Frank Capra
Born May 18, 1897
Bisacquino, Sicily
Died September 3, 1991
La Quinta, California
Film director
"As with many other workers in the Hollywood feature film industry, Capra devoted...
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Capra, Frank (1897-1991)
Although he is one of the most successful and popular directors of all time, Frank Capra is seldom mentioned as one of Hollywood's great film auteurs. During his peak...
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Filmmaker Frank Capra (1897-1991) was 1930s Hollywood's top director, creating several immensely popular movies that captured the mood of the Depression-era United States and earning more Academy Awar...
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Director, writer, and producer Frank Capra, who made over fifty movies in a career spanning almost four decades, is best remembered for showcasing the virtues of ordinary people in sentimental human c...
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Critical Essay by Alexander Bakshy
A superior picture, if only by virtue of its two magnificent scenes of evangelistic mummery in a tabernacle, is "The Miracle Woman"…. Here, at l...
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Critical Essay by William S. Pechter
The unique Capra genre has been defined by Richard Griffith, the film historian, as the "fantasy of goodwill," and he has also described its archetyp...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Bergman
Capra's erratic background was reflected in his best films. The seemingly wide-eyed immigrant boy who travelled the traditional path to success in college (carr...
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Critical Essay by Jeffrey Richards
The Pursuit of Happiness is, perhaps, more than any other, the central theme in Capra's work. Happiness is to be found in peace, contentment, enjoyment of lif...
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Critical Essay by FranÇois Truffaut
Capra is the last survivor of that great quartet of American comedy; Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges. An Italian, born in Palermo, he brough...
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Critical Essay by Donald C. Willis
I interpret [the slump of Capra's films in the later thirties] as Capra's initially faltering attempt to assimilate an acute, new, altruistic impulse (...
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Critical Essay by Leland A. Poague
As a general rule, comedy attends to and reflects upon human desires for love, life, and fertility. Comic plots emphasize sequences of reversal and recovery that in ...
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Critical Essay by John Raeburn
American Madness, [Capra's] film about an idealistic banker, is one of the finest American movies to emerge from the early years of the Depression. Very little in...
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Critical Essay by John Tibbetts
The Miracle Woman is perhaps the first American commercial feature film to deal intelligently with the less savory aspects of popular evangelism, showing it as a secula...
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