The unique Capra genre has been defined by Richard Griffith, the film historian, as the "fantasy of goodwill," and he has also described its archetypical pattern. "In each film, a messianic innocent, not unlike the classic simpletons of literature … pits himself against the forces of entrenched greed. His inexperience defeats him strategically, but his gallant integrity in the face of temptation calls forth the goodwill of the 'little people,' and through their comb...

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 turn reflect mythological sequences of death and rebirth…. Elements of the miraculous, the wonderful, and the fantastic are found in all comedies. Shakespeare's comedies abound with fantastic characters and situations….

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 Capra's early career as a director suggested he was capable of creating a film as sharp in its social observation and as ambitious in its analysis of American values as this melodrama about robbery, murder, a bank panic, and the conflict between social responsibility and greed. (p. 57) There is a good deal of "business"...

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 secularized merchandising of life and hope at the hands of ruthless opportunists…. [The] film carries another implication more specifically pertinent to its immediate cultural and social context: Fallon's message of salvation on earth carries a special significance for the disadvantaged of Depression America. Her adherents, which incl...

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 (which he accounts for, somewhat mystically, in his book) into his highly-refined filmmaking technique. (p. 2) If Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and You Can't Take It With You happened to become box-office hits, it's almost entirely due to Capra's technical, sugar-coating skills, to his gift for entertaining, to the fac...

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 (carrying trays in the commons, pen and slide rule concealed beneath the white jacket) was obviously one with faith in the classic American route to opportunity and fulfillment. But the Capra who hustled farmers and sold coupons to their wives, the Capra who turned from chemical engineering to the glib sales pitch and "I'm from Hollyw...

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 life, above all, freedom from the rat race, the individual asserting himself to escape from the oppressive hand of the forces of Organization. This idea was expressed in abstract terms in Lost Horizon …, a film dismissed by almost all influential film critics as pretentious and absurd…. In fact, it is one of the most dazzling pieces o...

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 brought to Hollywood the secrets of the commedia dell'arte. He was a navigator who knew how to steer his characters into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra's comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed ...

A superior picture, if only by virtue of its two magnificent scenes of evangelistic mummery in a tabernacle, is "The Miracle Woman"…. Here, at least, is some excellent and genuine material of life, striking in its unfamiliarity and effectively presented. The director of the film, Frank Capra, can be congratulated on the skilful handling of these scenes; and there is also merit in the story in so far as it attempts to expose the fakery that goes under the name of evangelism. Its romantic...