Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
by Joseph McBride
Simon & Schuster, New York, and Faber and Faber, London, 1992; revised edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2000; University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2011.
Frank Capra’s beloved films are idealistic, patriotic, full of human comedy, and often sentimental — so much so that skeptics have called them “Capracorn.”
Moviegoers frequently assume that the director’s life resembled his classic films, such as It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, or It’s a Wonderful Life: A man of the people faces tremendous odds and, by doing the right thing, triumphs. But as Joseph McBride reveals in this meticulously researched, definitive biography, the reality was far more complex, a true American tragedy.
An immigrant from Sicily, Capra came to America with his family as a child and struggled against great odds to achieve an education and find success as a Hollywood director. But when the post-World War II Red Scare caused Capra and his work to be considered possibly “subversive,” because of its elements of social criticism during the Depression era and his associations with leftwing writers, he panicked and betrayed his ideals. Using U.S. government documents declassified for this book and drawing on extensive interviews with Capra and many others, McBride chronicles not only Capra’s remarkable rise and great artistic achievement but also his creative and personal downfall.
COMMENTS ON FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS
“Easily the best — certainly the most realistic — biography of a film director in the age of the Auteur, to which this is a counterbalance.”
Gore Vidal
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Masterly, comprehensive and frequently surprising biography.”
Barry Gewen
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
“Formidable — and resolutely iconoclastic — life of the director, one that wears its ample research so lightly that its 700-odd pages are a constant pleasure to read.”
Dennis Drabelle
LOS ANGELES TIMES
“A major book . . . Superbly researched and almost continually surprising.”
Gavin Lambert
BOSTON GLOBE
“Revelatory and important biography . . . Frank Capra is a milestone in its quiet but firm rejection of the legend in favor of facts . . . McBride has delivered the evidence through magnificent and resourceful research.”
David Thomson
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“Astounding new biography . . . Like wheat, Capra’s soul is sifted and the chaff cast away.”
Tim Appelo
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“This is more than just another biography of a movie director. It paints a lively picture of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and the horrors of the anti-Communist ‘witch hunt’ and blacklist that followed. But it remains above all the dramatic story of one of the most interesting characters ever to emerge in Hollywood.”
Philip Dunne
LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
“Fascinating . . . McBride has achieved a rarity: a truly definitive and meaningful book about a filmmaker. His is a model of lively, engaged scholarship — and a terrific read.”
Kirk Honeycutt
THE NEW REPUBLIC
“McBride’s book . . . takes on an importance that is unique for this kind of biography. It becomes essential to a true knowledge of the films by giving us truth about the man.”
Stanley Kauffmann
USA TODAY
“Meticulously researched portrait of an exceptionally complex man . . . setting the record straight.”
Tom Wiener
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“A knockout read.”
Donald Newlove
LOS ANGELES READER and BOSTON PHOENIX
“Calling Joseph McBride’s brilliant new biography of Frank Capra ‘comprehensive’ is like describing the Grand Canyon as ‘big’ . . . This splendid volume is an important and long-overdue examination of the life and times of a man who defined his life and times, and those of a nation.”
Steven Kane
KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Superb in every way.”
SILENT ERA WEBSITE
“While the book may crumble our iconic preconceptions of who Frank Capra was, it does a greater justice to him in its documenting the life of a complex man, who struggled for respect from his peers and family, but never received it on his own terms or to his own satisfaction. . . . The reader is likely to be left with a compassionately balanced understanding of what was both good and bad about Frank Capra as a human being and artist, and also a great appreciation of the mammoth work turned in by McBride.”
Carl Bennett
“Joseph McBride has cleared away all the Kris Kringle cobwebs from the illustrious life and career of Frank Capra. The most authoritative study of the director to date reveals Capra the troubled, complex, ultimately controversial player in Hollywood’s classic power struggle and Faustian ordeals. This book is chock full of facts and figures and marvelous insight.”
Andrew Sarris, author of The American Cinema
“Over the past several years, in connection with my writing, I’ve read biographies by the dozen, but none that I can recall did more than acquaint me with the story of a life. Yours made me feel that I was witnessing a tragedy of classic proportions, a tragedy made inevitable by reason of Capra’s very nature. I’d known little of him beforehand, and it was your writing that made me perceive a man of great ability brought down by his innate fatal flaws. It wasn’t the times, it wasn’t the stars, it wasn’t the ways of the world — it was Capra himself that was Capra’s undoing, and relentlessly and truly you chronicled his fall.
“I say truly because I mean truly. I don’t think you rejoiced in the fall; I think you deplored it. I think you deeply wished that there could’ve been a better second half to Capra’s life, but knowing that it was otherwise, you chronicled it with sadness but with a clear eye. In doing so, you accomplished a wonder: you made me pity a man much of whose character I despised. That’s art, Joe, and I congratulate you. It’s a first-rate book, and I hope it’s widely read.”
John Sanford, historian, novelist, and Capra screenwriter