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17 The Capra Miracle Ladies฀of฀Leisure,฀The฀Miracle฀Woman,฀Forbidden,฀ The฀Bitter฀Tea฀of฀General฀Yen,฀Meet฀John฀Doe Judging by Joseph McBride’s surely definitive biography of the director , Frank Capra lied about a lot of things, appropriating credit whenever he could, but he could also be brutally frank about others and about himself. There’s something of Elia Kazan about him—but even messier, less calculating. An Italian immigrant, Capra was filled with hate and resentment, and these served as fuel for his work and as a link to Stanwyck , whose own hatred was the slow burning, quietly bitter kind. Capra was more open about most of his feelings. “Mr. Capra was not afraid to show emotion,” she said. “He understood it.” And so did she. Together, they made five films that are devoted to the most extreme expression of emotion, which acts as a fire of purification on both threadbare plots and audience expectations. Ladies฀of฀Leisure was based on a play by Milton Herbert Gropper called Ladies฀of฀the฀Evening, which had been produced by David Belasco, and Capra himself did a first draft of the film script. Jo Swerling, a newspaperman and committed leftist, nervily told him that his adaptation was bad, and so Capra nervily told Swerling to do his own version of the material . “It’s the old Camille story, but it needs a new twist,” said Swerling, who polished off his draft quickly. Shooting started eleven days after Swerling turned in this draft, on June 14, 1930. Stanwyck is still billed under the title, and Capra is billed as “Frank R. Capra” (he thought the initial might give him an aura of respectability ). Joseph Walker’s camera pans up a tall skyscraper and into the middle of an arty sort of party, where Bill Standish (Lowell Sherman), a soused dauber, is painting a girl’s bare back. It’s clear that we’re a world away from the “whoopee” boat of The฀Locked฀Door. It’s 1930 now, and the t H e C a p r a m i r a C l e 18 Depression is on, seeming to depress most of the revelers, including the party’s host, Jerry (Ralph Graves), who complains of a headache. Jerry takes off in his car and gets a flat tire; from across a lake, he sees a girl in a boat hitting the shoreline. The lady of the lake is Stanwyck’s Kay Arnold, a gum-chewing, selfdescribed “party girl,” with mascara running down her face. Talking to Jerry, Kay flashes an intensely angry look at him. She’s been on a boat filled with men; she’s a hooker, but it seems like something happened on this boat that has thrown her for a loop. Kay, like Stanwyck, is a wearer of masks, a person who hides her feelings, so she immediately tries to fall into a practiced wisecracker persona with Jerry in order to blot out that questioning look of rage and contempt she couldn’t help but lay on him. A party girl, that’s her racket, see? She asks if Jerry “totes a flask,” and he says no. But he wants to paint her portrait, and she accepts in a “why not?” sort of spirit. We then see Kay with her roommate Dot (Marie Prevost), a pleasingly plump fellow prostie in a feather-boaed negligee. Kay has been sitting for Jerry, and she marvels that he hasn’t tried to make a pass at her. We dissolve from a shot of Kay pouring coffee to a shot of Jerry’s dowager mother (Nance O’Neil) pouring tea. Jerry’s father is a railroad magnate, a classic Capra capitalist ogre. Even though the director himself was a right-wing Republican who hated Roosevelt, he allowed screenwriters like Swerling and Robert Riskin to grace his movies with left-wing sentiment because it was fashionable during the thirties and guaranteed that most critics would take him seriously. Jerry wants his model Kay to look up at the ceiling and pretend to see stars, but sensible, low-class, uneducated Stanwyck/Kay only sees the ceiling. Capra himself wants to purify his leading actress and present her to us in an unvarnished state, and he includes a close-up of Jerry stripping off Kay’s false eyelashes. This act has the effect of making Stanwyck ’s small eyes seem even tinier; Capra wants us to look at this girl closely, intently, to...

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