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 Award nominations than any of his contemporaries. "Capraco...

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 comedies, films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, w...

The New York Times expands on yesterday's Washington Post story about Michael Bloomberg's January 7 meeting in Oklahoma by reporting that he is putting in place a "turnkey" presidential campaign in case he decides to run. Slate says that story is “bizarrely sequestered in the...

Frank Capra Jr., a producer who helped build a major television and movie studio and whose father directed the Christmas classic "It's A Wonderful Life," has died. He was 73.Capra Jr. died Wednesday night at a hospital in Philadelphia, said Bill Vassar, the executive vice...

Today is Wednesday, Dec. 20, the 354th day of 2006. There are 11 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Dec. 20, 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was completed as ownership of the territory was formally transferred from France to the United States during ceremonies...

Film director Bob Clark, best known for the beloved holiday classic "A Christmas Story," was killed along with his son in a head-on crash with an alleged drunken driver on Pacific Coast Highway, the filmmaker's assistant and police said. He was 67.Clark and son Ariel...

One important function of good art or entertainment is to unite and illuminate the heart and the mind, to cause each to learn from, and to enhance, the experience of the other. Bad art and entertainment misinform and disunite them. Much too often ["It's a Wonderful Life"] appeals to the heart at the expense of the mind; at other times it urgently demands of the heart that it treat with contempt the mind's efforts to keep its integrity; at still other times the heart is simply use...

The most overtly presented of the … structural oppositions [in It's a Wonderful Life] is that between the two faces of Capitalism, benign and malignant: on the one hand, the Baileys (father and son) and their Building and Loan Company, its business practice based on a sense of human needs and a belief in human goodness; on the other, Potter …, described explicitly as a spider, motivated by greed, egotism and miserliness, with no faith in human nature. Potter belongs to a very deeply roo...

Essay shows how a man finds claritity in his life, through the financial stress, withe the help of his guardian angel in the classic movie "It's a Wonderful Life."