Yes, I think films offered hope.

And they go out of theatres

feeling much better than they went in.

They were lifted.

Movie-going in the Depression and through World War II

was different than the way it is now.

Then, everyone saw virtually the same movies,

and that creates the sense of movies being a myth,

that we can all

have the same frame of reference in our minds,

we've all been through the same thing together,

not just as citizens of a country, but as filmgoers.

That alone gives filmmakers in Capra's generation

more power than you can imagine a filmmaker having today.

I mean, you have to think of Capra,

in a way, as another FDR in that sense.

That is going to create a lot of suspicion

as soon as people begin to interrogate

what it's like for someone in the media

to have that much power.

And Capra knew he had that power,

and so, too, did the American government

when they brought Capra in

to make what would become the Why We Fight series.

Causes and events leading up to our entry into the war.

Well, what are the causes?

Why are we, Americans on the march?

Is it because of...

Pearl Harbor?

Is that why we are fighting?

Or is it because of...

Britain?

Who was the genius behind all this?

Who made the films that moved presidents, prime ministers

and millions of citizens and soldiers around the world?

To answer the Nazis,

the American government turned to Hollywood, California,

and to a cocky little immigrant from Sicily

named Frank Capra.

The United States of America,

when the war broke out, found itself the only country

that didn't have a big propaganda machine.

So, we had to get organised and get propaganda.

As soon as the war starts, Capra wants to join up.

He wants to get involved.

He wants to make films.

American soldiers mobilised for war,

and with them, Major Frank Capra.

Forty-five years old,

salary, $250 a month.

Capra reports directly to Chief of Staff,

General George C. Marshall.

When you first called on General Marshall at the Pentagon,

what did he tell you he wanted you to do?

He called me in, and then,

he said, "We have an enormous problem".

He said, "We know that if you shoot an American,

"he'll shoot back".

But can he take this being away from home?

Can he take this discipline?

And his answer?

"In my opinion,

"he can if we tell him what he's fighting about."

So, General Marshall was asking you in effect

to give the boys a reason to fight.

Give the boys a reason to fight and don't lie.

But your films were comedies in Hollywood.

He wanted somebody to reach the people.

Was able to reach the people,

and I had been able to reach the people in my films,

and make them laugh and cry, make them like things.

Here, I got the greatest heroes, the greatest villains

on the world stage.

Real. Not actors. Real.

In Italy, they had a shorter word. "Fascism."

In Japan, they had lots of names for it.

A new era of enlightenment.

Capra says he's starting the war in Hollywood.

The Why We Fight films are just extraordinary.

They're films that involve collage, animation,

multiple voices telling the stories, found footage.

They almost seem like avant-garde films to us now.

They say trouble always comes in threes.

Take a good close look at this trio.

Remember these faces.

Remember them well.

If you ever meet them, don't hesitate.

The films are simplistic in some ways.

The way they develop ideas of good and bad.

But they're also sophisticated, not just aesthetically,

but in how they have to talk about

the realities of the world.

Here was the Italy that Mussolini took over in 1922.

And almost his first act was to tell the Italians

they were the rightful owners of Corsica,

Nice, Savoie,

Albania, Tunisia,

Ethiopia, and a land corridor linking it with Libya.

He's making myths about the war in these war films.

There's no question about that.

And he creates a history that goes back to Buddha,

Muhammad, which is extraordinary to think about,

Christ, Jefferson.

Moses.

Muhammad.

Confucius.

Christ.

All believe that in the sight of God,

all men were created equal.

And from that, there developed a spirit among men and nations

which is best expressed in our own Declaration of Freedom.

So, he creates a kind of global myth

that is, we ourselves come from a world history

that leads to a particular form of democracy

that now is at risk.

It's certainly true that his films before that

had engaged in a kind of mythic practice.

That government of the people,

by the people, for the people

shall not perish from the Earth.

Not until we showed him some of the stuff

that we got at Dachau, that George Stevens photographed,

did it actually impinge itself on the mind,

the horror of this whole thing.

It left me just speechless,

colourless, bloodless.

I couldn't possibly believe that there was

that kind of a savagery in the world, you see?

Between men.

Men, the highest of all the animals.

Man... It's man who created God

and man who created all kinds of things.

To end up here in a pile of bones, burned.

So, that was a terrible shock.

The question of the goodness of people,

the question of, "What is humanity?

"What can we hold on to and believe in?" was a challenge

after he did the job he did in World War II.

He handled a great many atrocity photos.

The atrocity photos were part of what he was doing,

and he saw them, he had to look at them,

handle them every day, and it upset him,

it changed him, and it damaged his faith in human beings.

I think, in fact, he was one of those veterans,

even though he didn't see battle,

who came back and perhaps

had a great deal of trouble adjusting.

I was away almost six years from camera.

We came back to Hollywood and we didn't know anybody.

People introduced me to somebody and they'd say,

"Frank who?"

Capra comes back after the war, ready to make films.

He certainly wants to work.

He understands that the future of film production

might not be at the studios but might be more independent.

These were the three absolute titans,

titans of mid-century cinema,

George Stevens, William Wyler and Frank Capra,

to form "Liberty Films".

That name is not chosen by accident.

That's what they thought they had

was their liberty, and they had chafed under the studio system.

It's a very big deal, and there are tonnes of articles about it

in Time magazine, and Newsweek, and all the newspapers.

But, of course, Capra was the only one who was able

to make films for Liberty, the production company.

Wyler and Stevens were both committed to other studios,

and couldn't make any films for the company they had formed.

This is a brilliant move.

This is a really smart business move.

Three of the biggest

and best directors of America get together.

They're going to make some movies they want to make

the way they want to make them,

and distribute them through Paramount.

What could go wrong?

What could go wrong? Everything, obviously.

Why is It's a Wonderful Life your favourite film?

I keep reading that.

Why do you like that the best?

Because I think it expresses

what I've been trying to say in the other films

better than the other films.

I don't know how many of you here

have seen It's a Wonderful Life.

How many of you have seen it?

Thank you very much.

But it is one of those films that...

I break down every time I see it,

and I made the goddamn thing.

It's just one of those things that

that gets you inside, and shows you what you can be,

what we can do,

and how precious life is,

and how wonderful life is.

Hello, Bedford Falls!

Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas! -Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, George!

Merry Christmas, movie house!

Merry Christmas, Emporium!

Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building & Loan!

Merry Christmas, Mr Potter!

Happy New Year to you, in jail!

Go on home. They're waiting for you.

When people talk about Capra's films,

they always remember the optimistic side,

the happy endings, the guy getting the girl,

that kind of thing.

But they forget, or tend not to think about, the darker side.

The comedy is born from pain and anguish.

That's where it comes from.

And I think that's one of the strongest qualities

of It's a Wonderful Life.

A lot of his films, below the surface of the films,

have anger, resentment and violence,

and we see this, too, in Mr Smith goes to Washington,

when he beats up the reporters

who have written these terrible things about him.

There's always an undertone of violence.

There's always an undertone that things might get out of control.

There's an undertone that things can be scary really fast.

Get over there.

See how you're gonna like it this time.

See what good your money will do

when you're six feet under. Never thought of that, did you?

No. All you ever thought of was pinching pennies,

you money-grabbing hick!

Virtually every character is driven to madness

or every main character is driven to madness,

or to the brink of suicide.

And there's real rage there in those moments.

I love the roller-coaster feeling

of his films, emotionally.

The highs and the lows. One critic said

it's like the feeling of life being lived.

Every day, there's a mixture of comedy and drama,

and highs and lows.

-Let go! -What's the matter with you?

I'm not fit to be a Senator! I'm not fit to live!

Expel me!

With a film like It's a Wonderful Life,

you wonder how much of Capra's own experience

is in the bitterness we see in George,

the depression we see in George,

the general tiredness that we see in George.

There's the pharmacist who beats up the young boy.

There are the people who try to destroy the bank.

