Frank Capra Was Darker Than You Think, Says Biographer Sam Wasson

Sam Wasson, one of Hollywood’s preeminent historians and biographers, has published searching books on the lives and works of Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Mazursky, Blake Edwards and Roman Polanski. Now, with Frank Capra, out Oct. 27, he’s delivered a 752-page doorstop chronicling the arc and art of a filmmaker whose surname is adjectival shorthand for heartfelt, humanistic American storytelling.

“We are down on America right now — down on leadership, down on ideals, down on the film experience — and Capra represents these things when they’re working and shows us why we need them,” says Wasson. “Another way of saying that is, he’s America’s director, whose own tale is a rags-to-riches immigrant story, with all the darkness that entails.”

Capra, who won three Oscars for Best Director, is most known for the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, along with It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — plus the Why We Fight series for the U.S. Army during World War II. Today, Capra’s work is often dismissed for its perceived schmaltz. But Wasson thinks this misses the point: “The so-called ‘Capra-corn,’ the alleged corniness of the films? There’s no merit in that. These movies are dark and triumphant. There must be shame around the idea of a happy ending, something that we’ve projected. Why are we so guilty about that?”

Wasson’s biography of the striving Capra, from a Sicilian village to East L.A. to Columbia Pictures and beyond, is an immersive journey through early and Golden Age Hollywood, with colorful sketches of everything from Mack Sennett’s backlot to Chasen’s dining room. At its center is a larger-than-life storyteller whose talent was knowing that audiences love nothing more than well-told, larger-than-life stories. “He did self-mythologize, but his self-mythology was also true,” Wasson explains.

The book also acts as a reparative rejoinder to Joseph McBride’s highly critical Capra bio The Catastrophe of Success, which was released in 1992, a year after the director’s death. That treatise dismantled Capra’s life, highlighting his personal and professional hypocrisies, with a focus on his self-serving conduct during the Red Scare, at the expense of his industry colleagues.

“Therapists talk about mental health as integration, holding the good with the bad: You’re not perfect but you’re not evil,” muses Wasson. “Joseph McBride discovered some very painful things about Capra which are true, and that became the entirety of his view about the man. My guess is he was so hurt and so angry about what he discovered that this colored everything. The book is relentlessly prosecutorial, in a way that invites a view of human nature that I just don’t share.”

Wasson notes that Capra has shown little influence over today’s working American filmmakers, aside from a couple of Steven Spielberg features, citing Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — “and even then, it’s not a one-to-one.” He does point to television’s acclaimed Friday Night Lights as a rare modern-day link: “That had a warm view of humanity that led in the darkness.” Wasson continues, “We don’t go to the movies to see people anymore. We go to the movies to see spectacle. Watching Capra is about people looking at people — looking inside people.”