Eric Smoodin,
Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 8223 3384 8 (hb) US$79.95
ISBN: 0 8223 3394 5 (pb) US$22.95
301pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
Film scholars have seen Eric Smoodin’s Capra book on the horizon for a decade now – versions of several chapters have appeared in Screen, Cinema Journal, and The Velvet Light Trap – and the finished product is richly suggestive, though its suggestiveness has less to do with Capra than with disciplinary blind spots regarding the heterogeneity of cinema audiences and regarding the early history of film study as well.
Smoodin’s research effort was extensive – including expeditions to the Library of Congress and the (U.S.) National Archives – though most of the book’s six numbered chapters depend crucially on the material on file in the Capra Collection in the Wesleyan Cinema Archive, especially letters from fans and students. Capra scholars have had access to some of this material before, thanks to Joseph McBride’s Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, yet Smoodin deserves high praise for seeing the unique opportunity this archival material provided. That is, in Capra’s case it is possible to trace the reception of his films in very concrete terms from early until late, in such a way as to offer a counter-account of the trajectory and meaning and his career.
The nearest exception to this focus on reception involves Smoodin’s chapter one, where the promotional “ballyhoo” designed to drum up business for Capra’s earlier Columbia efforts – Flight (USA, 1929), Ladies of Leisure (USA, 1930), Dirigible (USA, 1931), Platinum Blonde (USA, 1931), and Lady for a Day (USA, 1933) – is discussed by reference to “Exhibitor Campaign Books” provided to local theaters by Columbia Pictures and to accounts of promotional activities gleaned from the pages of the Motion Picture Herald. Most of the evidence here is “pre-textual”, a matter of receptions solicited rather than directly documented – emphasizing, for example, how theater marquees and lobbies exemplified an “architecture” of reception that started at the sidewalk, well before patrons actually encountered the film “text” itself. But Smoodin is very skillful in using the historical record to elaborate several themes that are crucial to the book as a whole: the heterogeneity of audiences (local/national, male/female), the role and rhetoric of directorial celebrity, the links and tensions among multiple constituencies or institutions (exhibitors/the press/educators). A repeated observation is that these relationships are patently more complex than is often depicted or assumed. As Smoodin asserts in his Introduction, “The response [to Capra] was never monolithic, and Capra’s audiences should at all times be thought of in the plural” (2).
We can catch some glimpse of this plurality or complexity as it pertains to governmental audiences by contrasting Smoodin’s chapter two discussion of “Chinese Censorship and The Bitter Tea of General Yen” to his chapter four discussion of the reception of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (USA, 1939). In the case of The Bitter Tea of General Yen (USA, 1933), despite the fact that the film never played in China proper, Chinese consular officials (especially in Havana and Los Angeles) complained to Nanking that the film “contained situations and dialogues reflecting discredit on the Chinese race” (64), and the National Board of Film Censors insisted that Columbia pull the film from circulation altogether lest they refuse even to censor other Columbia pictures for Chinese distribution, despite Columbia’s international circulation of a modified print from which offending passages had been eliminated. Indeed, Chinese consular officials urged overseas Chinese “not to patronize the film” (66), and it seems likely (according to Smoodin) that the film’s disappointing box-office performance is partly attributable to such interference.
Equally to the point, the whole episode quite literally involved competing interpretations of the film. The Chinese took it as too realistic, to judge by the recommendation from the Chinese Foreign Office that Columbia append a prologue declaring the film “a mere literary fancy” (72). By contrast, American diplomats and Columbia’s representative appealed to the logic of narrative to defend the appearance of racial and national enmity, while noting that the enmity cut both ways, as when the heroic General Yen denounced the hypocrisy of American missionaries – by which logic (per Smoodin) the Chinese should have welcomed the film as “bolster[ing] the new Chinese regime’s anti-Westernism” (68).
A similar anxiety over (racial) representation and censorship is also on view in Smoodin’s analysis of the reception of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, though the anxiety is, as it were, on the other foot. Smoodin begins his chapter on “This Business of America: Mr. Smith, John Doe, and the Politicized Viewer” by adducing the contrast between latter day evocations of the film as “an eloquent if somewhat utopian assertion of universally recognized and understood democratic values” (120) and its original reception, where responses differed considerably among exhibitors, educators, and the U.S. State Department. Especially given the period’s investment in representations of national unity (Mt. Rushmore, the Jefferson Memorial), the conflicts are striking, though I will mainly discuss the State Department reception here.
Where exhibitors repeatedly praised Mr. Smith for extolling patriotism and confronting the purported cynicism of government and of Hollywood, State Department officials were anxious that the film’s unflattering depiction of the U.S. Senate amounted to “ridicule” of democratic systems (137), which was especially troublesome in light of the many totalitarian regimes in Latin America, a region where U.S. studios were increasingly encountering censorship and were seeking State Department assistance. Though the department decided against self-censorship as a response to foreign censorship – by contrast with their diplomatic argument that The Bitter Tea of General Yen could be censored for domestic distribution in China – their motives were deeply conflicted. Their fears of seeming unmanly (given Jeff Smith’s reliance on Clarissa Sanders) and of giving members of Congress additional ammunition in their attacks on Hollywood were finally balanced in the event by reports from the American Consulate in Switzerland that audiences there took the film “as a symbol for democracy” in action (138).
