Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

17. Liberty

17. Liberty "9«Xt's dering whether you've gone rusty or lost touch," Capra admitted to Tom Pryor of The New York Times in November 1945. "I keep telling myself how wonderful it would be just to sneak out somewhere and make a couple of quickie Westerns first—just to get the feel of things again." The postwar security he craved could be found only under studio contract, but Capra found it necessary to pretend otherwise. In an article he wrote for the Times six months later, Capra insisted that he was "willing to gamble [his] hard-earned savings to gain independence" and that it was his craving for "individuality" which led to his "revolutionary" act of founding an independent production company, Liberty Films, Inc., in partnership with William Wyler, George Stevens, and Sam Briskin (its trademark the tolling Liberty Bell). The unheroic truth, though, was that after his creative and financial disappointment in his earlier attempt at independence with Meet John Doe, after his run for cover with Arsenic and Old Lace, and after years of following orders in the Army, Capra was afraid to take the risks of going independent again and did so only out of necessity , in a state of anxiety and self-doubt. While weighing his future in the last months of his Army service, Capra was hoping to pick up where he had left off in Hollywood when Pearl Harbor interrupted his career. Just as he was doing then, he was looking for a safe haven as a studio contract director, preferably with a long-term deal. But when Sam Briskin tested the waters for Colonel Capra around Hollywood, the news was not good: unlike in 1941, studio offers were not forthcoming. Like it or not, going independent—with seed money from his and his partners' own pockets and with production financing for his first postwar film, It's a Wonderful Life, coming largely from Bank of America loans secured by the negative of the picture—was his only postwar option. t's frightening to go back to Hollywood after four years, won- 5 0 4 F R A N K C A P R A His public pose of determined optimism made a striking contrast to his private fears. Capra's 1946 analysis of the industry shortsightedly heralded the rise of independent companies as an antidote to studio "mass production " (most of the filmmakers he mentioned would soon be back in the studio folds) and welcomed the federal government's outlawing of blockbooking , a reform he had long been advocating, as a boon to independents, since films now had to be "sold individually, standing on their own merits ." But in retrospect Capra acknowledged that what he was trumpeting was the beginning of the end of the Hollywood which had enabled him to thrive before the war—a process that culminated in the 1948 consent decree the Justice Department forced the major studios to sign, cutting loose their theaters and depriving them of a guaranteed outlet for their productions. These changes, along with the simultaneous advent of television , effectively destroyed the studio system. JimmyStewart, who starred as George Bailey in Wonderful Life, said in 1988 that he had "often wondered" about Capra's postwar decline, and concluded that "Frank had this wonderful relationship with Harry Cohn, and I think the change in the studio system, the big studios going out of style, had a very profound effect on Frank." Capra blamed his postwar problems on the industry's notoriously short memory—to many after the war, he recalled, he was "Frank who?"—and on the general lowering of production budgets and standards of quality during the wartime box-office boom, which, coupled with cost increases due to postwar inflation and labor militancy, threatened to make his "one man, one film" approach obsolete. There were elements of truth in those explanations, but they also were alibis for his personal failure to adapt to changing conditions and his inability to function independently. Unlike Stevens, Wyler, and Stewart, Capra had experienced the war largely from a distance, but Paul Horgan felt that "Capra's war experience changed his whole vision of the cinema—during the war he dealt with historical material in a highly persuasive and percussive way, but at the expense of his concentration on fictional film later." "Once he got into this government stuff, it gave him a new sense of values, and then he was dead," said screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter, who worked...