Last year at the Venice Film Festival, I saw a documentary directed by Matthew Wells called “Frank Capra: Mr. America.” It was engaging, informative, and very pro-Capra. My friend, Farran Smith Nehme, was one of its interviewees. Another thing that happened last year is that, with Farran and my wife Claire, I recorded a commentary for Capra’s 1948 “State of the Union,” a kind of landmark picture in that it was not only a Capra movie but a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie. “State of the Union” was, like many Capra pictures, a picture about politics. But it wasn’t an intense brow-beater and crowdpleaser like “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.” Like “Mr. Smith,” it’s a movie about ideals and the potential betrayal of those ideas, but it’s a drier treatment of those themes.
Capra was a great American filmmaker, but unlike other titans of our cinema — Welles, Hitchcock, Ford — he’s not remembered for signature visuals as such. By the same token he was neither a master of ostensibly invisible film style the way Howard Hawks was. What Capra was about was speed, speed and intensity. His was a style not just congenial to the depiction of American majesty, but of American madness. It’s no coincidence that one of his Depression-era pictures was titled “American Madness.”
The filmmaker would make an exemplary study not just in American Studies but American Energy. This comes across with jaw-dropping force in a magnificent new Blu-ray/4K Ultra box set from Sony, “Frank Capra At Columbia,” which puts 21 films on 27 discs, 9 of them in ultra-high-def 4K for the first time. (The 4K renditions also have Blu-ray versions in the clamshells, hence the large number of discs.)
In one of his more self-aggrandizing interviews, conducted after the finish of his career, Capra, an Italian immigrant, would say “My films were my way of saying ‘Thanks, America.’” He wasn’t being disingenuous. Several pictures here — the ones starring the dual male leads Jack Holt and Ralph Graves — have zip in the way of political or social-conscious dimension but are in their ways celebrations of American technical ingenuity. They’re called “Submarine” and “Dirigible,” and they demonstrate Capra’s early mastery of then high-tech adventure chops — and show the influence of Sergei Eisenstein in terms of action montage. “Dirigible,” about a zeppelin captain who wants to take his craft to the South Pole, was practically the “Top Gun” of its day.
Working under the aegis of producer turned studio head Harry Cohn, Capra proved himself in a number of genres including melodrama, a lot of the star power for which was provided by young Barbara Stanwyck. You could do a dissertation on Stanwyck’s allure based solely on the pictures included here.
He adapted Fannie Hurst (as in the immortal Mel Brooks lyric “hope for the best/expect the worst/you could be Tolstoy/or Fannie Hurst”) in “The Younger Generation,” which has a bit of a “Jazz Singer” vibe in its story of denial of ethnic identity. Ricardo Cortez plays the Jewish Morris Goldfish, who changes his name to “Fish” and rises in the world. An incidental irony here is that “Cortez,” whose brother was the great cinematographer Stanley, was born Jacob Krantz and Latinized himself for the silver screen.
1931’s “Platinum Blonde,” costarring Loretta Young and Jean Harlow, is an engaging comedy with almost no pretensions of significance. But it’s a definite precursor of 1934’s “It Happened One Night,” also included here, in terms of crackling romance. Similarly, American Madness,” which has Walter Huston as a banker with a “character counts’ philosophy and features, about 45 minutes in, a bank run sequence that’s still overwhelming today, looks ahead to the money woes suffered by George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” the still-galvanizing master class in emotional pummeling which caps the set.
There’s little precedent for the breathtaking fantasy/parable “Lost Horizon,” but that’s okay because that film is here too, and it’s sui generis (although brimming with the kind of heart-tugging sentiment of Capra at his best, before his methods and aims were derided as “Capra Corn”) and, yes, genuinely breathtaking. Even if you choose to binge on the set, whether you do it chronologically, or by theme or genre or star, you are never likely to get to the point where you say, “Oh no, not another Capra” or “ho-hum another Capra.” Such is the dynamism and diversity of his work here.
The movies are great…but not perfect; they are dotted with cringe-inducing racialist humor provided by Black performers playing service workers. And of course “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” is an unfortunate study in yellowface (although the allure of its perverse melodrama is still potent). One esoteric bonus: playing Stanwyck’s roommate in “Ladies of Leisure” is one Marie Prevost, the unfortunate actor whose grisly post-mortem was memorialized by Kenneth Anger in the book “Hollywood Babylon” and perversely turned into song by Nick Lowe, who, for scansion reasons (I presume) changed her name to “Marie Provost.”
