If your late for anything at the cinema then owlish eyes glare at you in the dark while you find your seat. This time I was a bit late to see a double bill of Frank Capra films at the British Film Institute HQ but it was worse because there was only five pairs of eyes in the place. Five pairs of owlish eyes swivel. Famous eyes. But the jokes on them because I seen the movies already. The movies are It Happened One Night and Forbidden.
They've been polished up and re-released by our country because we think Frank Capra is so good.
When I came into the cinema, I was so nervous about being late, that my heart was going “Potato Potato Potato!” Thats the kind of thing that a snappily dressed, hack journo might say in a Frank Capra film, the kind of thing they frequently do say. Pure Runyonese. I wonder if people really did speak like that back then or if these guys just created a whole language. I don't know what is more interesting. I think the second one.
Staples? Gruff amoralists with hearts of gold. Mephistophelean newspaper editors. Sassy, intelligent flappers. Homeless men. Chauvinists. All of them jollying along in the foothills of the Big-Rock Candy Mountain.
This is not to say that Frank Capra is pantomime and gaiety. Nor is it to say that these things are bad things. At the heart of these films is something good and important. It Happened One Night manages to pull off being a pretty graphic, Steinbeckean social commentary while making you laugh. It is a demonstration of a quiet fury, a smiling, passive aggressive film. Violence is never far off, but it is always throwaway, comic, empty threats. Claudette Colbert asks for a burger and burly six-footer Clark Gable threatens to break her neck. Another time Gable threatens to kill some guy’s children. The guy is scared and so he runs away and falls over.
It makes you laugh, but it's hard. It's difficult.
Even more anachronisticky is Forbidden. Its the story of a librarian who fucks a politician but holds onto his secret and his lovechild til he dies. Powerful stuff. In 1931 it must have been insane. Like Taxi Driver and L'Etranger and Brief Encounters (or Close Encounters!), it holds up the monster by the scruff of the neck to show the douche-bags that (Hello?) the monster is (of course) a human being. No mean feat.
Even in a technical sense, these are movies that feel suspiciously of our generation. They are snappy. The scenes race across the screen with accuracy, and exactitude and economy. There is no fluff. It feels way more adult and clinical than the flabby poesy of, say, the Magnificent Ambersons, or even Casablanca with its mawkish soft-focus bullshit on the hour mark. (You forgot about that right? Those flashbacks?) He's classy Frank Capra. Like Frank Sinatra. I get the feeling that if he had been as good at Facebook as he was at making movies he'd be like the most popular guy I've ever met.
I still feel like I’m underselling all of this?
Listen. I'm the kind of guy who thinks Preston Sturgess is better than Frank Capra. That Hannah and Her Sisters is better than Annie Hall. All that should tell you is that I am a speccy, circumcised pansy, gym shorts around my ankles and my underwear wedged into my behind. It should tell you, also, that Frank Capra is the land that's fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night, with the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees and the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings. He's the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
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