Frank Capra’s Defense of Humanity: Cinema as a Moral Institution

I always get a lot out of Matthew Ehret’s essays, and this one strikes many a bell (“Every time a bell rings, another angel gets its wings). Too many!

It happens upon zip codes very very close to home for me then, at times too close, as my mother was a denizen of Hollywood from the age of an immigrating 5 years old from St. Paul MN, and gave me all kinds of astonishing oral history (astonishing to me, everyday familiar to her) of early film days near her homes in the Silverlake district, then Melrose (where I had a good friend then, Endre Balogh, who, by chance, still owns the Stradivarius that he somehow already had when we met in the fifth grade) and her turn as a bright-eyed Catholic ingenue valedictorian at Fairfax High School, amongst an overwhelmingly Jewish student body, back then anyway. (I just read for the first time last night that the dearly departed Maestro Andre Previn –born Andreas Priwin in Berlin– played his first compositions at nearby Beverly Hills High School as a high school lad there.) She told me stories, now and then, over 6 decades, of sitting in the press box at the Uplifter’s Club to watch Will Rogers, from the natives nations in Oklahoma and raised as a skilled indigenous horseman, play polo, escorted by the director Frank Borseghe’s son, Junior. She lived on Mayfield for some years next door to Bob Mitchell and they became young friends, as he directed choirs at her church at their corner, St. Brendan’s, and went on to form the Mitchell Boys Choir which adds some of the warmth to the Capra-esque films like the Bing Crosby/Ingrid Bergman tear-jerkers “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “Going My Way” (he was also the Dodgers’ first organist when they moved to LA and I managed, thanks to the internet, to put them both back in touch with each after 30 years MIA, just months before each died: my Mom pushing 92 years young and Bob Mitchell, still playing movie house organ in Hollywood 80 years after he began, dying 70 days later, as I found out at the library just minutes before I was about to write him of my mother’s death and happened to glance at the headline above the fold in the L.A. Times, and his obituary, died July 4, 2009!). Stravinsky, Klemperer, and Schoenberg all lived nearby, though she didn’t know any of them, but her mother took her often to hear old Otto K lead the L.A. in the years he was an L.A. refugee, like the others, from the Nazi Reich. She told me with gaps of many years between tall tales, and always off-handedly (off-guardedly?) about how Tom Mix would set up cameras in her street, as he used to ride up the empty lot next to her house in the silent movie days filming takes for a horseback-riding cowboy scene before the “talkies”, Wyatt Earp on hand to advise him “how it really was”. Yeah, sure.

More to the point, or stepping stone, on these mossy flagstones of Memory Lane, Capra was befriended by another ardent Catholic writer and an icon of the Golden Ager of Hollywood, Myles Connolly. I didn’t know it when my best friend then, long passed, an Episcopalian pastor, recommended to me the centerpiece of Connolly’s fictions, “Mr. Blue” in my late teens.

It has so much of the spirit of St. Francis of Assissi, including the resonant name of Francis’ “muse” ‘Domina Pauperpate”, or as Mr. Blue calls Her in translation in the spellbinding little book that bears his name, “Holy Lady Poverty” a title well-known to lay Franciscans, or anyone who has come under the godly spell, Go’spell, of “Il Poverello” or “The Little Poor Man” as Francis called himself. (It’s serendipitous that the full name of the city where Hollywood abides, as given by the Franciscan Saint Junipero Serra, patron of the Californias, is “La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora, La Reina de Los Angeles y La Porciuncula” ~Church of ‘The Little Portion’~ named after the tiny church in Assisi where Francis began his Mission, begging stones from the bewildered residents of Assisi, as the founding stones for his Quest.)

I didn’t know a half century ago when I first read it, and publicized my nascent dream of “Imitatio Blui” throughout the parish office and vicinity, that Connolly was a very close friend of Frank Capra, and they were so symbiotic for many years in their dreamer Franciscan variations on a theme. All of the films Mr. Ehret references are in one way or another a variation on a theme on the palpable innocence of St. Francis and his “Fools for God” followers.

I have known a number of Italians named Frank, and all of them, including Frank Sinatra (who happened to be on the phone for a few minutes once with Mom, while on hold, were all christened “Francesco” after the Saint, who, along with St. Catherine of Siena, is the co-patron saint of Italy.

Ehret mentions their connection to RFK. Both Senior, and his son and namesake, our current torch-bearer, Junior, have as their middle initial, “F” as in “Francis”.

The Little Poor Man’s reach is extensive!

You can probably say without too much argument, theologically, that all of them acquired their charism and ethos from the saint, whom not a few have called, early and often (that is, for the last 8 centuries), the greatest avatar and exemplar of Christ since the religion’s Founder. Even “Ol’ Blue Eyes” at his best moments!

But Mr. Blue was written in the 1920s, I believe 1925, and it informs much of the spirit of Frank (Francis) Capra’s work.  A Catholic publishing company, I believe “Image”, was so smitten by the message of the little book, “Mr. Blue”, that I often marvelled at the price having been fixed at 25 cents perpetually, well into the late 1990s, 25 years after I got my first copy. I don’t think it was raised until the publisher died and new owners felt compelled by inflation to raise it to a buck, or whatever!

But this all was bubbling around Mom’s Hollywood in the 1930s, and when Connolly was laid to rest, it was in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, a few blocks from where we first lived in Westchester, near LAX Airport. The name struck a bell when I saw it, and then I remembered that Mom’s mother Elizabeth was laid to rest there, nearby her nephew Roman Bohnen, my mother’s favorite among her family (founder of Hollywood’s “Actor’s Laboratory”, one who died of a heart attack at 44, just days before he was to testify to HUAC and the McCarthy witch-hunters, and then blacklisted posthumously, something like a Purple Heart back then: a factoid that his bio at Wikipedia doesn’t include, tellingly, but which Mom told me several times over many years ~ Actors Lab burned to the ground shortly after his untimely death, and just happened to have its safe go missing, leading to its closure soon after, due to that shortfall in funds…………………)

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As much as Chesterton wrote what most Franciscans and Dominicans consider, by consensus, the two greatest single books on their respective Founders, this quote below, from Wikiquotes, strikes me as summarizing the spirit of brothers Capra and Connolly:

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: ‘Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.’ Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.

“The Ethics of Elfland” ~~ G. K. Chesterton