There are all kinds of scary things going on in that film

that kind of strike us as...

That's not what we think of as going on in a Capra film.

There is a lot of suicide in Capra,

or near-suicide, attempted suicide, planned suicide,

more than you might think at first.

So, that particular theme in It's a Wonderful Life

is perhaps not surprising.

But Capra said later that what appealed to him about this theme

was that it was saying to people,

"No, you are not a failure".

Help!

Help! Help!

So, here is Capra, the grand success,

kind of reaching back toward Americans

who maybe hadn't done so hot in the past 15 or 20 years,

and telling them, "You're still in this country.

"I'm going to show you

"the things that are still wonderful about this country

"and about your life here."

I sincerely believe that is what Capra was after with this film.

We tend to mythologise the film as something of a bomb.

It certainly wasn't.

It's a Wonderful Life does well.

The problem is it cost so much to make.

It's something of a disaster for the company.

Now, clearly, what's really worse for the company

is that two-thirds of the people who formed it

can't make films for it

because they're contractually committed to other studios.

So, Liberty Films crashes and burns.

And the men who formed it,

Capra, Wyler and Stevens, sell it

and all the men go their separate ways,

and Capra signs on with Paramount,

which really is a death knell.

Be careful what you wish for.

It's been tried many times.

United Artists, Directors Company,

Liberty Films.

It almost never works. That's telling you something.

Great directors have a tremendous amount of freedom,

all the freedom they want in the world, right?

What they want is to have financial support,

and marketing support, and structural support.

Nobody in my job who's any good at my job

is gonna tell a great director where to place the camera.

So, they may have to lift budgets

and deal with economic realities.

But that's the reality that keeps things going.

I think, in terms of the emotional investment

that Frank Capra had made in this film,

really nothing but a big hit would have satisfied him anyway.

It was his comeback.

So, this movie, I think,

was in no small measure about saying to Hollywood,

"Hey, I've still got it. I've still got that touch

"that brings in audiences and moves people."

And when It's a Wonderful Life did that,

but not to a great world-shaking extent,

I think that was very hard on Frank Capra.

I have to confess that

the pattern of Frank Capra's career

after It's a Wonderful Life is a little mysterious to me.

This was an older Frank Capra.

And somehow,

he couldn't really get back up off the mat.

Isn't that nice?

I must say, it's right neighbourly of you people

who have seen the preview of Here Comes the Groom

to write a wireless and apprise us

of your reactions to this film.

If I may be immodest for a moment,

I must tell you in all candour the reactions have been good,

which is easy to understand because Paramount went out

and got the down-to-earth, homey type of story

that they've been searching so long for me.

They got a bang-up cast and a great director, Frank Capra,

at the helm, to direct the picture.

When Capra makes films for Paramount,

he makes them with big stars.

He makes a couple of films with Bing Crosby.

And there is a campaign to push those films.

They're a big deal and there's a lot of PR about the films.

But no one thinks of them once they come out

as anything but minor films.

These films, Riding High, Here Comes the Groom,

are Bing Crosby films that Capra happened to make.

As America recovered from the war,

the Capra-esque story of the individual

lost its urgency

in the sort of postwar complacency.

The feeling that America could take a breath

didn't really serve Capra as an artist.

He needed a fight. There were still fights to be fought.

He just didn't find one in the '50s.

During the McCarthy years,

the years of the Hollywood blacklist,

paranoia was rampant, and the whole question arose

of what it meant to be a patriot.

It's a 10-year period or more

when your politics can prevent you from having a job.

The films that were hailed in the '30s

were seen in a different light after the war.

And so, films like Mr Deeds and Mr Smith

were potentially risky things to look back on.

Frank Capra was never blacklisted.

What happened to Frank Capra was,

during the Korean War, he wanted to serve,

but he was too old to serve in any capacity.

But there was a committee made,

Vista, I believe it was called.

It was a military service committee,

and he was denied clearance by that committee.

It was the biggest shock of his life

that he was basically accused of being disloyal to his country.

