American Dreamers

If the recent death of James Stewart struck a deep and wide chord in the American public, it’s due in part to two films he made with director Frank Capra, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) and “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946). Stewart made a number of classic films, but in the end he was most cherished as the naive neophyte who took on a corrupt U.S. Senate, and as a failing small-town businessman saved from suicide when an angel shows him what his family and community would be like had he never been born. They are the roles that defined his image as the ideal decent American man.

Stewart’s death inevitably recalled Capra, whose life and work is celebrated in writer-director Kenneth Bowser’s engaging documentary, “Frank Capra’s American Dream,” which screens Friday through Sunday at the Nuart as part of “A Centennial Salute to Frank Capra.” The theater will present eight Capra double features Aug. 4-11. And yes, “Mr. Smith” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” will be included.

Joseph McBride’s acclaimed 1993 biography, “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,” revealed both the man and his films to be far more complex than had been widely believed. Bowser’s documentary, for which Capra’s sons Tom and Frank Jr. served as executive producers, however, concentrates on the professional rather than the personal life of Capra, who died six years ago at 94.

Although McBride participated in the documentary, he has already made public his complaints with it, in particular in its dealing with Capra’s politics, which he discovered to be surprisingly conservative. In any event, the outlines of Capra’s rise are as familiar as they are archetypal: his arrival in the U.S. in 1903 with his Sicilian family; his determination to succeed--he studied engineering at Caltech; his chance involvement with the movies; and his enormous success by the age of 35.

“One man, one film” was Capra’s slogan, but Bowser makes clear how crucial Capra’s long association with writer Robert Riskin and cinematographer Joseph Walker were.

The popular conception of Capra is that he was a highly skilled, highly entertaining sentimentalist who cheered the triumph of the ordinary man over political and social injustice. A raft of noted directors and actors, not all of them knowledgeable about Capra, plus film historian and critic Richard Schickel, as well as McBride, show us how in film after film through a remarkable array of clips that Capra heroes in fact tended toward ambivalence and that Capra in turn was himself ambivalent about the American Dream. The documentary leaves us with the feeling that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is in its way prophetic--that the garish vision of George Bailey’s hometown had he never been born has come to pass across America anyway.

If this leaves us feeling pessimistic about just how much lasting impact one good man can have on his community, “Frank Capra’s American Dream” also leaves us pessimistic as to the possibility there will ever be a time in Hollywood again when filmmakers like Capra and his peers could make movies that actually deal with American lives in such quality and quantity. Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Another feisty filmmaker gets his due Friday when the American Cinematheque launches its Samuel Fuller retrospective, which will screen weekends through August at Raleigh Studios’ Chaplin Theater. Former newspaperman and World War II veteran Fuller is one of the handful of surviving Hollywood mavericks who include Budd Boetticher, Andre de Toth and Joseph H. Lewis--all edgy stylists whose genre films of the ‘40s and ‘50s and beyond have become classics.

The series kicks off at 7:15 p.m. with a brand-new 35-millimeter print of “Forty Guns” (1957), a lurid black-and-white CinemaScope western in which ruthless, hard-as-nails cattle rancher Barbara Stanwyck, who dines formally with all 40 of her mercenaries seated at her very long table, clashes with square-shooting gunfighter Barry Sullivan. It’s ludicrous, it’s delirious, but it’s fun.

“The Steel Helmet” (1951), which screens at 9:30 p.m., is the first of Fuller’s celebrated war movies, which introduced a quintessential Fuller actor, Gene Evans, a solid, ultra-masculine guy, tough but reflective. Evans stars as a battle-weary sergeant in what a Hollywood Reporter critic called “the first literate treatment of the Korean War.”

This is a terse vision of war from the inside, from the point of view of the foot soldier struggling to keep moving and to stay alive. Evans plays a member of a small patrol imperiled by a novice lieutenant. Racial tensions crackle within a highly diverse unit, and the film is patriotic without being jingoistic as a captured North Korean soldier points out that America is no paradise for minorities. “The Steel Helmet” is a gem, tough-minded and uncompromising.

Saturday brings “I Shot Jesse James” (1949), a remarkably complex western with which Fuller made his directorial debut. John Ireland stars as outlaw Bob Ford, driven to assassinate his good friend James (Reed Hadley) for promised amnesty and a $10,000 reward with which he hopes to settle down and marry a beautiful actress (Barbara Britton). How the naive Ford must live with his betrayal makes for a film of haunting psychological suspense--and for one of the best performances of Ireland’s career.

“The Baron of Arizona” (1950), Fuller’s second film, is one of his finest and most unusual. In one of the very best roles of his career, Vincent Price is perfect casting as a clerk in a Santa Fe land office who concocts a breathtakingly elaborate scheme to declare a poor Mexican orphan the direct descendant of a fictional grandee, the recipient of a land grant from the King of Spain that just happens to include the entirety of the Arizona Territory. An amusing chain of fakery climaxes with the clerk marrying the orphan, now grown (Ellen Drew), and presenting their claim to the U.S. government. The film has rightly been described as a Gothic romance, and Price is superb as the most elegant, most sympathetic of rogues. With superb camera work by no less than James Wong Howe. Information: (213) 466-FILM.