Not Such a Wonderful Life

...A sensible passage on social consciousness in It Happened One Night turns silly once he interprets "the Walls of Jericho,' the blanket Clark Gable pins up to separate his bed from Claudette Colbert's, as a symbol of their class difference...

...He hated Franklin D. Roosevelt and admired Il Duce (but was also impressed with the Soviet Union...

...And, of course, there is the usual Capra heaping of showbiz sentimentalism...

...It was the much-excoriated Cohn who first spotted Stanwyck's "combination of brassiness and vulnerability...

...His long and fruitful association with Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, for whom hardly anybody has ever had a kind comment, is richly explored...

...Unfortunately, he cannot resist imposing big psychological meanings on Capra's every action and every failure to act...

...As McBride shows, the director was always worried about audience reaction...

...Deeds...

...Pauline Kael complained that Capra "destroyed Gary Cooper's early sex appeal when he made him childish as Mr...

...One critic, Donald Willis, summed up the prevailing perplexity: "Depending on one's political point of view and on what Capra film or films or parts of Capra films one is talking about, Frank Capra is an advocate of Communism, fascism, Marxism, populism, conservatism, McCarthyism, New Dealism, anti-Hooverism, jingoism, socialism, capitalism, middle-of-the-road-ism, democracy, or individualism...

...Manny Farber had it right when he called Capra "a smooth blend of iconoclast and sheep...

...McBride brings all this out dramatically in his account of the five different endings Capra played with before settling finally for a crowd pleaser...

...McBride is a close observer and careful analyst of the seemingly irreconcilable elements in works that sometimes combined the philosophies of Karl Marx and Dale Carnegie...

...During the security mania of the early 1950s, McBride reveals, Capra, despite his movies featuring brave nonconformists, ran for cover, winding up as an FBI informant...

...the Big Shots theme that Capra worked so effectively...

...In his business dealings, he tended to be on the side of management rather than labor, a stance befitting a man born poor and on his way to becoming very rich...

...No other moviemaker has ever equaled his knack for merchandising the natural appeal of the all-American outsider taking on the system, and at the same time cheering for the system...

...What makes Meet John Doe in particular such an unsettling movie is that the strong tensions it builds up remain unresolved...

...Writing about the little Italian's yen for wasp blondes, McBride tells us: "The story he was trying to cover up was an embarrassing and painful one, a trauma that affected all of his future dealings with women, helped confirm his perception of himself as a social outcast, and drove him to sublimate his sexuality by concentrating his energy into his work...

...who died on May 23 at the age of 81, shortly before he decided to make it...

...What has always made Capra such an inviting subject is the ambiguous nature of his most famous, most popular movies...

...And in his many cracks about the studio heads he despised, he often tagged on the word "Jew...

...In addition, he was far more attuned to America in the Depression years than the ideologically committed directors and writers who would later find themselves blacklisted...

...Along with the life and career of the man who in the years between 1934-41 gave us It Happened One Night, Mr...

...McBride goes in for similar vaporings in explicating the director's movies, even Arsenic and Old Lace: "There may have been a subconscious cause for Capra's attraction to Arsenic and Old Lace: Making the film may have been his way of trying to work out his complex emotions about his mother...

...Here is Capra's most powerful picture of the little man beaten down by the system???along with a message of mistrust in the mob...

...Such stuff is easier to write than to take...

...His eye was on the imperatives of the box office, not of anybody's dialectic...

...Nonetheless, the movie still packs a terrific punch...

...and his way of expressing his compulsive need to escape from his family...

...Just when you think he has steadied down, however, he goes flying off after symbols...

...But will it have a satisfying ending...

...mistrust of the system yet no radical program to change it...

...a Variety reporter as well as the author of books about Orson Welles, John Ford and Howard Hawks...

...Whether the director helped or hindered the development of his favorite male stars, like Gary Cooper and James Stewart, by marking them so strongly as Capraesque heroes is a more complicated matter...

...Looking now at the fairy tales of the rise and fall and rise of Longfellow Deeds and Jefferson Smith, it is impossible not to be impressed with how intimately in touch Capra's Depression-era movies were with a peculiarly American mixture of radical impulses and conservative instincts...

...Reading this biography turns one's thoughts to our present national condition: Hard times and populist stirrings...

...a Left in disarray and strongman saviors popping up...

...As McBride, whose treatment of the blacklist period is straight down the old Hollywood-Left line, makes plain, Capra was no bleeding heart...

...In the light of his whole career, Capra's compromise in Meet John Doe is no surprise...

...Cooper being dissuaded from suicide by the com-mon folk...

...with plenty of grist...

...At times, he seems to be out to get his subject...

...Here is the biographer on Capra's divorce from his first wife: "By punishing her for his own failure in Hollywood and as a husband, he was also punishing a part of himself, a part he feared and hated...

...for example, the appeal he found in offbeat actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, with whom he apparently had a serious affair, and Jean Arthur, with whom I, and other discerning adolescents, dreamed of having one...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman All right, 655 pages (not counting acknowledgments, source notes, film-ography, and index) may seem a lot to devote to a movie director...

...There is plenty of evidence in these pages of his reluctance to share the spotlight with his collaborators, notably the writer Robert Ris-kin, the New Deal liberal McBride credits with much of what came to be thought of as the Capra theme...

...Who in Hollywood was not...

...The author derives particular pleasure from pointing to the errors, evasions and outright lies in Capra's autobiography, The Name Above the Title, as proof of a shaky ego, a weak character and sundry emotional confusions...

...He molded them, and they added inestimably to his pictures...

...But the book is littered with psychorubble, too...

...The author is much more solid and interesting when he focuses on Capra's directing...

...Although you have to be a movie buff to absorb it all, you can't complain about being shortchanged...

...that many critics have reasonably enough written off as a political and artistic sellout...

...yet so exasper-atingly in the opinion of critics who would have liked a tougher, more polit-ically correct or at least coherent message...

...McBride has evidently read everything and interviewed everybody, and when he serves up the fruits of his research he is certainly generous...

...The title, echoing Tennessee Williams' experience after he wrote The Glass Menagerie, signals the book's somewhat overcooked approach...

...Here, in Edward Arnold's shrewd portrayal of a press boss, is as clear a warning against fascism American style as the screen has had, but the movie is pervaded by a protofascist attitude toward the people...

...Trying to sort out Capra's politics on the basis of his most popular movies could be baffling...

...these could be the ingredients for a Frank Capra movie...

...Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe, McBride offers a minihistory covering the studio system in Hollywood's great age, labor relations between the moguls and the artists and hacks in their service, the behind-scenes maneuverings over the early Academy Awards, and more...

...Capra, never one of nature's noblemen, is an easy mark...

...Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It With You, Mr...

...But Frank Capra provides Joseph McBride...

...It's a Wonderful Life, which cannot be escaped during the Christmas season, was not made until 1946 and marks the end of the Ordinary Guy vs...

...Nevertheless, this son of immigrants identified deeply with the little guy, the outsider, the maverick...

...Who in Hollywood is not...