Some of the charges were ridiculous.

But the one charge that really was a problem for him was,

they said, "You worked with a lot of left-wing writers",

and that was true.

He did, of course, immediately mount his response to them,

and sent it to them.

He goes through each of the men accused

of being a leftist, of being a communist,

and he says, "I didn't know this",

or, "If I had known, I wouldn't have worked with them".

He wants to distance himself from them

as a means of protecting himself.

Different people reacted in different ways,

and he named names of people

and recklessly threw them around,

and this all added to the stigma

that was attached to those people.

I think this is a very difficult issue,

and this is a time when it's hard to know

who the good guys are at all

because there are these inflections.

We can name the bad guys.

We know the bad guys, the guys who name names,

the Elia Kazans and others who were happy to name names.

Clifford Odets and others like him.

What Capra did is probably certainly on that spectrum.

He was very hurt by this, and very upset.

He didn't talk about it, generally.

The country he had devoted so much to,

he'd served loyally in World War II

and sacrificed a lot for,

and here he was, accused of being disloyal.

It was the worst shock of his life,

and it's like being kicked in the teeth

by somebody you love.

So, he wound up being

very disappointed by the United States,

I guess, to put it mildly.

His career dwindled and died.

He becomes something of a gentleman farmer at this time,

raising his avocados in California.

He becomes a collector of rare books.

He owns the rights to films that he then sells.

He owned Roman Holiday,

which becomes a huge hit for William Wyler.

He does that kind of thing.

You know, if we want to understand

why Capra hoarded

so much praise and attention late in his life,

it's because there really was a long limbo period

of maybe even two decades

where this person barely existed

at the level that he had before.

He certainly did not exist at the level that he had before.

He was almost himself forgotten,

and he's part to blame for that, too,

because he didn't find out why he was relevant any more.

He didn't discover that.

One of your last movies, Pocketful of Miracles,

had tremendous trade reviews,

and yet, was a box office failure.

How hard did this hit you?

Surprisingly badly.

It was almost like another Lost Horizon,

only I found no way to cure it.

I can't...

That one eludes me completely.

His career has an extraordinary decline.

Later in his life, certainly, he has reason to be bitter.

And his career didn't go the way

he had hoped it would after the war.

But I think what really struck me and took me aback was,

at the beginning of McBride's book,

he quotes Capra as railing against the Jews

who had ruined his career.

You'd ask him about any ethnic group,

he would malign in stereotypical terms,

even his own people, the Italian-Americans.

And he unfortunately made antisemitic remarks

and anti-Black remarks, and anti-Mexican-American remarks,

anti-Native-American remarks, you name it.

And to see Capra, an immigrant,

talk about that is just really kind of heartbreaking.

I'm Jewish. I've heard this before.

You hear it all the time,

and it's very hard to see Capra doing the same thing.

In the late '60s,

not only is Capra looked on as quaint,

but he's also looked on as a status quo.

He represents the sort of Hollywood...

...classical, glamorous studio filmmaking,

that this new generation of filmmakers,

Dennis Hopper, Friedkin, Altman,

the '70s era of filmmakers,

regarded with a little bit of cynicism.

It's funny. It becomes a Capra movie again.

He's at this low point, "I'm forgotten".

"No one remembers my movies."

"They're looked on as corny."

So, what does Capra do?

He writes a book.

And the autobiography is a phenomenal success.

And he was back.

Frank Capra hasn't made a feature film since 1961.

But when he appears before a group of students,

many of whom weren't born

when his greatest films were being made,

he is greeted with applause.

He went on 125 college campuses,

and he went around the world

for the US government again.

Ironically, they asked him

to promote Americanism around the world,

and for the State Department. He was very happy to do that.

As I found out, the book is like a novel about Hollywood.

It's a rather beguiling novel, somewhat disturbing,

but often very charming.

But it's almost completely fictitious.

The memoir Capra writes is wonderful.

But when you read the book now,

it's upsetting in some ways because the way he takes credit

for everything he ever did, every script he ever wrote,

every film he ever made, it all comes from him.