On Smoodin’s view, the “accuracy” of “falseness” of the interpretations subtending these variously contradictory responses to Capra’s films is less interesting than the fact that they occurred and mobilized numerous cultural and political activities, from the classroom to the highest levels of government. The film-study habit of positing or assessing audience responses on the basis of textual features is, on Smoodin’s view, far less interesting and credible than seeing how actual audiences in fact did respond, where we are fortunate enough to have the data, as in Capra’s case we do. Subsequent chapters, indeed, analyze how the films in the Why We Fight series (USA, 1942-45) were understood by American soldiers during the World War II, and how differently they were taken by German prisoners held in American POW camps, where they were shown for de-Nazification purposes. Similarly, Smoodin discusses how prisoners in San Quentin responded to a showing of It’s a Wonderful Life (USA, 1946), likewise intended to effect a kind of rehabilitative discourse.
The last chapter of Regarding Frank Capra, apart from its brief conclusion, concerns Capra’s retreat from Hollywood, largely by reference to his Bell System Science films (USA, 1956-58), which Smoodin reads less in terms of a declining career arc (though a decline there was) than as the culmination of a pedagogical strain in Capra that had become increasingly obvious since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We “can also view the latter stage of Capra’s career”, he writes, “as the logical conclusion to a filmography that had become more and more overtly educational…, the didactic lessons of Deeds, Smith, Doe, Why We Fight, State of the Union and other movies perfectly anticipat[ing] Capra’s collaboration with AT&T on science films for junior high and high school students” (219). Indeed, after reading the evidence Smoodin provides along these lines, Capra’s many pronouncements about speaking for the little man, for the hoi polloi, no longer sound so boastful; the responsibility was as much shouldered as sought, and Capra’s willingness to write so many personal replies to the letters he received bespeaks a sense of obligation and connection that was very likely rare among Capra’s tinsel-town peers.
The subtitle of Regarding Frank Capra is Audience, Celebrity & American Film Studies, 1930-1960. Smoodin’s interest in Capra’s pedagogical value thus extends well beyond Capra’s own educational undertakings to include the ways several generations of educational and academic professionals have used Capra for progressive, often overtly liberal, purposes. In chapter three, “Film Education and Quality Entertainment for Children and Adolescents,” for example, Smoodin discusses the way Capra’s 1930s films, especially It Happened One Night (USA, 1934) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (USA, 1936), figured in the “film education” movement, which sought (with varying degrees of success) to inculcate active practices of “film appreciation” while privileging a “popular front” ideology – humanist, anti-war, anti-imperialist, socially realistic.
Smoodin’s larger story, it bears saying, involves the displacement of a social science model of film study by a liberal humanist one – associated chiefly with the post-war boom in American post-secondary education and the influence of French-inspired auteurism on American English departments – a displacement for which Regarding Frank Capra is offered as part of a long-overdue remedy. But that story pertains chiefly to college and university film study. Most of Smoodin’s evidence, however, pertains to high school education, and his point involves the prevalence during the 1930s of a director-centered pedagogy of appreciation designed with the newly constructed “adolescent” consumer in mind, a regime enforced by textbooks, study guides, magazines, the National Board of Review, even radio and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association itself. Capra played a central role in this regime as “the best Hollywood had to offer precisely because his films seemed antithetical to the typical Hollywood product” (99).
Of course, a crucial turn in this history involved the onset of World War II, which saw a shift away from anti-war progressivism and toward an “education for victory” (117) program, though Capra’s role as an educator was only underscored and formalized by his assignment to make the Why We Fight films for the War Department. Indeed, in the post-war period, the Why We Fight films became exemplary not only as “pedagogical models for the streamlined modern classroom” but of a disciplinary shift in which “film appreciation” gave way (momentarily) to “intellectual and psychological persuasion” and was “administered not by the high school teacher” but “by a larger culture of experts” (168). The latter included experts in the War Department’s Information and Education division who used the Why We Fight series to conduct “reception” research of an unprecedented scale and precision – though the results were (on Smoodin’s report) discouragingly paradoxical. Equally paradoxical, it seems to this reviewer, is the extent to which Smoodin both privileges yet discounts “interpretation,” to the point where the auteurist tradition of Capra scholarship barely figures in his historical account of Capra’s reception – apart from Smoodin’s rare critique of its “interpretive gymnastics” (1) and the claim that 1930s high school teachers got their first.
To be fair, most of Smoodin’s analysis pertains to disputes within reception studies, especially regarding the complexity of the enterprise, to which many a film scholar (regardless of approach) has turned a blind eye. Moreover, it seems clear enough that Smoodin’s primary interest involves receptions contemporaneous to the films’ original release dates, where partiality of interpretation matters less than its (social) “reality” and affectivity. But the fact remains that one’s view of Capra’s films is not likely to change significantly after reading Regarding Frank Capra, unless it is overly simplistic to begin with – though the frequent association of Capra with liberal modernism might be counter-factual news to those who have accepted Joseph McBride’s view of Capra as a Social Darwinist conservative tricked out in popular front regalia.
What gets lost in Smoodin’s emphasis on the historical past is the extent to which views of Capra can and do change, and often as the result of critical dialogue and debate. Regarding Frank Capra shows that Capra was, in significant ways, more important to his culture than even his wildest auteurist advocates might have guessed. Perhaps it is the failure of auteurist criticism to sustain a picture of Capra at least as complicated as the one Smoodin attributes to Capra’s original viewers that justifies Smoodin’s neglect of subsequent reception and interpretation. All the same, whether Capra should continue as an educational and cultural touchstone is a question poorly answered by invoking the growing ebay market for Capra memorabilia, which is where Smoodin finally brings his otherwise enthralling story to conclusion. Frank Capra and Regarding Frank Capra both deserve better.
Leland Poague
Iowa State University, U.S.A.
Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06