Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

Rating:
Summary: Complexity is fascinating
Review: I was captivated by this book from the very first page. (Read the first three paragraphs and see if you can put it down after that!) Frank Capra was a fascinating man, a man of contradictions, a man who could make great films and inspire the passionate loyalty seen in some of the other reviews below, yet who had a dark side to his personality that haunted his life. McBride is equal to the task of encompassing Capra's compexities. His writing is both detailed and flowing. Like any great biography, this book raises large questions of human life: What happens when worldly success outpaces our own inner sense of worth? What do we do as adults with the enduring wounds of childhood? To see how a well-known man struggles with such issues is one reason to read a book like this one. The panorama of Hollywood in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s is another. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Want revenge? Write a biography!
Review: One gets the same feeling finishing Frank Capra's autobiography The Name Above the Title as one does finishing a Capra film: thrilled with the zigs and zags of life and optimistic about one's own future.

But following up The Name Above The Title with Catastrophe of Success is akin to washing down Thanksgiving dinner with a rotten-egg-and-sour-grape smoothie. McBride has tainted a seven year odyssey of painstakingly documented research (175 interviews! weeks with Capra's personal papers! archive searches! FOIA releases! federal declassifications!) with an animosity uncommon in academics, at once vilifying Capra and his father while portraying those who loved and associated with Capra as selfless victims of Capra's insecurities, inner torments, and anticommunist political convictions.

In reading McBride, one senses that behind it all, there exists an even better story than the one McBride has scratched out from the voluminous source material. Why did McBride seek to so vehemently deconstruct what he called "the Capra myth," and soil the dignity of Capra's image by using such tactics as only quoting those interview passages in which his subject used expletives, or subjectively interpreting Capra's blinks and nods in a This Is Your Life episode as queasy squirming in the face of some underlying "irony"?

Was it because Capra declined to direct a made-for-TV sequel to It's A Wonderful Life, one which McBride hints he may have been involved in on page 644 of the paperback edition? Did Capra at one point step on McBride's toes as had done with so many insufferable fools?

McBride's perseverant scholarship is self-evident, yet his shamefully slanted execution degrades the whole presentation, making the book unreadable except to Capra enemies and eternal sourpusses. Readers are advised to reserve a second helping of "legend" for after the egg-and-grape "truth" sauce.

Rating:
Summary: The Ego Above The Title
Review: Poor Frank Capra who had to fall into the hands of a biographer who rejects the "Auteur" school of film theory. Capra is not a modest man and in his autobiography "The Name Above The Title" he should have given more credit to those talented people such as cinematographer John Walker who helped make so many of his finest films. But author Joseph McBride seems to have been so taken up with with Capra's egotism that it overcomes his appreciation of Capra's films. Some of McBride's criticism is simply petty such as his carping that Capra exaggerated his college grades over sixty years after the fact. It's almost as if McBride expected the director of "It's A Wonderful Life" to be as nice a guy as George Bailey.

Worse of all, Frank Capra is - gasp - a rich man. Maybe even a Republican. How can a great, humanistic film be directed by a Republican?

The book is not without some virtues. It does give a detailed and impeccably researched account of Frank Capra's life starting from his arrival in America until his reluctant and forced retirement.

In "Lost Horizon" Capra created a perfect world inhabited by less than perfect people who do not suffer in the words of wise old Change from an "excess of virtue". A biography written by someone who had a bit more tolerance for his subject's imperfections would have done a better job.

Rating:
Summary: "It was a horrible life"
Review: This book is an unholy surprise for any Capra film lover picking it up and expecting to read a warm-hearted tome about the greatest director of 1930s Hollywood. The author hates Capra, and to be fair he makes his case really well. It is sort of like Frank Capra is a china shop and the author goes into him with a baseball bat and vast damage on his mind. Nothing is left unbroken, not even Capra's reputation as a maker of great movies. Much of the credit for those masterpieces is shifted to Robert Riskin. This doesn't even come close to the hit that Capra the man takes, especially with the revelation he named names to federal Commie seekers. Guys like that never get off easy these days. But the most fascinating aspect of the book is how Frank Capra -- the All-American movie maker -- was hounded to prove his patriotism. And nothing worked. No wonder Capra was left so exasperated and bitter. The only good thing is he didn't have to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Biased Attack on Capra
Review: This book, though it does have much interesting detail, is essentially an attack on Frank Capra, with many dubious conclusions drawn, and is so unrelentingly negative and unfair that it at times borders on the ludicrous. The theory of the book is that Frank Capra was a pathlogical liar and unrelenting egotist, who used the talents of others to make his films and then tried to hog all the glory himself, culminating in his famous autobiography, "The Name Above the Title," which is a "self-aggrandizing fairy tale." Capra was essentially a front man for the brilliant work of screenwriter Robert Riskin, who is the main reason behind Capra's success. When you finish this book, however, you stop and say, "How did this pathetic fraud produce such a staggering array of classic films, in such a distinctive style, and in such a variety of genres (comedy, drama, documentary, and even educational films)?" None of McBride's conclusions makes the slightest bit of sense. One key flaw of the theory is that Capra's two greatest films, "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," were not written by Riskin. McBride attempts to answer this by saying that they "followed the Riskin formula," as if by watching a few Disney Classics we could each make one ourselves, simply by following the formula, as if any decent movie was ever made by a "formula." In actuality, the brilliant screenplay of "It's a Wonderful Life" bears little resemblance to anything written by Riskin, although Capra's directorial style is easily recognizable (his style is almost as easily identifiable as Hitchcock's). The fact that Capra made many great films without Riskin (The Strong Man, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Arsenic and Old Lace, State of the Union, Why We Fight series, the Bell Science series, and the two classics mentioned above), while Riskin made none without Capra, though he was given the opportunity to direct his own material, should seem to be a telling blow.

