Arsenic and Old Lace is director Frank Capra's spin on the classic Joseph Kesselring stage comedy, which concerns the sweet old Brewster sisters (Josephine Hull, Jean Adair), beloved in their genteel Brooklyn neighborhood for their many charitable acts. One charity which the ladies don't advertise is their ongoing effort to permit lonely bachelors ...
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's whimsical Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play You Can't Take It With You was transformed into a paean to populism by director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin. This is the story of the zany Sycamore household, presided over by Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), a former businessman who has turned his ...
Frank Capra's classic comedy-drama established James Stewart as a lead actor in one of his finest (and most archetypal) roles. The film opens as a succession of reporters shout into telephones announcing the death of Senator Samuel Foley. Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), the state's senior senator, puts in a call to Governor Hubert "Happy" ...
It took British author James Hilton six weeks to write his visionary novel Lost Horizon. It took director Frank Capra two years-and half of his home studio Columbia's annual budget-to bring it to the screen. After a lengthy preamble, inviting audiences to imagine their own ideas of Utopia, the film opens on a chaotic scene at a Chinese airfield. ...
Director Frank Capra's last feature film, Pocketful of Miracles is a Technicolor remake of his 1933 film Lady for a Day. A barely recognizable Bette Davis plays Apple Annie, the besotted, unkempt, rag-clad street vendor who controls the activities of all the beggars on Broadway. Apple Annie is the pet of Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford), a tough but ...
This is director Frank Capra's classic bittersweet comedy/drama about George Bailey (James Stewart), the eternally-in-debt guiding force of a bank in the typical American small town of Bedford Falls. As the film opens, it's Christmas Eve, 1946, and George, who has long considered himself a failure, faces financial ruin and arrest and is seriously ...
Prelude to War was the first entry in the US War Department's Why We Fight series, a group of seven morale-boosing documentaries supervised by Lt. Col. Frank Capra. As brilliantly assembled as any of Capra's "populist" Hollywood films, Prelude demonstrates how the diplomatic and political blunders made in the wake of WW1 led inexorably to WW2. ...
Frank Capra's seminal screwball comedy, which won all five major Academy Awards for 1934, is still as breezy and beguiling today. Claudette Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who has married fortune-hunting aviator King Westley (Jameson Thomas), despite her father (Walter Connolly)'s objections. To keep Ellie from marrying this ...
The first of director Frank Capra's independent productions (in partnership with Robert Riskin), Meet John Doe begins with the end of reporter Ann Mitchell's (Barbara Stanwyck) job. Fired as part of a downsizing move, she ends her last column with an imaginary letter written by "John Doe." Angered at the ill treatment of America's little people, ...
The Bitter Tea of General Yen is the oddest, least characteristic talkie effort of director Frank Capra. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the intended of an American missionary (Gavin Gordon) who is sent to spread the good word in China. During a military revolution, Stanwyck and her fiance inadvertently wander into forbidden territory while trying to ...
Battle of China was number six in the Why We Fight series, a group of government-sponsored documentaries aimed at explaining World War II to the American home front. The film describes the rape of China at the hands of the Japanese warlords. Once China is enslaved, Japan uses the captured land and its facilities to overwhelm the rest of Asia. ...
A rather bleak comedy-drama from Frank Capra, Platinum Blonde basically starts where Capra's later and much more buoyant It Happened One Night (1934) ends: the marriage between a brash newspaperman and a society dame. But where the latter comedy was enhanced by the director's patented optimism, Platinum Blonde, produced at the height of the Great ...
Although the main character, Tony Manetta (Frank Sinatra), in this light comedy tends to tip the scales towards being unbelievably unrealistic, the story is pulled off because everyone else is convincing. Tony is a widower in need of a financial bailout for himself and his son, so he asks for help from his brother Mario (Edward G. Robinson), a ...
May Robson plays Apple Annie, a slatternly Broadway apple peddler. Annie has a curious setup whereby she is able to finagle other street merchants and beggars to pony up part of their weekly earnings to her--yet she never seems to spend any of the money on herself. This is because Annie has a daughter named Louise (Jean Parker), who has been ...
Anxious to remain active in the 1950s, director Frank Capra wanted to prove to Paramount Pictures that he could deliver an "A" picture on a modest budget. To that end, Capra bought the rights of his 1934 film Broadway Bill from Columbia, and remade it under the title Riding High. He then hired many of the supporting actors who'd appeared in ...
The Nazi Strike was the second of Col. Frank Capra's government-ordained "Why We Fight" series. This hard-hitting documentary artfully assembles existing stock footage to trace the rise of Adolf Hitler and his thirst for world conquest. Virtually wresting the German government from more moderate politicos, Hitler installs a dictatorship. Having ...
Here Comes the Groom was the second collaboration between director Frank Capra and star Bing Crosby. Though not as "socially relevant" as previous Capra productions, the film is a thoroughly likeable yarn about a happy-go-lucky newspaperman named Pete (Bing Crosby). In order to legally adopt a brace of war orphans, Pete must marry within a week. ...
For many years considered a "lost" Frank Capra silent, The Matinee Idol was restored in the mid-1990s to very nearly its entire 60-minute length. Johnnie Walker is cast as brash Broadway star Don Wilson, who out of boredom takes a leave of absence from his latest show and heads to the boonies. Here he stumbles across a threadbare theatrical stock ...
When baby-faced comedian Harry Langdon left Mack Sennett Studios to make features for First National, he wisely brought along the two Sennett staffers who helped make him a star: gag writer Frank Capra and director Harry Edwards. Langdon's first feature-length comedy at his new studio was Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, which not only ranks as one of Harry's ...
When a car crash ends the life of a fabulously wealthy patron of the arts, the decedent's $20,000,000 fortune is inherited by one Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) of Mandrake Falls, Vermont. Already a reasonably successful local businessman, Deeds doesn't really feel the need for anything extra in his life: he just wants enough time to practice his ...
The Battle of Britain was the fourth of the US government's Why We Fight documentaries. The film uses newsreel footage and a few re-created scenes to illustrate the courage of the British people under the bombardment of Hitler's Luftwaffe. Much is made of the fact that Britain stood alone in 1940 when it was besieged by bombs, and that the little ...
Frank Capra's only MGM film, State of the Union was adapted by Anthony Veiller and Myles Connolly from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse. Spencer Tracy plays an aircraft tycoon who is coerced into seeking the Republican Presidential nomination by predatory newspaper mogul Angela Lansbury. Campaign manager Van ...
This classic yet little-seen documentary, co-helmed by screen legends Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, uses strategic newsreel footage to chronicle one of the most famous and pivotal episodes of World War II: the beachfront mass-landing of the Allies in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
Divide and Conquer was the third of Col. Frank Capra's government-ordained Why We Fight series. Using newsreel footage and animated maps, Capra delineates Hitler's strategy in overtaking Europe. We watch as the Nazis occupy Denmark and Norway, push back the British Army, and force France into a humiliating surrender. The film ends on a hopeful ...
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