Pacific Film Archive: Before Capraesqe

Tiburon International Film Festival Recommends:

Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, January 16, 2010 - February 27, 2010


image: American Madness

Over the years, interest in Frank Capra’s work, and his critical reputation, have ebbed and flowed, usually due to changing sociopolitical currents in the United States and their effect on public perception of his work. What is now known as “Capraesque” filmmaking is generally, and reductively, regarded as a form of sentimental populism, but Capra’s work in fact encompasses a far wider range of emotion, social criticism, and genre experimentation than is usually recognized. Because of our current economic collapse, with its many disturbing echoes of the Great Depression, Capra (1897–1991) seems timely all over again, as the first film in this series, American Madness (1932, about a run on a bank), demonstrates with startling immediacy.

Much of Capra’s early work—the films the Sicilian immigrant made before the Capraesque label was applied in his heyday during the New Deal—has largely been inaccessible to most filmgoers, preventing a deeper understanding of his legacy. Many of the films he directed between 1927, when he came to Columbia Pictures, and 1934, when he made his Oscar-winning and career-changing It Happened One Night, have not been available on home video. Now Sony Pictures, which owns the twenty-five films Capra made for Columbia, has painstakingly worked with both vault material and foreign prints preserved by collectors to reassemble and restore his rich and diverse early period. This series showcases many of these little-known gems, showing Capra’s explorations of various genres before he found his familiar niche. The programs also include rare short films Capra directed in the San Francisco Bay Area; two short comedies he cowrote as a Hollywood gag man; and his first feature as director, The Strong Man (1926), starring Harry Langdon.

Joseph McBride
Author, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

Sunday, January 24, 2010
2:00 p.m. Early Capra in the San Francisco Bay Area
(U.S., 1921–22)

Lecture by Joseph McBride
Judith Rosenberg on Piano

Now having its first Bay Area screening since its December 1921 premiere, the documentary The Visit of the Italian Cruiser Libia to San Francisco, Calif., November 6–29, 1921 offers a fascinating glimpse of the local scene in the early twenties, with the Italia Virtus Club welcoming Italian sailors to the city. The film showcases various aspects of the city’s thriving Italian-American community; Capra himself is briefly seen on a pier, working on the shooting. Also shot in San Francisco, with a cast of local actors and waterfront denizens, Capra’s first fictional film as a director, Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House, prefigures Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters in its artistic treatment of squalor. Fulta is based on a Rudyard Kipling poem, reworked by Capra to bring Christian redemption to his prostitute heroine (played by Mildred Owens). Pop Tuttle the Fire Chief is one of the few surviving Plum Center Comedies, a series of rustic slapstick two-reelers shot in San Francisco and Belmont. Capra worked on the series as a prop man, editor, gag man, and personal assistant to the director, Robert Eddy.

• The Visit of the Italian Cruiser Libia to San Francisco, Calif., November 6–29, 1921 (La visita dell’incrociatore italiano Libia a San Francisco, Calif., 6–29 Novembre 1921) (Frank Capra, 1921, Italian intertitles with live English translation, 32 mins @ 18 fps, From Library of Congress. Preserved by Library of Congress.). Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House (Frank Capra, 1922, 15 mins @ 22 fps, From Sony Pictures). Pop Tuttle the Fire Chief (Robert Eddy, 1922, c. 20 mins, From Library of Congress. Preserved by Library of Congress.)

• (Total program time: c. 120 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)

Sunday, February 14, 2010
2:00 p.m. The Matinee Idol
Frank Capra (U.S., 1928)

Restored Vault Print
Introduced by Joseph McBride
Judith Rosenberg on Piano

According to Columbia’s Harry Cohn, The Matinee Idol, a burlesque of the theater centering on the tribulations of a hammy tent company putting on a Civil War drama, “started the audience laughing in the first fifty feet and never allowed them to stop except for little impressive human touches injected here and there which never failed to register.” The Variety reviewer, Sid Silverman, gave resounding approval to what he called a “solid laugh and hoke picture. . . . It’s a picture a good organist can have a circus with. The chest-heaving and gesturing drama lays itself open to all kinds of kidding sobs.” Columbia was starting to spend more money on Capra’s films, and that helped elevate The Matinee Idol in status to a movie that Variety said could play on its own without a second feature. Rediscovered by the Cinémathèque Française in 1992 and restored by Columbia in 1997, The Matinee Idol drolly reflects Capra’s experience of amateurish theatrics at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, in the Civil War playThe Crisis.

—Joseph McBride

• Written by Elmer Harris, Peter Milne, based on “Come Back to Aaron” by Robert Lord, Ernest S. Pagano. Photographed by Philip Tannura. With Bessie Love, Johnnie Walker, Lionel Belmore, Ernest Hilliard. (75 mins @ 24 fps, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)

Preceded by short:
Fiddlesticks (Harry Edwards, U.S., 1927). A young man dreams of a career playing the bass fiddle but finds success through a different and surprising avenue in this “almost perfect little comedy” (Joseph McBride), on which Capra worked as a gag man. (20 mins, 16mm, From Douris Corporation)

• (Total program time: c. 120 mins, Silent, B&W)

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