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Showing posts with label It Happened One Night. Show all posts
Showing posts with label It Happened One Night. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

What's Your Favorite Old Movie?

I'm reading bits and pieces from Frank Capra's autobiography, Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title. His movies have always fascinated me and I absolutely love a few of them. I think my favorite is Lady for a Day, a black and white picture about an apple peddlar in New York who's spent any money she's ever made (along with donations from her fellow "godparent" beggars) to send her illegitimate daughter to boarding school in Spain and keep her scandalous beginning secret.  Capra remade the film several decades later as Pennies from Heaven with Betty Davis and Ann Margaret, but the original was the real gem.

Capra had a Jimminy Cricket in his background, a hulking fighting Irishman named Myles Connolly who told him early on that he was the "best director in Hollywood" but wasted his efforts creating "picture postcards" when he could be making films like the "Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa." Here's how Capra describes one exchange between Connolly and himself: