FRANKLY CAPRICIOUS

We all have our favourite films, some of us also have favourite directors: Hitchcock, perhaps, Lean, Spielberg, Ridley Scott or the Cohen Bros.

One my favourite Favourite Directors is a man who made a whole slew of my favourite pictures – the fact that many of them garnered Oscars and have gone on to be ranked among the greatest American movies ever made, suggests that my passion is one shared by many, many others. I am talking about Francesco Rosario Capra - better known as Frank Capra – who was born on this day 117 years ago – May 18, 1897.

Some people referred to his films as "Capra-corn", but those without an aversion to the use of polemic and sentiment in the cinema, see his movies as being life-enhancing reflections of the struggles, dreams and aspirations of a generation of Americans and, wider than that, millions of ordinary folk the world over.

Those films include: Platinum Blonde, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, the five-Oscar-winning It happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon, You Can't Take it With You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, Arsenic and Old Lace and, to my mind, his greatest film (though it was less than  successful when it was released in 1946) It's A Wonderful Life... 

Among the stars who populated this American Dreamworld were Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, Carey Grant, Lionel Barrymore, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur and James Stewart, seen here at the end of in one of the great scenes in cinema: Jefferson Smith's filibuster speech in congress observed by the implacable Claude Raines... 

You can discover more about Capra in this radio feature that I made for the BBC's arts programme, Kaleidoscope, in 1997, to mark the filmmaker's 100th birthday... 

Frank Capra - It's A Wonderful Life Story