Frank Capra emigrated from Sicily as a child and became the most commercially successful director in America during the 1930s, winning Best Director three times in five years. The films are usually described as sentimental, which misreads them badly.
Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe and It’s a Wonderful Life all spend most of their running time on institutional corruption, mob manipulation and a man contemplating suicide. The uplift arrives in the last reel and is earned by two hours of the opposite. It’s a Wonderful Life failed on release and only became a fixture when a lapsed copyright put it on television every Christmas.
He made the Why We Fight propaganda series during the war, which shaped how documentary argument was constructed for decades afterward.
