Word: capra
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...cold night just after New Year's, I watched one of Frank Capra's movies--not a bad way to keep warm, if you choose the right Capra. I wanted to tune in on an old American wavelength. A Capra resonance, an atmosphere, seemed to have returned off and on during the fall. It suggested some earlier American self-image, a kind of innocence arising from vulnerability and loss: post-traumatic sweetness. (The trauma in Capra's case, of course, was the stock-market crash and the Great Depression.) Had we renewed our citizenship, for a little while, in Frank...
...Capra's movies are the garden from which Americans were expelled, years ago, by their success and power and diversity--and by their bitter internal wars over, among others, Joe McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ho Chi Minh. The films archive the country's grainy common-man myth of itself, more generous and neighborly and decent, and a lot whiter (in a Norman Rockwell way) than America has proved to be, decades later, having made all that money and opened its doors to the world...
...That night I did not want to see one of Capra's heavily political films (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Meet John Doe, for example), all chicken fat and diatribe, in which endearing little people go up against incipient corporate fascism. I wanted the pure, innocent allegory of It Happened One Night, which won five Oscars...
...hill gang of character actors (especially Landau, who does winsome as well as any 70-year-old) ground their fable in Golden Age geniality. But the story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating: a ferocious pace and the realization that even the nicest townsfolk have weaknesses and venalities. But that would complicate this all-too-simple tale of American madness, gladness and sadness...
...know George Bailey's dilemma in It's a Wonderful Life: What if he had never been born? Here's another question: What if that ultimate Frank Capra movie had never been made? We fear Hollywood would have been stuck for a what-if plot for its year-end inspirationals. Michael Sloane's script butters the Capra-corn with another '40s touchstone: Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero, about a 4-F fellow mistaken as a war hero when he returns home. Here the unwilling impostor is a screenwriter (Carrey) who escapes Hollywood when he's marked for blacklisting...