I don’t agree with some choices of the AFI and other film critics. For instance, most Hundred Best film lists include D. W. Griffith’s "Birth Of A Nation." Nobody can argue about Griffith’s mastery of the film medium. But the film’s portrayal of blacks and its account of reconstruction in the South set back race
relations by half a century.
The Civil War sequences are spectacular, but the film lapses into silliness at the end. The film’s portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as heroic white knights leaves one with a bad aftertaste. Not one of my favorites. Certainly not a film that I would call "great."
Best of the Best
My favorite film is "It’s A Wonderful Life," with James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and Thomas Mitchell, directed by Frank Capra. I first discovered this film back in 1955 when a local television station ran it and other neglected classics on "Million Dollar Movie" in prime time, starting at eight o’clock in the evening. They didn’t chop the movies up then. and there were only four commercial breaks during the run of the film. It played for a full week, with two performances on Sunday.
The story of a man who is prevented from committing suicide by "an angel who has yet to earn his wings,” who shows him what the world would have been like if he never had never lived, is Capra’s timeless masterwork. Film historian and critic James Agee called it "one of the most efficient and sentimental pieces since ‘Christmas Carol.’ "
The film was a financial failure, causing Capra and company to sell their independent film company Liberty Films.
Capra would sour on the motion picture business. He retreated from making films after his disastrous remake of "Lady for a Day" and "Pocketful of Miracles" in 1964 with Glenn Ford and Bette Davis.
"It’s a Wonderful Life" began airing on television at Christmas time, and by the 1980s it became a sentimental classic. One Christmas
season I counted thirteen screenings over the holidays, which rendered it overexposed. Still, the story of a man’s despair over his failure to achieve what he considers greatness and his redemption in finding the true value of his life has a universal appeal.
I briefly met Frank Capra in 1978 at the American Film Institute. He was teaching there, and I was working as line producer on the Screen Actors Guild Legacy series pilot.
One afternoon when Capra was teaching a class, he invited some of us to attend his lecture. He showed clips from "Mr. Deeds Goes To
Town," with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. He showed us how he cut corners to bring the film in under budget.
How To Be Successful
One student remarked that in the1930s the film industry was a producers’ medium. He asked Capra how he got the freedom to make the films that he did. "I always respected the money," Capra replied.
Film critics said that Capra had lost touch with audiences, and that he was too old to be making films. It was a young person’s business, they said. Others who knew Capra weren’t so sure.
Bob Sacchi ("The Man with Bogart’s Face") observed that Capra was alert and talented enough to make films but he was unable to cope with the bloated studio hierarchy. Once he only had to deal with a tyrant like Harry Cohen. Now he found himself negotiating with twenty lawyers who knew nothing of the filmmaking process.
My second all-time favorite also was made in 1946, "The Yearling,” starring Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman Jr.,and directed by Clarence Brown.
I first saw "The Yearling" in 1947 in its initial release at the DomeTheater in Ocean Park. I was six years old at the time.
My babysitter was a middleweight Panamanian prizefighter, Simone Vigara. My saloonkeeper father reasoned that since Simone was in training for a fight, he would stay out of trouble if I tagged along. He opted to take me to see "The Yearling." I loved from it the start, and I have seen it in a different light after viewing it as an adult, but still rich and rewarding.
The movie is based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1939 novel. Production originally started in 1941 with Spencer Tracy starring and Victor Fleming directing. Tracy hated the Florida Location. He went on a bender. The film was shut down, and Tracy came back to Culver City to co-star in "Woman Of The Year" with Katherine Hepburn. Some of the 1941 second unit footage was used in the final film.
The story of a Civil War Veteran who retreats from civilization to start a farm in the Florida Everglades. His son’s attachment
to a stray deer still resonates today. When I first saw the film, I saw Jane Wyman’s portrayal of the mother as a woman who had soured on life and was unsympathetic. When I grew older and became a parent, though, I began to understand her point of view. The sequence where Peck, his son and two hounds pursue Old Slewfoot, a huge killer bear, through the Florida Everglades is still among the best action sequences I ever have seen.
A Reagan Memory
Claude Jarman Jr. won an Academy Award for his performance in "The Yearling."
My friend Syd Kronenthal recalls looking after Jarman as a young boy. He still is in touch with the actor in San Francisco. Syd visited one of the locations at Big Bear Lake. He recalled the beginning of the end of Jane Wyman’s marriage to Ronald Reagan. It seems that Reagan went on location to Big Bear with his wife. Bored to death with nothing to do while they were filming, they went fishing at Big Bear Lake.
Claude Jarman Jr. would make one more classic film, in 1949, with Clarence Brown directing. Called "Intruder in the Dust,” it was based on the William Faulkner novel.
