Volume 40, Number 3 · January 28, 1993
American Pie
By Luc Sante
Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
by Joseph McBride
Simon and Schuster, 768 pp., $27.50
As plotted on the chart of conventional success, Frank Capra's career as a movie director would seem to describe a particularly American parabola. He was born in 1897, immigrated from Sicily with his family in 1903, entered the movie business in the wideopen early 1920s. He remained an obscure journeyman director for a few years and then, during the Depression, swiftly rose in stature, power, and esteem until, by the mid-1930s, he was one of the most important figures in Hollywood. But his curve crested just before World War II and he slid slowly into commercial oblivion, managing only six movies—as many pictures as he had made in 1928 alone—between the end of the war and 1961. By the time he died, in 1991, few were aware he had survived as long as he did. This trajectory might be a perfect illustration of Fitzgerald's line about there being no second acts in American lives.
Review, 4067 words
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