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11. "A sense of responsibility' omething to say" was proving elusive. Before his illness, Capra had been thinking of making a musical. His thoughts went to the opera star Grace Moore, a surprise success in Columbia 's 1934 One Night of Love. After the visit from the little man, however, such a project may have seemed too fluffy for "The World's Foremost Director." The first project announced for Capra when he made his abortive return to the studio in February 1935was an adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's play Valley Forge. The inspirational saga of George Washington's refusal to surrender to the snow and the Redcoats appealed to Capra's newfound obsession with courage and to his budding interest in patriotic Americana. He claimed he dropped the project because he felt uncomfortable about doing a period piece, but commercial considerations probably were the prevailing factor.* Around this time he also considered making films of Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina. "I have always hankered to make classics as films or do more ambitious productions but have usually ended up doing a comedy," he said when he tried to revive the Anna Karenina project in 1962 with Sophia Loren. A more fitting excursion into high culture was Capra's attempt in July 1935to obtain the film rights to Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci. The tragicomedy of the circus clown who kills his un- *Capra proposed it again in thefall of1938, with Gary Cooper as Washington, but Cohn vetoed it as inappropriate to make at a time when Hitler's shadow wasfalling over England. In 1971 Capra and John Ford tried to obtain the film rights from Columbia, intending to codirect it (Capra doing the exteriors and the ailing Ford the interiors) to benefit the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, with John Wayne or George C. Scott as Washington. Columbia, however, was preparing to make what Capra called "that awful goddamn thing, that musical about the Revolutionary War[\776]," and refused topart with the Anderson play for fear of competition. Four years later, Columbia made Valley Forge as a moviefor television. "S 3 2 8 F R A N K C A P R A faithful wife may have struck an emotional chord in the Italian director, with its echo of his violent anguish over his first wife's supposed infidelity. As late as 1938 he was still talking about making it. The story Capra was most eager to film, however, was James Hilton's mystical novel Lost Horizon, first published in English in 1933. Capra said he read it that fall while making It Happened One Night, and that his interest in Hilton's fantasy had been roused by Alexander Woollcott, whose radio interview helped make it a best-seller in the United States. But Riskin explained it differently: "Every studio in town had turned it down. I had read it in London, and I talked it over with Frank on getting back here. He read it and liked it. We mentioned it to Cohn, sure that after reading it he'd say we were crazy. But he surprised us by agreeing. So we went to work [in March 1935, after Valley Forge was dropped]." Hilton's appealing but rather sophomoric vision of Shangri-La, an escapist paradise in which the problems of the real world are blandly dismissed with advice to "be gentle and patient," struck Capra as the perfect vehicle for the kind of philosophical statement he so earnestly yearned to make. "With men and women the world over groping for a solution to the turmoil and terror in their lives," he wrote while making the film in 1936, "I saw in the book one of the most important pieces of literature in the last decade. The story had bigness. It held a mirror up to the thoughts of every human being on earth. It held something of greatness. The fact that it did not conform to Hollywood formulas interested me even more." But Ronald Colman, the ideal choice for the lead role of the British diplomat Conway, was unavailable until the following year, so on June 4, 1935, Capra decided to wait for Colman and began looking for another picture. By July 1 he had found it. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town began as an American Magazine serial, "Opera Hat," by Clarence Budington Kelland.* There was nothing remotely of what Capra called "bigness" about Kelland's tediously protracted murder mystery. But Riskin and Capra saw...

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