American dreamer

The complex world of Frank Capra

by Steve Vineberg

FRANK CAPRA'S AMERICAN DREAM, Written and directed by Kenneth Bowser. Narrated by Ron Howard. At the Brattle Theatre this Friday and Saturday. November 7 and 8.

The best news about the documentary Frank Capra's American Dream is its acknowledgment that Capra was a complex, troubled man with an ambivalent view of the American folks generally assumed to be the collective heroes of his movies. It also identifies two gifts he doesn't receive enough credit for. Kenneth Bowser, who put the movie together, spends a fair amount of time on the large-scale action sequences that earned Capra his footing at Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures in the late '20s and early '30s and that show up in some of his more famous later films. Capra made a hit out of Submarine when he was called in to replace Irvin Willat in 1928 and went on to direct Flight and Dirigible. His ability to handle crowds creatively and keep the narrative line clear in tense, complicated sequences is evident in the clips Bowser includes from 1932's fascinating American Madness (which the Brattle will screen November 10) and 1937's Lost Horizon -- a blockheaded movie that would be a dead loss without its riveting set pieces, which are also marvels of design and cinematography.

The other talent Bowser and many of his interviewees justly celebrate in Capra is his loving direction of his actors, especially Barbara Stanwyck and Jimmy Stewart. (Among the Capra pictures scattered through the new Brattle schedule are several showcasing these two performers: Stanwyck stars in The Miracle Woman on November 10 and Forbidden on November 17, and the series dedicated to Stewart includes You Can't Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on a double bill this Sunday as well as -- inevitably -- It's a Wonderful Life in late December.) Bowser argues that no one has ever tapped a fatter lode of memorable character acting than Capra, and though I'd suggest that Preston Sturges and Robert Altman are at least worth a nomination, it's true that a number of actors gave their finest performances for him, including Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, Myrna Loy in Broadway Bill, and Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life. Stanwyck's quartet of films for Capra in the early '30s exposed sides of her later audiences would have no idea she possessed. Of her post-Capra films, only Stella Dallas gave her the opportunity to take the kind of high-wire risks you see in The Miracle Woman and The Bitter Tea of General Yen.

I've always considered General Yen, the melodrama that opened the Radio City Music Hall in 1933, Capra's best film. It predates "Capracorn," that insidious mixture of snake-oil salesmanship and emotional potency that he started concocting around 1936, when he made Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The bad news about Frank Capra's American Dream is that it lays its buck down for that snake oil. We're told by one famous fan after another that Capra's finest moment was the shamelessly manipulative Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or Meet John Doe (which was without a doubt his looniest picture), or, predictably, It's a Wonderful Life. (The roster of interviewees includes contemporary actors like Richard Dreyfuss and Michael Keaton, directors like Altman and Scorsese, and writers like Marshall Herskovitz, as well as some of his colleagues and Joe McBride, who wrote a crackpot bio on him five years ago.)

The documentary was produced by Capra's sons, Tom and Frank, Jr.; of course it's adoring. But Marshall Herskovitz, for example, wasn't related to the guy, so his unthinking worship of every frame of It's a Wonderful Life makes him sound like a dope, especially when he talks about the great truths in this profoundly fraudulent film. I certainly agree that Capra's movies have far darker corners than they're often presumed to contain -- darker, I'd say, than their sappy endings take account of. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone who lent a voice to this documentary that Capra failed dramatically to reconcile the dark and the sunshiny elements of his movies. It doesn't seem to have struck any of them that there's something bizarre and creepy about using the power of both populist and fascist imagery from the Depression era (in Meet John Doe) to get audiences revved up about a grass-roots movement whose platform amounts to being more polite to your neighbor. Or about layering tough-to-shake Dickensian images and details (in It's a Wonderful Life) on a fantasy about a guardian angel who earns his wings by saving a man from jumping off a bridge.

There has never been a director quite like Frank Capra, and every effort to re-create him makes it clearer that there probably never will be. It would have been braver and more valuable if someone had produced a documentary that was honest about his work -- both the great and the enraging parts -- in a way that he could never be.