Frank Capra 1930s portrait by William A. Fraker. (Columbia Pictures)
Capra (far right) with his first love, Isabelle Daniels (second from left) on a jaunt in Santa Monica when he was working on the Screen Snapshots series in 1920. (Isabelle Daniels Griffis)
Joseph Walker, cinematographer on twenty Capra films, working with the director in the early 1930s. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/Columbia Pictures)
Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in the “Walls of Jericho” scene from It Happened One Night, the 1934 romantic comedy that won Capra his first Oscar as best director. (Columbia Pictures)
Capra rehearsing You Can’t Take It With You (1938) with his favorite actress, Jean Arthur, and Lionel Barrymore. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/Columbia Pictures)
Capra preparing a scene on the U.S. Senate set for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/Columbia Pictures)
“Dad always used to say the only causes worth fighting for were the lost causes” — James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. (Columbia Pictures)
Capra’s most important screenwriter, Robert Riskin, with the director while making Meet John Doe (1941). (USC Cinema-Television Library and Archives of Performing Arts [Fay Wray Collection]/Warner Bros.)
Capra looking pensive while serving as a U.S. Army film propagandist in World War II. (UCLA Special Collections/Los Angeles Daily News)
U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who recruited Capra to make World War II morale films, awards him the Distinguished Service Medal in June 1945. (National Archives/U.S. Army)
Capra’s favorite actor, James Stewart, with the director during the making of their third film together, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). (Marc Wanamaker-Bison Archives/Liberty Films/RKO)
James Stewart as the suicidal George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, with Larry Simms, Jimmy Hawkins, Donna Reed, and Carol Coomes. (Liberty Films/RKO)
“Subj considered possibly subversive” — a 1950 document from the U.S. Army Intelligence file on Capra during the postwar Red Scare. (U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command)
Capra in 1961, directing his last feature, Pocketful of Miracles. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/United Artists)
Capra in old age, enjoying the adulation of new young audiences but harboring secret doubts and guilt. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Capra’s initial response (1951) to the delay in his security clearance for the classified Defense Department/California Institute of Technology think tank Project VISTA, in which he cited his own informing to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a way of demonstrating his loyalty to his adopted country. (U.S. Department of Defense)
Joseph McBride with Frank Capra in 1985, at a Columbia Pictures tribute to Capra in West Hollywood, California. (Columbia Pictures)
Capra portrait, 1941. (Warner Bros.)
Cover of the 1992 biography Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success by Joseph McBride (University Press of Mississippi, 2011 edition)
Cover of Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra by Joseph McBride (Hightower Press, Berkeley, 2019)
