Bonus Corn: Movements and Moments of Capracorn Kindness
A Summation of Corn
My dear lovely readers,
This week has been a bit too jam packed with personal and professional engagements, so I ran out of time to watch a film let alone write the review. So, instead, I wanted to celebrate Capra’s upcoming birthday by re-sharing the last five posts in one place and reiterating why I think he is such an important filmmaker not only for his own time but for ours as well (and hopefully for Americans in a distant future living in a far stronger moral moment than we do now).
Capra’s 128th birthday is on May 18th (which just so happens to also be my 1st wedding anniversary (truly, it was an accident (a very apt accident)). In 1903, Frankie Caps came to America from Sicily as a sweet little 5-year-old, packed into a steerage compartment of a ship with his family, all of them seeking a life of opportunity. Traveling through Ellis Island, the Capras voyaged across the country and settled in what Capra called the Italian ghetto of Los Angeles. He worked odd jobs from delivering papers at age 8 to busking with his banjo as a late teen to waiting tables and working in the campus laundries by night at the California Institute of Technology where he studied chemical engineering by day. He served in the US military teaching mathematics for the final year of World War I, and he became a naturalized citizen in 1920. He studied, and he grew, and he observed, and he sold books, and he battled unemployment and homelessness and depression. He was a person, a curious, smart, impassioned person. And then he found film.
Capra worked in so many different roles in the film industry starting from the bottom and building his technical skills. He was a film cutter, a gag writer, a camera assistant, a property man, an assistant director, and eventually he worked his way up to director and producer and independent studio founder making films that flowed with his curiosity and smarts and passion. Was he incredibly successful at all of these? No. Did he work his ass off to try to “make it” in Hollywood? You bet your sweet Caps he did.
To make this point even more obvious, I bring all of this up to emphasize how thoroughly American Frank Capra was. He embodies such a classic immigrant story: a person who came to America with his family to have a better life, who then worked and worked and worked tirelessly to realize the American Dream he was promised. But, in so doing, Frank Capra had the uniquely early 20th century American opportunity to be an architect of both the growing cultural language of the motion picture and its articulation of that American promise on screen. And boy did he articulate.
In the first post of this series, I recounted my own personal journey with the concept of American patriotism, a realization that I know is privileged. I seldom challenged what it meant to be an American, both by design and by rebellion. I criticized it negatively without ever giving critical thought to the potential beauty the “American promise” held, something Capra was always fully aware of as an immigrant whose family endured miserable conditions and poverty to offer him a better life. The American promise was not a given to Capra; he knew that the promise is not an inevitability but a goal. It took me a long time to understand that “patriotism” is a thing you do actively every day, and it took Capra to help me understand how you do that.
In the second post, I reviewed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) as a perfect populist film. The hallmarks of populist cinema, the genre most dominated by Capra, uphold the American promise by embracing the most patriotic of actions: criticizing the US government and its citizens. If we are to be a nation of lofty goals and dreams, we must be able to acknowledge when we are off course from reaching them, and Mr. Smith is a shining example of how Capra puts that patriotic theory to film.
In the third post, I analyzed Meet John Doe (1941) as a film about propaganda and a piece of propaganda itself. Capra presents this story of a man hired as a face of a media scheme that ultimately turns into a populist movement, a sort of meta hope of his that his films might encourage American citizens to be kinder to one another. A movement of kindness, or even a moment, holds the American promise within it, and the more we can practice them, the closer the dream comes to reality.
In the fourth, I took a Queer approach to Mr. Smith Goes to Town (1934) in which a man comes into the contemporary equivalent of half a billion dollars during the Great Depression and is deemed insane for using it to help impoverished farmers. The lawyers in the film list his eccentricities as certifiable simply because he is unlike them and generous. His differences and quirks are seen as not only punishable but also reasons to have him institutionalized, locked away from society forever to prevent him from helping people when he has the means to do so. Capra celebrates Mr. Smith’s oddities and encourages us to too, to lift up the brave creatives in society who make life just a little more beautiful and a little more human when our leaders and lawyers would rather we forget our humanity altogether.
In the fifth and final post, I took a comparative approach to the texts of American Madness (1932) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) that exemplified that humanity at the heart of two rare bankers. In each of these films, Capra uses that populist approach to argue that capitalism doesn’t have to be senselessly cruel all the time always, so long as we remember why we have organized resources in the first place. If you start exploiting the systems that organize the resources to keep them from the people who need them most while stifling competition and tossing out the values we profess as Americans, then capitalism 100% does not work and needs to be replaced. But Capra argues for a system that balances social policy in a capitalist economy in a way that seeks to uphold those very values.
And across all of these posts, I argue that they are corny as hell and, and this is crucial, that’s why we have to watch them now. We must be reminded that we have to work our asses off to have the country we want. We have to be engaged, active, eager citizens to protect each other from the exploitation and atrocities that can occur when we forget our humanity. We have to fight, and Capra can teach us why we do so (and I’m not just talking about his Why We Fight series of films made for the US military in WWII).
Capra had a truly inspiring American immigrant story, and because of those formative experiences working endlessly to take advantage of the opportunities his family desperately wanted for him, he was steadfastly devoted to loving this country in such a profound way as to call it out on its bullshit when it was harming its citizens. His story and the stories he put to film are timeless glimpses of critical Americana that we need so badly to be reminded of right now.
For Capra’s birthday this year, I urge you to watch one (or many) of his films, read a review or critical essay, share them with loved ones, and actively consider how to be a better person every day either by joining a movement of kindness or creating a moment of it every day.