| Author | : Eric Loren Smoodin |
| Publisher | : Duke University Press |
| Total Pages | : 318 |
| Release | : 2004 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 9780822333944 |
From feature films to television production.
Frank Capra
| Author | : Joseph McBride |
| Publisher | : Univ. Press of Mississippi |
| Total Pages | : 825 |
| Release | : 2011-06-02 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1604738391 |
Moviegoers often assume Frank Capra's life resembled his beloved films (such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life). A man of the people faces tremendous odds and, by doing the right thing, triumphs! But as Joseph McBride reveals in this meticulously researched, definitive biography, the reality was far more complex, a true American tragedy. Using newly declassified U.S. government documents about Capra's response to being considered a possible “subversive” during the post-World War II Red Scare, McBride adds a final chapter to his unforgettable portrait of the man who gave us It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe.
American Vision
| Author | : Raymond Carney |
| Publisher | : CUP Archive |
| Total Pages | : 536 |
| Release | : 1986-10-31 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780521326193 |
Professor Carney analyses Frank Capra's life as well as the broad cultural context of his films.
Frank Capra
| Author | : Robert Sklar |
| Publisher | : Temple University Press |
| Total Pages | : 314 |
| Release | : |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 9781439904893 |
Frank Capra's films have had a lasting impact on American culture. His powerful depiction of American values, myths, and ideals was central to such famous Hollywood films asIt Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life.These pre-war films are remembered for their depiction of an individual's overcoming adversity, populist politics, and an unflappable optimist view of life. This collection of nine essays by leading international film historians analyzes Capra's filmmaking during his most prolific period, from 1928 to 1939, taking a closer look at the more complex aspects of his work. They trace his struggles for autonomy against Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn, his reputation as an auteur, and the ways in which working within studio modes of production may have enhanced the director's strengths. The contributors also place their critiques within the context of the changing fortunes of the Hollywood studio system, the impact of the Depression, and Capra's working relationships with other studio staff and directors. The contributors' access to nineteen newly restored Capra films made at Columbia during this period fills this collection with some of the most comprehensive critiques available on the director's early body of work. Author note:Robert Sklar, Professor of Cinema at New York University, is the co-editor (with Charles Musser) ofResisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History(Temple), and the author of numerous books on film, includingMovie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, and Garfield, andFilm: An International History of the Mediumwinner of the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award.Vito Zagarrioteaches film history at the University of Florence and film analysis at the University of Rome III, Italy.
Songs of Innocence and Experience
| Author | : Magdalena Grabias-Zurek |
| Publisher | : Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 230 |
| Release | : 2013-07-26 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 1443850950 |
Songs of Innocence and Experience: Romance in the Cinema of Frank Capra is a study of the director’s chosen movies from the perspective of three types of comedies: paradisal, purgatorial and infernal, as assigned by Dante in his Divine Comedy. Magdalena Grabias views Capra’s films in two broader categories of “innocence” and “experience,” where “innocence” represents Dantean paradisal level, and “experience” combines the levels of purgatory and inferno. Such a division constitutes the means to interpret Capra’s filmic universe and to describe the ever-evolving directorial vision of Frank Capra. The main purpose of the book is to demonstrate how, in the light of the theory of literary romance as presented by Northrop Frye in his seminal works concerning the subject, the films of Frank Capra fit into the genre of romance. Romantic elements in Frank Capra’s movies can be found in both “innocence” and “experience” categories and, hence, consequently in his paradisal, purgatorial and infernal comedies. However, in both categories, and all three comedy types, the romantic reality of each examined film is structured and developed in a different manner. The book offers an insight into Frank Capra’s films and the complex process of creating his multidimensional romantic universe within them.
Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film
| Author | : Joe Saltzman |
| Publisher | : Norman Lear Center USC |
| Total Pages | : 204 |
| Release | : 2002 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 0971401810 |
The Name Above The Title
| Author | : Frank Capra |
| Publisher | : Da Capo Press |
| Total Pages | : 534 |
| Release | : 1997-03-22 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 9780306807718 |
Although Frank Capra (1897–1991) is best known as the director of It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It's a Wonderful Life, he was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker as well as a behind-the-scene force in the Director's Guild, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Producer's Guild. He worked with or knew socially everyone in the movie business from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton in the silent era through the illustrious names of the golden age. He directed Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, and others. Reading his autobiography is like having Capra sitting in your living room, regaling you with his anecdotes. In The Name Above the Title he reveals the deeply personal story of how, despite winning six Academy Awards, he struggled throughout his life against the glamors, vagaries, and frustrations of Hollywood for the creative freedom to make some of the most memorable films of all time.
Five Came Back
| Author | : Mark Harris |
| Publisher | : Penguin |
| Total Pages | : 528 |
| Release | : 2014-02-27 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0698151577 |
Now a Netflix original documentary series, also written by Mark Harris: the extraordinary wartime experience of five of Hollywood's most important directors, all of whom put their stamp on World War II and were changed by it forever Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before. They were on the scene at almost every major moment of America’s war, shaping the public’s collective consciousness of what we’ve now come to call the good fight. The product of five years of scrupulous archival research, Five Came Back provides a revelatory new understanding of Hollywood’s role in the war through the life and work of these five men who chose to go, and who came back. “Five Came Back . . . is one of the great works of film history of the decade.” --Slate “A tough-minded, information-packed and irresistibly readable work of movie-minded cultural criticism. Like the best World War II films, it highlights marquee names in a familiar plot to explore some serious issues: the human cost of military service, the hypnotic power of cinema and the tension between artistic integrity and the exigencies of war.” --The New York Times
