Frank Capra named the one actor with a “devastating combination” of talents
Hollywood history would be unrecognisable if it weren’t for Frank Capra, the Italian-born auteur who became so deeply embedded in the fabric of his adopted country that his name ended up synonymous with the best of all-American ‘aw shucks’ cinema.
Many directors tend to know exactly what they’re planning to shoot from the moment they step on set, but Capra rarely worked that way. He was an intuitive filmmaker who let his actors and imagination dictate the pace, rhythm, and development of a scene, and that collaborative spirit brought the best out of both him and his collaborators.
The winner of six Academy Awards, many of today’s most notable directors owe a huge debt of gratitude to Capra, most notably Steven Spielberg. Ever since Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the wunderkind who changed the game with Jaws has been known for his balance of technical virtuosity and overt displays of emotion and sentiment, with ‘Capraesque’ and ‘Spielbergian’ hardly dissimilar at their core.
It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Lost Horizon, and of course annual staple It’s a Wonderful Life are just some of Capra’s mountainous masterworks, uniting him with such ‘Golden Age’ icons as Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and many more besides.
However, it was an actor he only worked with once who possessed what the filmmaker saw as a unique set of gifts, which helped them survive and thrive for decades as one of the most popular, bankable, and talented performers Tinseltown had to offer. 1944’s Arsenic and Old Lace was their one and only film together, but Capra had seen enough to know he was in the midst of an undeniable superstar in Cary Grant.
“Grant is a great comedian, a great light comedian. He’s very good-looking, but he’s also very funny. That makes a devastating combination, and that’s why he’s been a star so long,” he marvelled to Richard Schickel. “I think he’s been a star for 40 years, and is still a star today because he is a great entertainer. And fun to work with, lots of fun to work with.”
If anything, it wasn’t really fair to the rest of his peers that Grant seemed to have absolutely everything in his locker. He was tall, he was handsome, he carried himself with a natural sense of authority and confidence, star power seeped out of his every pore, and he was every bit as dependable in screwball comedies and romances as he was in dramas and thrillers.
That’s why he’s often cited as what would emerge from the laboratory if science was tasked to create the perfect Hollywood icon from the ground up, and it’s something Capra was fully aware of as far back as the early 1940s.
