Frank Capra, the Italian film director, on the U.S. Postal Service stamps

Frank Capra has been announced as one of the three Great Film Directors to appear on the U.S. Postal Service postage stamps in 2012. L’Italo- Americano Newspaper would take the occasion to homage the Italian-American director who made the history of cinema in the early 20th Century. Born in 1897 in Bisacquino, Sicily, Capra immigrated to the United States with his family when he was only six. Between 1882 and 1911 nearly four million people left Italy permanently. Most of the emigrants stayed in the Eastern United States –about a fourth going no further than New York City area. Most of them suffered the separation from the native land and kept their habits and culture with them for a long time; Frank Capra is instead one of those who grew up as an American and never felt any real connection to Italy.

However, his being in some way “not American” can be seen in his unique point of view on the American society itself. Edward Zwick, filmmaker and film producer, said about him: “I found his vision of America not unlike that one of the Hudson River School of Painters – this celestial light of unlimited possibilities”. Director of It Happened One Night (1934), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can’t Take it With You (1938) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Capra is a perfect representative of the culture of his time. He knew how to involve a heterogeneous audience: his movies describe an America ready for social progress but still strongly attached to the most traditional image of social classes and families. Capra’s movies could be interpreted as political and sociological messages or enjoyed as contemporary fables.

Capra rose above his working- class immigrant background to earn a degree in chemical engineering and serve in the U.S. Army in WWI, only to enter into filmmaking once his post-war career options became limited. He received his start in comedy, helping vaudeville star Harry Langdon make it big in Hollywood, before landing a deal with notorious head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn. Later, in the early 30’s, he started his lifelong collaboration with writer Robert Riskin, with the first of their socially-conscious films: American Madness (1932).

Capra presented himself to the public as an apolitical crusader for the freedom of man and the right of the individual to fight against any kind of oppression, while at the same time he revealed in his symbolic status as the champion of American ideals. The conflict between rich and poor is a constant theme in his works, more simplistic and Darwinian in the early period, more complex in his latest movies. Here, the presence of “hope” changes the approach to a hard life. “I see a small [Ohio] farm boy becoming a great soldier; I see thousands of marching men. I see General Lee with a broken heart surrendering. And I can see the beginnings of a new nation like Abraham Lincoln said. And I can see that Ohio boy being inaugurated as president. Things like that can only happen in a country like America”, sais the protagonist of Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936).

Lawrence Levine, historian, observed that scenes like this are repeated throughout Capra’s trilogy and contain the essence of his cultural populism. Redemption is precisely what is at the heart of Capra’s films. Capra’s populism is ridden through with a virulent anti- materialism; his heroes care nothing for wealth or status. Frank Capra once stated: “The strength of America is in the kind of people who can plant a seed, sow the grass. I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire.” [J.F. Mariani, Focus on Film 27 (1977)].

“This immigrant from Italy also attempted to explain America by portraying another series of immigrants, not from abroad, but from America’s small towns and villages, trooping into the great cities and immediately undergoing a cultural trial by fire” (L. Levine). A way of looking at middle-class life which is not banal and sterile, but which invests it with vitality and style. “Until World War II”, continues Levine, “Capra was not merely lamenting something dead and gone, something one could only be nostalgic about, but something that could still be saved, still be returned to vital health [...] When Frank Capra finally emerged from his dra ing board to create It’s A Wonderful Life, his first post- war film, his small-town hero no longer had to journey to the city to test his values, the city now came to him.

But only an overt miracle in the shape of an angel named Clarence allowed him to even hold his own. The game was over. Traditional values were endangered not only in the modern city, but in the very precincts of the organic society itself. Capra had nothing left to say, which is why, he never was to make another important film. I don’t think he lost his powers; he lost, in a way, his voice.”

Alessandra Mastroianni
contributor