How It Was

By JAY COCKS

THE NAME ABOVE THE TITLE by Frank Capra. 513 pages. Macmillan. $12.50.

The formula seldom changed. At the end of every typical Frank Capra movie --Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, say, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington--the hero, a generally shy but sturdy innocent, vanquished the villain, got the girl and reaffirmed once again the notion that all you really need in order to win out is spunk and some levelheaded determination.

It was a surefire fairy tale, the sort of thing that Depression audiences ached to believe, and one of Capra's many talents was that he could make it alt seem so tantalizingly true. As a film maker, Capra was an impassioned propagandist for the virtues of simple sentiment. As an autobiographer, he is somewhat more realistic.

Capra's early life does sound like one of his scenarios. An immigrant Sicilian, one of seven kids, he has to take almost as many jobs as courses to get himself through school. His first movie work, directing a one-reel rendition of a Kipling poem, is a chance opportunity.

Vivid Cameos. Little more than a dozen years later, he is an Academy Award winner and one of the few directors whose name appears above the title of a movie on the credits. "All the honors and glory a film director could hope for were mine at the age of forty," Capra writes in his rough-hewn prose. "I even made the cover of TIME."*

This section of the book is good, gossipy reading. There are vivid cameos of Mack Sennett trying to spy on his writers; of Harry Langdon, the baby-faced vaudevillian, suddenly famous and going to pieces; and of Harry Cohn, the libidinous vulgarian who ran Columbia Pictures. It is the latter part of the book, when Capra returns to Hollywood from Army Signal Corps duty during World War II, that makes The Name Above the Title such a poignant reminiscence.

Abruptly out of touch and out of time, Capra quickly became hobbled by the industrial intricacies of postwar Hollywood. Attempting to retain artistic control over his films, he forms his own movie company, which fails. He goes from making innocuous Bing Crosby musicals to television science films to an ineffectual remake of his own Lady for a Day. After a few more luckless attempts to produce other movies, he settles into uneasy retirement.

As in Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, ego so often intrudes in The Name Above the Title that history is sometimes obliterated. Still, no other book has given quite so vivid a picture of the way Hollywood farms out its once infallible film makers. Capra, now 74, has not made a movie in over a decade. The kind of happy ending he perfected on screen, the whimsical triumph at the final fadeout, eludes him in life.

*Aug. 8, 1938.

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