Another Frank Capra

Book excerpt: Another Frank Capra offers a new interpretation of the great Hollywood director beyond the patriotic sentimentalist or the cynical opportunist that he has been taken for. Often cast as a cinematic simpleton or primitive, Capra's exploitation of the stylistic and narrative resources of cinema was, in fact, extremely self-conscious and adventurous in ways typical of artistic modernism. His modernism is also evident in his repeated and strong identification with female characters. Informed by recent work in genre theory and feminist psychology, Another Frank Capra shows Capra to be a 'proto-feminist' director whose feminism has been entirely neglected by previous critics.