Frank Capra - film director

Giant of American cinema from humble roots in Sicily

The huge popularity of Frank Capra's films was
to influence generations of movie-makers 

The film director Frank Capra, one of the most celebrated figures of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, was born on this day in 1897 in Bisacquino, a hilltop village about 80km (50 miles) south of the Sicilian capital of Palermo.

Capra, whose films often championed the cause of society’s underdogs in the face of greedy, powerful elites, were hugely popular with audiences and critics in the 1930s, their stories seen as personifying the American Dream.

He won the Oscar for Best Director three times, starting with his breakthrough movie It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, followed by Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can’t Take it With You (1938).

While initially less well received by the critics and filmgoers, his 1946 tearjerker It’s A Wonderful Life, which starred James Stewart, has come to be regarded as one of the most heartwarming Christmas films of all time.

Yet Capra’s story started in the most humble beginnings in Bisacquino, a town 744m (2,441ft) above sea level at the foot of Monte Triona in the rugged Sicani Mountains, less than 20km (12 miles) from Corleone, which would become a notorious Mafia stronghold.

Born Francesco Rosario Capra, he was the youngest of seven children of Salvatore Capra, a fruit grower, and his wife, Rosaria.  Salvatore struggled to make much money and Francesco had to help on the farm even as a small child.

As the 20th century dawned, in common with many Sicilians, Salvatore joined the long procession of disillusioned Italians, mainly from the south, who were tempted to emigrate to the United States, often at huge personal cost as their desperation was exploited by criminals and fraudsters.

In 1903, the family boarded a boat to Naples, where they crammed into the steerage compartment of the SS Germania, a steamship built in France that had up to 60 comfortable cabins but was fitted out mainly to house large numbers of emigrants in the lower decks, which could accommodate up to 1,400 passengers, albeit in dreadful conditions.

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in a scene from It 
Happened One Night, which won Capra his first Oscar

The Capra family left Naples for the 13-14 day passage to New York on May 10, which meant that the future film director turned six about halfway through the journey. 

Frank Capra wrote about the experience later in life. “You're all together - you have no privacy.  Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off. There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you could ever be.”

Yet he recalled his father’s excitement at seeing the Statue of Liberty, describing the statue’s upheld torch as “the greatest light since the Star of Bethlehem”.

From New York, the Capra family travelled by train to Los Angeles, where they settled in an Italian community in the East Side in what is now the Lincoln Heights area. Salvatore found work as a fruit picker.

 It's A Wonderful Life became
one of Capra's best-loved films 

The young Francesco’s route into the film industry that would define his life was a long and difficult one. Throughout his school and college years, he simultaneously worked in low-paid jobs to help the family, sometimes as a street-corner newspaper boy, or playing music in bars. Some backstage theatre work at this time may have sparked his interest in storytelling.

National service followed, with Capra deployed teaching maths at a military base in San Francisco. After his father died in 1916, Capra contracted Spanish Flu but fortunately survived what became a deadly pandemic. Discharged, he became an American citizen in 1920, taking the name Frank Russell Capra.

After struggling to find work, he made friends with an actor, with whose help he persuaded a small studio in San Francisco to allow him to direct a short film. Impressed enough, the studio took him on and his movie career began.

Showing a talent for comedy, Capra became a gag writer for the producer and director Hal Roach and then joined Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company, where he directed silent comedian Harry Langdon in The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927). 

He and Langdon parted ways over a difference of opinion, but that led to what would be Capra’s big break, his move to Columbia Pictures.

It Happened One Night, a story about the unlikely relationship between a society heiress and a recently unemployed newspaper reporter who meet on a Greyhound bus from Florida to New York, brought him staggering success. It was the first of only three films in history to win all five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Frank Capra, pictured in 1982, reflects on his
career during a television interview

In addition to his other Oscar winners, Capra made Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) while at the peak of his powers, and won another Oscar in 1943 for Prelude to War, part of a documentary series commissioned by the Office of War Information to educate American troops, in the face of relentless Nazi propaganda and disinformation, about the necessity of combating the Axis powers during World War II.

Many years after he retired from film-making - he shot his last movie in 1964 - Capra returned to Bisacquino, aged nearly 80, to see again the house where his mother had lived. 

The visit initially was meant to be secret, largely because Capra felt uncomfortable about the fact that many of his childhood friends and some family members became involved with the Mafia. There was reportedly resentment within local Mafia circles that none of the Capra fortune had found its way back to the village.

One account of the visit claimed that, although he was happy to meet villagers, when a nephew organised a huge family lunch in his honour, Capra was advised by some members of his travelling entourage not to eat anything, fearful he could be poisoned.

Capra died at his home in La Quinta, California at the age of 94. At his peak he was regarded as one of the greatest film-makers in the world. His stories of individual courage triumphing over collective evil had an influence on future generations of writers and directors in cinema and television that still endures. 

The rooftops of Bisacquino, Capra's birthplace,
bathed in the light of a late summer sunset

Travel tip:

The habitation of the area around what is now Bisacquino goes back to the Iron Age and the Sican tribe, who were succeeded by the Greeks, the Carthaginians and the Romans. The village or small town, the population of which peaked at around 10,300 in the early 1900s and 1920s, has a strong Islamic imprint of alleys, courtyards and stone houses, a legacy of the Muslim domination of Sicily in the ninth century, although there is also Baroque architecture, of which a fine example is the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista, known locally as the Chiesa Madre (Mother Church), on Piazza Triona. The house where Capra was born is about 350m away from Piazza Triona on Via Santo Cono, and while now privately owned and no longer open to the public, it remains marked by a small sign mounted on a pole outside. The Capra family were devout Catholics and the nearby church of San Francesco di Paola was their regular place of worship. The Bisacquino Civic Museum, in Via Palmerino, dedicates a permanent section to Capra, where visitors can see original documents from his early years, including his birth certificate, as well as period photographs and newspaper articles, and testimonies from his return to the town in 1977.

Neapolitans eating pasta with their bare hands
was a regular sight in the Naples of the 1900s

Travel tip:

In 1903, when the Capra family arrived in the city to board the SS Germania at the Molo Pisacane, Naples was a bustling, vibrant port city defined by its chaotic streets and deep-rooted culinary traditions. Photographers and early film makers were drawn to its lively urban life, where story tellers and dancers entertained the public and local people ate steaming pasta with their bare hands. At the turn of the 20th century, long pasta - commonly referred to as maccheroni - was an everyday street food, sold by street vendors known as maccheronai. Because forks were uncommon among the working class, locals scooped up the steaming strands of pasta with their bare hands, lifting them high and lowering them straight into their mouths. This informal, theatrical way of eating became a celebrated spectacle that fascinated visitors. In terms of its architectural appearance, the Naples of 1903 did not look much different to the Naples of the 21st century. The famous sights - the Royal Palace, the Castel Nuovo, the Galleria Umberto I, the Teatro di San Carlo and the Castel dell'Ovo, the Duomo and Spaccanapoli, the famous, straight-as-an-arrow street that cuts directly through the historical centre - were already attracting visitors to the city.

More reading: 

The Sicilian behind Oscar-winning film Nuovo Cinema Paradiso

How Dino De Laurentiis put Italian cinema on the world map

The Corleone Mafia boss who dodged police for 43 years

Also on this day:

1551: The death of painter Domenico di Pace Beccafumi

1892: The birth of opera and Broadway star Ezio Pinza

1939: The birth of anti-Mafia crusader Giovanni Falcone

1945: The birth of politician and magistrate Giuseppe Ayala

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