Word: capra
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Reason for Producer Cohn's confidence is simple. You Can't Take It With You is directed by Frank Capra. Unlike most of Hollywood's major cinemanufacturers, Columbia controls neither a huge chain of theatres nor a long roster of famed stars...
...both of these, Capra, as the company's strongest financial asset, has been a more than acceptable substitute. A genial, stocky, 41-year-old son of Sicilian immigrants, he has twice won the top honors of his profession, the Motion Picture Academy's Award for It Happened One Night in 1935, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936. Last year, after a prolonged dispute in which he charged Columbia with breach of contract, their differences were composed on a basis that pays Capra roughly $350,000 a year. He has personally created or vastly improved half-a-dozen...
...topical vernacular, photographers where to point cameras as big as limousines, art directors to fabricate rooms, streets or cities. If producers are top dogs of the cinema as an industry, directors are its top craftsmen. Their pay runs from $200 a week (for beginners) to what Columbia pays Capra for turning out one or two films a year...
...that Capra is now the cinema's outstanding director does not imply that he is tops in all respects. As they acquire prestige, directors acquire specialties. Capra's is a certain kind of peculiarly American, peculiarly kinetic humor, in which the most individual characteristic is an extraordinarily adroit and constant use of "business" to accent the comic line. Unlike Gregory La Cava (Stage Door) or Leo McCarey, whose The Awful Truth took top honors for direction at the Academy this year, Capra has no interest in jokes whose appeal is touched with neuroticism. He is sufficiently versatile...
Columbia Pictures runs a gamut of its own, from the frankest sort of penny-thriller melodrama to the maturest. best-ordered and funniest comedy in cinema. For Columbia's good standing with the carriage trade, the men chiefly responsible are the team of Director Frank Capra and Writer Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Lost Horizon). Last fiscal year (June 26) unpretentious Columbia cleared a profit of $1,317,771. Of next season's schedule of 40 films, high spot will probably be Director Capra's production of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize...