BROADWAY BILL
*** (A must-see) Directed by Frank Capra Written by Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman With Warner Baxter, Myrna Loy, Helen Vinson, Clarence Muse, Raymond Walburn, Walter Connolly, Margaret Hamilton, and Frankie Darro.
I’ve never been one of Capra’s champions, though I admire the exquisite textures and feelings of his highly uncharacteristic and still neglected The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Like McBride, I agree with critic Elliott Stein that Capra’s most durable work comes in the 20s and 30s, before rather than after Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). By this reckoning Broadway Bill comes at the tail end of his most fertile period, characterized by his liveliest and most sensual work with actors, before the populist euphoria in his work took over (although there are foreshadowings of this euphoria in Broadway Bill’s closing minutes).
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Recently McBride wrote a review of Patriot Games for Variety that dared to attack the movie’s politics–a position deemed so out-of-bounds by the studio that it promptly withdrew its advertising from the newspaper. The fact that McBride was the only reviewer to bring up the film’s politics made his comments automatically enlightening, but he was clearly violating a central taboo in contemporary film reviewing by assuming that a movie has political meanings and a political impact in the first place. His Capra book is both shocking and useful for similar reasons.
Another factor that distances the movie from star-struck contemporary culture is that its spirit and energies are often more collective than individual, and in this respect perhaps even more evocative of the Depression than Capra’s better-known pictures. For related reasons the locations are somewhat more specific and resonant than they usually are in Capraland: much of the picture was shot at the Tanforan racetrack near San Francisco, and the gradual domestication of a leaking barn where Bill is stabled becomes central to both the plot and the developing love story, evoking the archetypal Depression love story of the previous year, Man’s Castle.
