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8. "The Manin the Street' e descent into the Great Depression, as he somewhat uncomfortably assumed the role of Hollywood's champion of the "common man." He shared his peasant family's thrifty habits and their instinctual distrust of banks. While making his prudent Hollywood and Malibu land investments in the late 1920s, he kept his extra money in safe-deposit boxes and hoarded at home. As a hedge against the instability of the world currency market, he converted some of his holdings into gold. After his years of struggling, he was not one to squander his savings on needless possessions. But like so many others in that era, he could not resist playing the stock market, twice losing $30,000, in 1929 and 1930. Capra had voted for Calvin Coolidge in 1924 and Herbert Hoover in 1928, confident that their probusiness policies would keep the country afloat on its wave of apparently unending prosperity. When Hoover made his ringing proclamation in his March 1929 inaugural address that "in no nation are the fruits of accomplishment more secure," Capra could see in himself the living proof of that faith in the American system. Unlike many other Americans who lost all of their investments in the market crash that October, Capra had a lucrative job and the assurance of a bright future with a prospering company. He could feel certain that his loss was only a temporary setback, and he was shortsighted enough to believe that the same was true for the country. Hollywood's prosperity encouraged his illusions. After the trauma caused by the conversion to sound, talking pictures had proven to be a bonanza for the studios and theaters. Studio profits rose to record levels in 1929, and again in 1930, at a time when more than four million people were unemployed, more than double the number before the crash. Even as the breadlines in American cities lengthened, so did the lines at movie apra's rise to fame and material success stemmed from America's 2 2 0 F R A N K C A P R A theaters. Despite the higher ticket prices charged for talkies (fifty cents to a dollar, compared with the thirty-five-cent average for the late silent pictures), eighty million Americans went to the movies each week, seeking a few hours' respite from the troubles of the darkening world outside. There were warning signs for those in Hollywood who could see them. Because of the cost of remodeling the studios and theaters for sound and the slower and more expensive production process of making talkingpictures , the number of productions had dropped from about 600 to 800 a year in the late silent era to 300 to 400 in the early 1930s. The studios cut back their ranks ruthlessly, causing labor unrest and pressure to unionize the industry. Despite their increased profits, the major studios which also owned their own theater chains (Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO) had seriously overextended their capital investment in sound equipment and real estate, saddling them with a high overhead that demanded a continued prosperity. It was not long before theater attendance fell sharply, driving them to the brink of bankruptcy. Columbia expanded its operations by establishing its first national distribution organization in 1929, but it would fare better than most of the majors in the Depression because it did not own theaters, thanks to the foresight of Joe Brandt, who had talked his partners out of expanding into exhibition. But all that seemed remote to Frank Capra in early 1930, when his name was being listed on theater marquees for the first time with Ladies of Leisure, and he was about to embark on a picture called Rain or Shine. Rain orShine was based on a 1928 hit Broadway musical (book by James Gleason and Maurice Marks), starring comedian Joe Cook as Smiley Johnson, a circus manager who keeps his little show together through good times and bad. In retrospect, it is impossible not to read the film version of Rain or Shine as an allegory of the Depression, despite its seemingly frivolous subject matter. Written for the screen by Jo Swerling and Dorothy Howell and stripped of its songs by Capra, Rain orShine gives mixed political signals, probably because of the clash of Capra's fundamentally conservative attitudes with more liberal ideas that were in the air at the time. The precarious financial state of the circus echoes the state of the country, and Cook...

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