Film History

¶ … exception, most of Director Frank Capra's greatest movies take place during the depression, 1929-1941, or shortly after. His films are unique in that they are some of the first to display a faith in American opportunity and values in the context of institutional reform. Author Annalle Newitz aptly articulates Capra's contribution to films with the following quote: The kind of 'socially conscious' movie we associate with Frank Capra's name does not tend to get made in or outside Hollywood at this point in history.

Movies that critics and audiences of the 1990s dub 'socially conscious' do not offer portraits of American communities in the process of coming together; more often than not, American communities in contemporary popular movies are falling apart or are bound together by morally repugnant ideals and practices." This discussion explores five Capra files in chronological order, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934), MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936), MR.

SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939), MEET JOHN DOE (1941), AND IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) as summarized by author Ray Carney in his book American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra to illustrate his film's inclusion of characters that display the courage to act on their own conviction and to sway out of control groups to act in the interest of common good.

In IT HAPPENED ON NIGHT, the films character are fleeing from roles imposed upon them by others, Ellie from her father's authority and Peter from social, political and institutional special-interest group influences that he has been exposed to as a reporter. In their quest for freedom, evil materializes as cynicism and mistrust and in the status barriers that divide people. However, the film shows that it takes only an extended one-on-one encounter for good to prevail. MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN portrays Longfellow Deeds as a personification of small-town virtue.

After inheriting $20 million from a distant relative, Deeds moves from Mandrake Falls, Vermont to a mansion in New York where he is victim not only to bureaucratic pressures and social scrutiny, but is actually threatened with being made over into someone else. Under attack by shyster lawyers with motives to steal his fortune, Deeds successfully defends himself in court so that he will be declared sane enough to distribute millions of dollars to destitute farmers.

Carney's interpretation of Capra's motivation for this work is that given the fundamental state of affairs, the marginality, and alienation of individual in a society that he is unable imaginatively to leave, he must therefore shape some sort of public expressive performance. The film MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON contrasts two politicians, Carey and Smith. On one hand, Carey is a bureaucratic functionary without any real conviction for one side of a political issue or the other, while Smith has great morals and fervor for what he supports.

The intensity of Smith's conviction becomes even more apparent in his drafting and presentation of a bill to support the creation of a national boy's camp. He is defeated in the end and is left unredeemed. Capra had made use of the crowed as a protagonist as exampled by people assisting Smith. According to an analysis of Capra's works, Capra often uses crowds in his films.

They are whipped into high emotion, and the hero then tries to direct them and turn them from catastrophic or self defeating ends This will be evidenced again in MEET JOHN DOE and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. MEET JOHN DOE describes the struggles of "Long John" Willoughby who has given up his own identify and taken on the role of a man that has never existed, "John Doe" to abet a newspaper in a scheme to support a falsified letter from Doe.

The fraud is eventually uncovered and Doe is forced to publicly admit the charade. When John rushes to the John Doe Covention, crowds of people, a national anthem, a prayer all prevent him from speaking. The film uses hordes of ordinary citizens, the state, and the church as a methaphor for cooperating, interlocking forms of repression.

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is a film about small-town America enslaved by a greedy banker, Old-Man Potter, with redemption no longer possible through the initiative of a single principled individual, as it had been in the earlier films. Only supernatural intervention saved Capra's vision of small town America and George Bailey from killing himself. Pottersville represents the corruption and the death of small-town society, a place where the underlings are as cruel as their oppressors and the individual is unimportant.

In the end, George's friends come together to help him bail out the building and loan company, an.