Frank Capra - Legacy

Legacy

During the golden age of Hollywood, Capra's "fantasies of goodwill" made him one of the two or three most famous and successful directors in the world. Film historian Ian Freer notes that at the time of his death in 1991, his legacy still remained intact:

He had created feelgood entertainments before the phrase was invented, and his influence on culture – from Steven Spielberg to David Lynch, and from television soap operas to greeting-card sentiments – is simply too huge to calculate.

Director/actor John Cassavetes contemplating Capra’s contribution to the art of film quipped: “Maybe there really wasn’t an America, it was only Frank Capra.” Capra’s films were his love letters to an idealized America – a cinematic landscape of his own invention. The performances his actors gave were invariable portrayals of personalities developed into recognizable images of popular culture, “their acting has the bold simplicity of an icon...”

Like his contemporary, director John Ford, Capra defined and aggrandized the tropes of mythic America where individual courage invariably triumphs over collective evil. Film historian Richard Griffith speaks of Capra's “...reliance on sentimental conversation and the ultimate benevolence of ordinary America to resolve all deep conflicts.” “Average America” is visualized as "...a still tree lined street, undistinguished frame houses surrounded by modest areas of grass, a few automobiles. For certain purposes it assumed that all real Americans live in towns like this, and so great is the power of myth, even the born city-dweller is likely to believe vaguely that he too lives on this shady street, or comes from it, or is going to.”

NYU Professor of Humanities and Performing Arts, Leonard Quart writes:

“There would be no enduring conflicts – harmony, no matter how contrived and specious, would ultimately triumph in the last frame...In true Hollywood fashion, no Capra film would ever suggest that social change was a complex, painful act. For Capra, there would be pain and loss, but no enduring sense of tragedy would be allowed to intrude on his fabulist world.” The theatre screen was the mirror in front of which American movie audiences sat enamored with the reflected images of their better selves–an idealistic storybook America.

Although Capra's stature as a director had declined during the 1950s, his films underwent a revival in the 1960s:

Ten years later, it was clear that this trend had reversed itself. Post-auteurist critics once more acclaimed Capra as a cinematic master, and perhaps more surprisingly, young people packed Capra festivals and revivals all over the United States.

French film historian John Raeburn, editor of Cahiers du cinéma, notes that that Capra's films were unknown in France, but there too his films underwent a fresh discovery by the public. He believes the reason for his renewed popularity had to do with his themes, which he made credible "an ideal conception of an American national character":

There is a strong libertarian streak in Capra's films, a distrust of power wherever it occurs and in whomever it is invested. Young people are won over by the fact that his heroes are uninterested in wealth and are characterized by vigorous ... individualism, a zest for experience, and a keen sense of political and social justice. ... Capra's heroes, in short, are ideal types, created in the image of a powerful national myth.

In 1982, the American Film Institute honored Capra by giving him their AFI Life Achievement Award. The event was used to create the television film, The American Film Institute Salute to Frank Capra, hosted by James Stewart. In 1986, Capra received the National Medal of Arts.

During his acceptance speech for the AFI award, Capra stressed his most important values:

The art of Frank Capra is very, very simple: It's the love of people. Add two simple ideals to this love of people: the freedom of each individual, and the equal importance of each individual, and you have the principle upon which I based all my films.

Capra expanded on his visions in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title:

Forgotten among the hue-and criers were the hard-working stiffs that came home too tired to shout or demonstrate in streets ... and prayed they'd have enough left over to keep their kids in college, despite their knowing that some were pot-smoking, parasitic parent-haters.

Who would make films about, and for, these uncomplaining, unsqueaky wheels that greased the squeaky? Not me. My "one man, one film" Hollywood had ceased to exist. Actors had sliced it up into capital gains. And yet – mankind needed dramatizations of the truth that man is essentially good, a living atom of divinity; that compassion for others, friend or foe, is the noblest of all virtues. Films must be made to say these things, to counteract the violence and the meanness, to buy time to demobilize the hatreds.