Word: capra
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Scorsese is just one of many top directors who have found release in reality. In World War II, virtually all of Hollywood was mobilized to churn out propaganda films, and directors such as John Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston, William Wyler and George Stevens (all, eventually, Academy Award winners) enlisted in the armed forces and made tough, smart, often inspiring films of fighting men. More recent directors, like Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee and Michael Apted, have alternated studio movies and important nonfiction projects. For a decade after Titanic, James Cameron gave up Hollywood to make deep-sea documentaries...
Remember those Christmas Eves spent in the monochrome glow of ABC’s airing of the Capra classic “It’s A Wonderful Life,” with all the rapt huddling, the luminescent self-forgetting that entailed? Or, for the sake of universality, “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve”? I don’t, really—usually someone fell asleep midway through, or a fight broke out—but I’ve found a commendable cognate in YouTube...
...this week with the GOP straw poll in Ames, which coincides with the state fair in Des Moines. Journalists will describe the luscious pork chops and the cow sculpted from butter. Meanwhile, the Iowa GOP will pocket about $1 million for party-building expenses. The straw poll is Frank Capra only on the surface. At heart, it's the party's No.1 fund raiser...
...That verdict was premature, but people believed it because they so desperately wanted to. Besides, Ford looked like an honest, decent man, and that, as people who knew him readily attested, is exactly what he was. Frank Capra might have made a movie of Ford's wholesome life to date, although perhaps without the improbable fade-out in the Oval Office...
...Altman certainly didn't invent overlapping dialogue; that goes back to the earliest days of talking pictures, when such directors as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Lewis Milestone picked up the technique popularized a few years earlier in the stage production of The Front Page. But he practically trademarked it in MASH. And he kept using it as a way of suggesting that life wasn't as neat as most movie stories. It was a messy thing - chaos, only vaguely organized - and it offered few straightforward resolutions or consolations. To the movie moguls, that was a call to anarchy...