It all springs from his brow.

Now, I think we'd take this with a grain of salt.

We know it's not how films are made.

He was a storyteller and a mythmaker.

And if you're a mythmaker,

what better subject to make a myth about than yourself?

It's kind of an American story, that is,

the immigrant who starts with nothing,

comes from nowhere, and makes it big.

But for him, it really does resurrect his career.

It gives him a second act.

He had been, not forgotten, but dismissed,

and the book, which is a bestseller,

really does make him a figure in public life.

America's a melting pot.

Well, he's part of the melt,

and he comes in and he learns what it is to be an American,

or at least what we think it is.

And then, he contributes to that definition.

He narratises it, makes it a great story

for us to go and enjoy,

convinces us it's true.

Also, that's propaganda, I guess.

But he has a huge legacy

about what it is to be an American,

which is to come from another place

and contribute to the definition of it.

Based on what you thought it was going to be,

or everybody believed it was going to be,

mixed in with what it really is,

all put in there with a little bit of ugly,

a little bit of sad, a little bit of tragic,

a little bit of corrupt, a little bit of whatever,

but ultimately coming out and saying,

"It's a victory, we're going to keep going".

The American value is, "You can do it".

That's the American value.

If you want something, you can go for it,

and it's not going to be easy.

That is what America should be.

I guess he is an embodiment of the American Dream,

if we believe that exists in the first place.

Certainly, he would have it that was the case,

that anyone could come here and make it big.

I think that's the mark of his conservatism in some ways.

He does believe you should do it on your own.

So, in that sense, the American Dream

is perverse, reactionary,

and impossible for most people to ever attain,

and probably was not even true in Capra's case.

Even though his drive was unusual,

he had to have an awful lot of help,

a lot of luck, and worked with all the right people.

So, it embodies the American Dream.

The person who made Frank Capra who he was...

We wouldn't be sitting here talking about Frank Capra

if it weren't for a woman named Jean McDaniel,

who was an Irish-American schoolteacher.

She was Frank Capra's champion.

The parents wanted to take Frank out of school in fifth grade

and make him go to work in a brickyard

like his brother, Tony.

And she said she raised the money from the PTA

to pay his parents what Frank would've earned in the brickyard

if he would stay in school.

So, if it hadn't been for Jean McDaniel,

we never would have heard of Frank Capra.

There's so much complexity here in a man's life.

There's so much complexity in the films he makes.

So, it is very hard

to make a simple idea about Frank.

Some people only want to think of them as politics.

Some only want to think of them

as optimistic, sentimental pap.

Or they want to think of it as an American immigrant story,

or definition of American history.

And all of these things are in there.

I think Frank Capra was always

much more than his reputation, say, in the 1930s.

He's more than the maker of It's a Wonderful Life.

And he's also more than some of the beatings

that his reputation has taken.

What's going to remain essential forever is the movies.

It does not surprise me

that there is a resurgence of interest in Capra right now

because this country is going through

terrible, terrible turmoil.

And like any great myth,

Capra's movies, on the spiritual-communal level,

give us a framework to maintain that kind of faith

in a way that isn't ludicrous,

and, in fact, is life-saving.

They're reminders that humanity can be good.

We all have to hope.

These movies are so delightful, you just have to watch them.

Why do we watch movies? Because they're delightful.

And his movies are delightful.

Forget the messages and all that kind of stuff.

They're so fun to watch,

you just have to watch these movies.

I don't want to live in a world where there's no hope,

where there's no sense that there could be a victory,

and if that's a silly idea and I'm crazy,

that's okay with me. I'm not...

The main thing is laughing.

If you want to ask me that question

all over again about Frank's legacy,

I'll just say, "Give me a laugh".

And he gave me a laugh.

If we don't do anything else but laugh, good.

That's all I'm here for, really,

to try and just tell you that

there's good in the world, and that it's wonderful.

Hey, I know the second verse there.

Yeah.

Do you mind if I take the third one?