Frank Capra

These acclaimed actors worked multiple times for the director. Barbara Stanwyck The Oscar-nominated legend made five films with Capra, including 1941's "Meet John Doe. " Gary Cooper The star earned his first Oscar nomination for Capra's 1936 "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. " He also starred in "Meet John Doe. " Bing Crosby "Der Bingle" teamed up with Capra for the 1950 comedy "Riding High" and the 1951 romantic farce "Here Comes the Groom. "

These acclaimed actors worked multiple times for the director. Barbara Stanwyck The Oscar-nominated legend made five films with Capra, including 1941's "Meet John Doe. " Gary Cooper The star earned his first Oscar nomination for Capra's 1936 "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. " He also starred in "Meet John Doe. " Bing Crosby "Der Bingle" teamed up with Capra for the 1950 comedy "Riding High" and the 1951 romantic farce "Here Comes the Groom. "

In 1983, Michael Thomas was running the San Diego Film Society and invited legendary director Frank Capra, then 86, and his longtime cinematographer, Joseph Walker, to San Diego for a lecture and a screening of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

Surrounded by desert, director Frank Capra once lounged in a cozy casita near Palm Springs and penned the 1946 snowy holiday classic “ It’s a Wonderful Life .” Who knew? The La Quinta Resort & Club wants to make sure you do by offering a special holiday deal. The deal: The offer, called " It’s Always a Wonderful Life at La Quinta ,” gives you a third night free when you stay two nights. Decorations at the resort, through Christmas, will honor the snowy fictional town of Bedford Falls, and the film will be screened for free on Saturday nights in the resort’s theater.

It is one of the ironies of Hollywood history--one of the sadder ironies in fact--that Capraesque has become a highly desirable word to describe a new film. The irony was not lost on Frank Capra himself, who died on Tuesday at the age of 94. Except for a rare foray into television, Capra stepped aside from the camera in 1961, bitterly convinced that audiences no longer wanted his kind of movies.

Frank Capra, the multiple Academy Award winner whose everyman heroes symbolized the American spirit triumphing over mercenary or venal big business and big government, died Tuesday at his desert retirement home. He was 94. Capra, a widower, died in his sleep at 9:30 a.m. at his condominium in La Quinta near Palm Springs, according to his son Tom Capra, executive producer of NBC's "Today Show."

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.

Jimmy Stewart probably said it best: "Frank Capra made you pay for those happy endings." No other director in American film put his protagonists through such grueling rites of passage only to have them survive on top a little wiser and more resilient--and possessing more friends than they ever imagined. And like his heroic protagonists, Capra experienced his own grueling rite of passage.

Movies should be a positive expression that there is hope, love, mercy, justice and charity. . . . It is (the filmmaker's) responsibility to emphasize the positive qualities of humanity by showing the triumph of the individual over adversities. --Frank Capra in 1960 Motion pictures would be about as varied as Sunday morning TV sermons if all filmmakers answered that evangelical call.

He adored Benito Mussolini, reviled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, supported Joseph McCarthy and championed the idealism of the American dream. That was the peculiar world of Frank Capra, one of Hollywood's most contradictory legends, a director whose best films trumpeted the glory of the common man and whose worst betrayed the self-indulgence of an inspired hypocrite.

Andy Roddick is out of the U.S. Open, and lately when Roddick is eliminated from major tournaments, it's the end of American men in the draw. But here Thursday there was 19th-seeded Mardy Fish gliding around the Louis Armstrong Stadium court using his sweet touch, able to time his volleys, willing to change the pace on his groundstrokes. Combined with a late-career decision to become supremely physically fit, the 28-year-old Fish looks rejuvenated, especially after his 7-5, 6-0, 6-2 victory over Pablo Cuevas in his second-round match.

The film landscape is changing so quickly these days with lively debates over whether to shoot in 3-D or 2-D or use digital or traditional film cameras. But a new UCLA Film and Television Archive series, "From Nitrate to Digital: New Technologies and the Art of Cinema," illustrates that technological change is the norm in Hollywood. The program, which opens Saturday at the Billy Wilder Theater, "is about reminding people that the industry has been through these changes before and Hollywood and artists have adapted and adopted to those transitions," notes programmer Paul Malcolm.

‘From Silent to Sound' Everyone knows that silent films gave way to sound ones, but that transition didn't happen at the snap of a finger. For a few years, studios produced both silent and sound versions of the same feature. This UCLA Film & Television Archive program offers the unprecedented opportunity to see the surprisingly dissimilar sound and silent versions of the 1930 circus melodrama "Rain or Shine," both directed by Frank Capra. The different choices Capra made in the two mediums couldn't be more fascinating.

Hey, did you hear the joke about the Great Recession of 2008-10? You'll be laughing all the way to the poorhouse, or the federal penitentiary in Bernie Madoff's case. ( Bah-DUM-bum? ) Oh, we've got a billion of 'em, folks. Make that 700 billion if you're a banker with powerful friends in Washington. For instance, take Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers -- please. For the tens of millions of Americans who've lost their jobs, homes and dreams in the current economic downturn and the millions more who've witnessed the disaster with mounting anxiety and fury, there's nothing very funny about the financial crash of 2008 and its roiling aftermath.

The American Cinematheque is ringing in the new year with a screening today at the Egyptian of the 1946 Frank Capra classic "It's a Wonderful Life," starring Jimmy Stewart, while the Aero goes Marxist with two zany Marx Brothers delights: 1935's "A Night at the Opera" and 1930's "Animal Crackers," in which Groucho performs his signature tune, "Hooray for Captain Spaulding." Capra fest Capra's politico films, 1939's "Mr.

Resourceful nostalgia carries "It's a Wonderful Life -- A Live Radio Play" at Stages Theatre in Fullerton. Joe Landry's take on the Frank Capra holiday film classic transpires in a 1940s radio studio, where director Rayanne Thorn's versatile ensemble does yeoman work to evoke the golden age of live broadcasts. After we've assembled in the mini-stadium venue, announcer Freddie Fillmore (Connor Keene) introduces the KBFR Players, and we're off to Bedford Falls. Landry's adaptation adheres to the screenplay, though it compresses some sequences and axes others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winslow Homer and corny Frank Capra--together at last? Unlikely as those names are to be uttered in one breath at your local Bijou, their conjoining is the very core of Raymond Carney's ambitious argument.

Tonight's weekly Filmforum offering at the Hollywood Moguls, 1650 N. Hudson, is composed of five experimental works by San Francisco-area filmmakers. The best of the five are Alfonso Alvarez's beautiful, richly hued "La Reina," a surreal celebration of the Virgin of Guadeloupe that perceives the human spirit and nature as one, and Craig Baldwin's 40-minute tour de force "O No Coronado!

The Army, with a hand from Hollywood, has received a long-lost Oscar back into its ranks. The little statue took a long and largely unknown path before being passed from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis to an Army general in a Wednesday night ceremony and screening. In 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, filmmaker Frank Capra joined the Army and was assigned to create a film series, "Why We Fight." Maj. Capra, who had directed such films as "It Happened One Night," "Lost Horizon" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," was told to create the documentary "Prelude to War."

Dating can be stressful enough when it isn't holiday time. But December brings another potential layer of angst: the doomed-to-failure pursuit of the perfection seared into our memories of holiday gatherings with loved ones. The rub is that many of these memories are phony, based on holiday movies of phony gatherings with loved ones. It's a safe bet the actors who made them were thinking, "My real-life holidays were never like this! Oh, well, time to 'act' like they were."