In January this year, Columbia Pictures celebrated its 100th anniversary, and "Lady Torch" illuminated 100 years of film history. This year's Shanghai International Film Festival and Columbia Pictures jointly planned the "100 Years of Dreams" celebration unit, and screened two of Frank Capra's masterpieces, "One Night of Love" and "Mr. Smith to Washington", which not only created the glory of Columbia Pictures in the early years, but also created a model for Hollywood to create an "American story". It is no exaggeration to say that part of Hollywood's "tradition" that has been passed down to this day was created by Capra, the "Captain America" of the film industry, despite the fact that he came from a poor family of Sicilian immigrants.
Capra was born in the remote countryside of Sicily and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 5 years old. When the family came ashore in New York, none of them spoke English. His original name was Francesca Rosario Capra, a quintessentially Italian name that is instantly recognizable. Secretive about his identity as an Italian, Capra tried to disguise and even cut ties to the Italian-American community when he was away from home, cutting off painful memories of singing in Los Angeles' red-light district as a teenager and changing his name to the more Americanized "Frank Capra." This is a rather contradictory point about him. The "penniless" protagonists in his films are not at all humble about their humble backgrounds, they have experienced all kinds of challenges and adventures, and have repeatedly verified the fairy tale that "a small person can become a big hero" in difficult times. Capra, the creator of these adult fairy tales, has taken a very different trajectory in his real life, and his personal identity is a brilliant "American dream" wrapped in a dark heart.
After graduating from Caltech's Department of Chemical Engineering in 1918, Capra was drafted into the U.S. Army in the final year of World War II as a math teacher and assistant quartermaster in the U.S. Army. After leaving the army, he couldn't find a regular job and worked as a book salesman, tutor, gardener, and extra, until he accidentally made a short film for a San Francisco stage actor and entered the American film industry, which was on the rise. From 1922 to 1928, Capra began as a handyman on the set, editing, scene writer, prop maker, camera assistant and screenwriter, he could do every job involved in the industry, and in the two years of the transition from silent film to sound film, he was already able to direct blockbuster comedies on his own. In 1928, he joined Columbia Pictures, marking the beginning of his "golden decade" with the studio.
In the early days of Hollywood, the star-studded MGM and the wealthy Warners and Paramounts were collectively known as the "Big Three", and Columbia Pictures was regarded as a "small studio on the back street", and even after the success of films such as Barbara Stanwick, "Idle Tears" and "Miracle Woman", by 1934, Columbia Pictures was still a small and medium-budget film company. This year, "One Night of Love" was launched, and the actor Clark Gable was MGM's top brand, and he was in conflict with the company, and MGM's senior management angrily assigned him to Columbia to act in a small-budget romance film as a punishment; The owner of the heroine Claudette Corbeth is Paramount, and Columbia Pictures wrote an IOU to the other party to "loan" the actress. Kaulbai plays the runaway Bai Fumei, Gable is a ruffian poor reporter, this pair of happy enemies who meet on a narrow road, from seeing each other to being indispensable, the class barrier between the two, together with the bluffing blanket wall, collapses in the trumpet song of true love, and the poor boy hugs the beauty. At that time, the whole Hollywood thought that this was a small sugar water romance film, who would have thought that this would be an unprecedented "masterpiece" that swept the Oscars, and there has never been a movie like "One Night Affair", which won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
"One Night" was the highest-grossing and best-rated romantic film of the 1930s. Today's audience may ridicule the plot of this movie as "all routines", but 90 years ago, Capra and his screenwriters were the creators of this "jack-of-all-trades". This movie has become a model for Hollywood love movies, even if Golden Hollywood has become the old Hollywood, the old Hollywood has been updated to the new Hollywood, the genre of "love movie" has not been eliminated, its core elements, issues and conflicts, and even the performance ideas of the male and female protagonists to produce screen chemistry are all continuing the "tradition" created by "One Night of Love", which is the "heritage" of Hollywood.
At the premiere of "One Night", this movie had a different layer of "epochal significance". The United States of 1934 was still under the clouds of the Great Depression, and Capra created the myth of comedy in the midst of a predicament of universal despair. The "myth" of "One Night of Love" is not a dream of getting rich overnight or crossing classes, on the contrary, the situation of everyone in the movie is actually very bad, the golden girl has fallen into class, the young people who have nothing can not find a way to struggle, and the road love in which they love and kill each other is not a ukiyo-e of poor couples mourning. Capra doesn't glorify poverty and suffering, but he has a treasure trove of humor that brings transparency and transcendence, transforming painful realism into joyful comedy.
The "best of times" shared between Capra and Columbia Pictures were achieved by the director and the studio. The studio gave the director enough creative autonomy to make a hidden political expression in popular melodramas, and the director reciprocated by deploying "American stories" that could be accepted by the audience with the greatest common divisor. "Mr. Smith to Washington" is the highlight of the partnership. "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "Mr. Deeds Go to Town", "John Doe" and "How Good Life is" are collectively referred to as "Capra Popcorn", and the common denominator of these four films is that they all tell the story of small people from small towns in the United States, who fight against the corrupt elite and the social system they control with idealistic enthusiasm, and the little people seek power for the larger silent majority. Capra once summed up his work: "I will definitely stand with the group who are born poor, born low, and despised because of their race or class, at least on screen, and I can let them win." "Combined with his films, this constitutes a very informative expression.
When the post-war youth of the United States launched a vigorous hippie movement, Hollywood came to a crossroads between the old and the new, Capra left the film industry and planted avocados in the world. His work focuses on the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, when American society was at its most volatile, and his films brought laughter in the dark.