Lady For A Day - Production

Production

Damon Runyon's short story Madame La Gimp was published in the October 1929 issue of Cosmopolitan. Columbia Pictures purchased the screen rights in September 1932, and the studio scheduled the production to begin the following May, although director Frank Capra had misgivings about the project. He reminded studio head Harry Cohn he was "spending three hundred thousand dollars on a picture in which the heroine is seventy years old," to which Cohn responded, "All I know is the thing's got a wallop. Go ahead." Robert Riskin was assigned to develop the story for the screen and wrote four drafts, submitting the last on May 6, 1933, three days before principal photography began. Aside from some minor revisions made during production, this final script was filmed intact. Riskin's version deviated from the original Runyon story primarily in that it linked its central character and a number of plot developments to millions of Americans who were suffering from an economic crisis as a result of the onset of the Great Depression. Runyon was pleased with the changes and later said, "Lady for a Day was no more my picture than Little Miss Marker, which, like the former picture, was almost entirely the result of the genius of the scenario writers and the director who worked on it."

Riskin had written his screenplay specifically for Robert Montgomery, but MGM refused to loan him to Columbia. He was among several performers Capra wanted but failed to secure for roles in the film. With Montogomery unavailable, Capra approached James Cagney and William Powell, but neither of their respective studios was willing to allow them to work on the project. Capra's first choices for Apple Annie and Henry D. Blake, Marie Dressler and W.C. Fields, could not be cast for the same reason. The director finally cast his film with an assortment of character actors under contract to Columbia. He also went to the Downtown Los Angeles neighborhood where he had sold newspapers as a boy and hired some of the street people who congregated there as extras who would add color to the film. One week before filming began, Capra offered the role of Apple Annie to 75-year-old May Robson, most of whose career had been spent performing on stage. In later years, Capra thought the fact she and most of the supporting players were unfamiliar to movie audiences helped the public accept them as the down-on-their-luck characters they were meant to be.

Just prior to the first preview in Hollywood in early July 1933, the film's title was changed from Madame La Gimp to Beggars' Holiday, then changed again before the film premiered at Radio City Music Hall on September 7. It went into general release on September 13 and within a very short time earned $600,000, twice its budget and a substantial sum for the period. According to the contract he had negotiated prior to making the film, Capra received 10% of the net profits. The film's success prompted the 1934 sequel Lady by Choice, directed by David Burton and starring Carole Lombard.

In the early 1950s, the original negative was lost while being transferred from one film lab to another for preservation work. For a period of time the only existing copy was a 35mm print owned by Capra, until he made a duplicate negative from it and donated a newly minted print to the Library of Congress. Columbia later sold the rights to the story to United Artists for $200,000, and Capra remade the film as Pocketful of Miracles with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford in 1961. The director claimed to prefer the remake to the original, although most critics and, in later years film historians and movie buffs, disagreed with his assessment.

The "Apple Annie" story transformed into Capra's Lady For A Day (and Pocketful of Miracles) has long been considered a natural source for a stage musical and a number of prominent writers, including Jerry Herman, David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr; the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb have all worked on unfinished and unrealized adaptations.