If you read Capra's own book after reading this one, you will be surprised to discover no sense of rampaging ego, but the thoughts of a rather straightforward, idealistic, and often self-deprecating person. Capra did very little research for his own book, largely relying on his wife's scrapbooks and his own memory, and so there probably are some minor factual errors, but McBride jumps on every minute inconsistency, and if Capra says one thing and some obscure person says something contradictory, he immediately and annoyingly assumes Capra is lying and the other person is telling the truth.

As an example, Capra says in his book that he graduated high school a half year early. McBride pounces on this eagerly, and says that Capra graduated on time with his class. However, we learn that Capra graduated on January 27, and didn't start college until September, so it's very easy to see how he could remember that he graduated 6 months early when recalling the events 50 years later. Capra also then says he spent 6 months working at the Western Pipe and Steel Company to earn money for college. McBride pounces again, saying that Tony Capra claims that he was the one who worked there. Later McBride ruminates about "the mysterious missing 6 months" after Capra graduated High School and ponders what he could have done in that time. Gosh, could it be that Tony Capra is the one mistaken, and that Frank did work at the factory?-such a possibility would never occur to McBride.

McBride even somberly and absurdly quotes a certain Eugene Vale, who claims that he was the man who wrote most of "The Name of Above the Title" and that he "made" Capra, as if Capra's classic films don't speak for themselves. Capra's book is great because we get to hear Capra's own opinions on various aspects of his films, not because it's brilliantly written. We're all still awaiting with bated breath the next astonishing literary production from the great Eugene Vale.

It appears that McBride's animosity toward Capra is largely due to the fact that Capra was a Republican who believed in rugged individualism and conservative values, which seems to lead McBride to think that it was therefore impossible to care about his fellow man, and that surely there must be a liberal somewhere responsible for all these powerful films.

McBride claims he wrote the book because after World War II "no other Director had such a precipitous decline" as Capra. For the record, after World War II Capra made possibly the greatest movie of all time, an outstanding political comedy-drama, two mediocre remakes of his earlier films, an enjoyable musical comedy, a disappointing musical comedy, and 4 Educational films (Out Mr. Sun, etc.) that have been beloved by schoolkids everywhere for the past 45 years.

In conclusion, it's especially galling that shortly before his final, paralyzing stroke, the 87-year old Capra was gracious enough to grant McBride a number of interviews, and supply him with information (such as his military records), while McBride (no doubt acting as servile and ingratiating as possible) knew full well that he intended to do a vicious hatchet job on him the second he could no longer defend himself.

Watch the films, read "The Name Above the Title," and don't bother with this book

Rating:
Summary: I loved this book! It was detailed, original and fascinating
Review: This is an outstanding book for a fan of Frank Capra, but it cannot possibly be definitive. Mr. McBride has devoted his energies to refuting Mr. Capra's autobiography, not to illuminating his work. The book reads like a grudge in passages. Many illuminative paragraphs end, unfortunately, in statements that reflect negatively on Mr. Capra, for no other purpose than to degrade his achievement or importance. Also, Mr. McBride neglects the technical achievement of Mr. Capra in his works. However, in spite of his spiteful coverage of the many facts he has unearthed, Mr. McBride has performed a service to future biographers of Mr. Capra. I do not think that Mr. McBride has successfully united the elements of Mr. Capra's character into a distinct, recognizable person. And in spite of his complexity, Mr. Capra must have been one! A future biography will take advantage of Mr. McBride's excellent research and will analyze Mr. Capra's character and achievement more authoritatively. The one thing that Mr. McBride fails to note specifically, is that Mr. Capra made unquestionably the greatest "American" film of history to date, namely "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." He also failed to notice that this drama features the single most decisive female character of literary history (notwithstanding Lady MacBeth). In spite of my disappoitment with Mr. McBride's treatment, I appreciate his efforts, and reservedly recommend his book to Mr. Capra's fans. Let the next book about Frank Capra be even better!

Rating:
Summary: A Biography from a Prosecuting Attorney
Review: This was a disappointment. I don't like everything that Capra made ("Platinum Blonde" and "You Can't Take It With You" do nothing for me)but this book proved too much to take. It reads like a legal brief against Capra by a prosecuting attorney. Every action Capra undertakes is wrong. Every success Capra enjoys is really the work of someone else.

Shortly after reading "Catastrophe of Success," I read "Christmas in July" by Diane Jacobs, a biography of Preston Sturges. It was the difference between night and day. Jacobs seemed to enjoy her subject, and while she noted Sturges' personal failings, she didn't dwell on them or harp on them. Instead she focused on the films and why they worked (or didn't). If only McBride had done the same.

Rating:
Summary: A Biography from a Prosecuting Attorney
Review: This was a disappointment. I don't like everything that Capra made ("Platinum Blonde" and "You Can't Take It With You" do nothing for me)but this book proved too much to take. It reads like a legal brief against Capra by a prosecuting attorney. Every action Capra undertakes is wrong. Every success Capra enjoys is really the work of someone else.

Shortly after reading "Catastrophe of Success," I read "Christmas in July" by Diane Jacobs, a biography of Preston Sturges. It was the difference between night and day. Jacobs seemed to enjoy her subject, and while she noted Sturges' personal failings, she didn't dwell on them or harp on them. Instead she focused on the films and why they worked (or didn't). If only McBride had done the same.