By Steve Vertlieb: During a particularly sad and lonely Christmas for my friend and hero, I wrote the brilliant motion picture director Frank Capra a few ineffectual words of hope and encouragement. It was a time of deep reflection and melancholy for the famed director, and I felt that I needed to reach out to him in compassion and support.
This was the man who brought such incalculable joy and hope to so many millions of filmgoers with his quintessential Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life. His nearly heartbreaking response remains, after all these years, one of my most treasured, and cherished pieces of personal correspondence.
He was a legendary film director, and became a personal friend in his later years. Clad in his distinguished white jacket, this was our first lovely meeting together in the Spring of 1972 at The Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. Frank directed Lost Horizon, It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, You Can’t Take It With You, and A Hole In The Head, among many other classic films.
Later that year I spent a quiet afternoon with one of cinema’s greatest, most distinguished motion picture directors. It was truly a memorable afternoon in which Frank and I sat together at the home of a mutual friend…just the two of us…watching a 16 mm print of his Oscar winning classic. It Happened One Night. At its conclusion, the two of us posed proudly beside a poster of his Oscar winning film.
This cherished afternoon with the acclaimed director of so many classic motion pictures, was absolutely sublime, and a wondrous remnant from a lifetime of cinematic memories and unforgettable experiences.
Here’s a lost treasure from fifty years ago. I was having dinner at my friend Pat Valentine’s home in Flourtown, Pa in July, 2022. He was looking through some old 4×6 photographs and showing them to my lady, Shelly, when he stumbled upon this amazing shot of beloved motion picture director Frank Capra and I. I’d never even seen this photograph until that night. It was taken in 1972 at the home of local television movie host and pal David Mallery.
Frank was visiting David, and I’d received an invitation to join them for an afternoon. Between us are Pat’s little brother, Todd, with his wife Wendy and their daughter, Ashley Valentine. I nearly fell off of my chair when I saw this picture, and longingly asked Pat if I could borrow it.
I ran over to my local camera shop this afternoon, and had them scan it for me. Frank Capra remains one of my lifelong heroes, as well as a cherished friend in his latter years. Life can bring both surprises and blessings out of nowhere when one least expects them to surface … and I shall remain ever grateful to Pat for discovering this lost treasure from half a century ago.
Yours will always be “The Name Above The Title” in my book, Frank.
Frank Capra defined the best of American values and optimism during difficult times in our country in the 1930’s and 40’s when life was often brutally challenging. He brought us laughter and optimism, during the great depression, and in the Second World War, with hope for a more meaningful tomorrow. There are critics, jaded and empty, who regard his work as naive, and yet there was a beauty … a primordial innocence, if you will, that is both uplifting and tender. With films like It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe. Capra’s work is cherished by millions of ordinary people across the globe. There is something inside of us, somehow reflective of an inner purity and goodness, that aspires to the best of humanity, a secret longing for happiness rarely expressed in contemporary cinema. George Bailey, as exemplified by Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, is a supremely caring individual who sees only the best in people, and in the world around him, until fate assails his soulful purity, turning his innate goodness against him as he is forced to imagine and confront a lonely world without his defining presence, an embittered plateau in which he had never existed. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart once again confronts the tyranny and greed of those whose personal ambitions nearly supersede his own sublime goodness, and belief in humanity. Capra’s films portray an America for all the people, a Utopian plateau in which mankind aspires to kindness and divine ascension.
Capra’s purest vision of humanity came, however, from an ethereal portrait wholly unlike any other of his films, a classic fantasy from the pen of author James Hilton whose romantic idealism was earnestly expressed in Random Harvest (1942) with Ronald Colman and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1939) starring Robert Donat. Hilton dreamed of a special land, lost to antiquity … a sacred shelter known as Shangri-La, hidden from the struggles and bitterness of the outside world, shrouded in mystery within the Tibetan mountains, where one might live hundreds of years in serenity, kindness, and love. There, a disillusioned American Diplomat finds respite and solace in a secluded monastery ‘neath the “Valley of the Blue Moon.”
Hilton’s exquisite fantasy, Lost Horizon, published in 1933, became the basis for Frank Capra’s solitary excursion into infinite wonder, a film unlike any other in the director’s legendary career. Released by Columbia Pictures on March 2nd, 1937, under the auspices of producer Harry Cohn, Lost Horizon featured Ronald Colman as Idealist Robert Conway whose dreams of a gentle, kinder world are shattered by war. Yearning for rest, his visions of serenity are at last realized when his airplane, narrowly escaping marauding rebels, ascends to the clouds above chaos and civil disruption. Unknown to Conway and his fellow passengers, their plane has been taken hostage by an unseen pilot whose kidnapping begins a precarious journey across cloud lit skies toward a strange and distant land. Their arrival in this ethereal community has been authored by its founder, a withered priest (Sam Jaffe) whose sojourn as the high lama is nearing its inevitable end. George Conway, a solitary dreamer without a home, is brought to Shangri-La as spiritual heir to the throne of authority and wisdom, an inheritance made all the more attractive by a beautiful girl (Jane Wyatt) who shall one day become his bride.
The evocative screenplay by Robert Riskin (then married to Fay Wray) lends literate credibility to an invitation to paradise, as Conway’s soul finds inspiration and infinite peace at last. Joseph Walker’s haunting cinematography brings wondrous beauty to the Valley of the Blue Moon, while Stephen Goosen’s art direction paints a splendorous landscape of wondrous possibilities. However, it is the rapturous beauty of composer Dimitri Tiomkin’s miraculous musical score, richly illustrated by the voices of the Hall Johnson Choir, that truly brings romantic, ethereal aspiration and joyous ascension to Capra’s vision of Utopian fantasy and a nobler vision of humanity … of horizons lost, then found.
Perhaps James Hilton’s message of hope and inspiration struck a nerve within Capra, as it did within ourselves … longing to remain forever youthful and, like a boy from “Neverland,” never grow old. Quoting the final poetic words of dialogue in the film … “Here’s my hope that Robert Conway finds his Shangri-La. Here’s my hope that we all find ours.”
