Capra comes off as a little conceited, and there isn't much about It's a Wonderful Life (half the reason I bought the book), but this is still a terrific book about the early days of Hollywood and the part Capra had to play in that. Highly recommended. ( )

Before I discovered film culture I was entranced by the 'old-fashioned' Americana that has become known as 'Capraesque'. As a family each Thanksgiving we watched Miracle on "Thirty-fourth Street". I loved Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" and Gary Cooper in "Mr. Deeds goes to Town". Later I would learn about other great films of Capra like "Arsenic and Old Lace", Meet John Doe", and "It Happened One Night". One indication of Capra's greatness as a director is a partial list of leading actors that he directed including, in addition to Cooper and Stewart, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Kathryn Hepburn & Spencer Tracy, Donna Reed, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and Frank Sinatra.
This autobiography was a natural for me to read when it was first published and I was not disappointed. It is an inspirational book and offers insights into the nature of artistic creativity. Anyone interested in the background of Frank Capra should consider reading his inspiring autobiography. ( )

A little over a week ago, I checked this book out from my college library to use for a research paper. Glancing over the worn binding and Capra’s impish, Sicilian grin on the cover, I never dreamed that it would so completely overtake my reading life for the next ten days.

Let’s get this straight: when one is writing four research papers in a single semester, and checking books out for all of them, one isn’t supposed to actually read any of the books all the way through. Something will inevitably get lost in the shuffle of conflicting demands. Yet director Frank Capra’s autobiography is so fascinating and compelling a read that I could find no way to resist it, and threw the unspoken rules of undergraduate research to the wind.

In one passage of The Name Above the Title, Capra writes about what he refers to as “Gee Whiz!” movies, pictures that feature a broad outlook and larger-than-life characters, as opposed to darker, more “realistic” films. By that measure, this could easily be billed as a “Gee Whiz!” autobiography. This is not to say that it is factually incorrect, as some critics have suggested. “Surely no life was ever lived this way,” Ray Carney writes in American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. “The official, optimistic party line of the book … is a kind of desperate whistling in the dark to cover up the profound crises of confidence and identity of a man who could never adequately convince himself of the ultimate value of his life and work.” This could possibly be true—I am certainly not an expert in the matter—but I am inclined to take Capra at his word when he says that some people simply see the world in fairy-tale terms, and he is one of them. Just because his life reads like one of his movies doesn’t mean he copied the tale from one of them, and not vice versa.

Besides, he is shockingly frank about the hard times he went through, including two long periods of depression. One of these might have ended in his death were it not for a strange visitor he received—a little man who called Capra a coward and an offense to God, and demanded he use the gifts he had been given for the good of his fellow men. This pulled him out of his slump and could well have been a turning point in his life, but it wasn’t all daffodils and butterflies after that. Of his cinematic creations, he most resembles the honest but conflicted George Bailey, rather than the more childlike characters of Jefferson Smith or Longfellow Deeds.

However, because I like fairy-tales, and because Capra is so adept at telling them, the first section of the book is my favorite, chronicling his rise from a life of poverty to winning his personal “Grail,” the Oscar. In places his writing is unpolished, but it is full of character and charm.

Fans of Capra and future filmmakers simply must take a look at this, but I recommend to everyone as an absolutely fantastic read.

Who knows? It might even make a pretty good movie. ( )

EXCELLENT CONDITION! ( )