Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra (Web Exclusive)
by Joseph McBride. Berkeley: Hightower Press, 2019. 601 pp. Paperback: $32.50.

Reviewed by Ian Scott

Joseph McBride’s Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success was the sort of book that turned heads. It did mine. I was a graduate student in California when it was published in 1992. I was supposed to be analyzing state politics, but an unshakable fascination in movies led me to Catastrophe and it became embedded in my subconscious and then later my work. McBride brought clarity to the process of film biography and virtue to increasingly testy arguments about authorship and the extent of a director’s control of his or her place in the artistic firmament. Arguably, Catastrophe was also the most intensively researched account of a filmmaker ever. Now, over a quarter of a century later, comes Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra, McBride’s tale of the making—and near undoing—of that book. That McBride should have entertained such an exercise is a sign of The Catastrophe of Success’s continuing relevance, but it’s also quickly apparent how the scars of that process, still self-evidently present for the author, shaped what’s contained within the pages of Frankly. 

This new book might have been subtitled Unmasking Joe McBride because it’s as much a deconstruction of the author as it is a further revaluation of Capra the filmmaker. Whether that confessional subtext was intended or not is hard to say. What isn’t at stake is the jaw-dropping revelations in this “real mystery,” to quote an unnamed Pulitzer Prize winner cited in the opening chapters, that is at heart of the tale. 

Before it ever acquired its Tennessee Williams–inspired subtitle, Frank Capra was intended as a straightforward account of the rise and fall of one of American cinema’s most beloved figures, a director who moved from commercial and critical adulation to postwar decline before rehabilitation via his wildly unreliable 1971 memoir, The Name Above the Title. McBride’s meticulous research, however, peeled away layers of disguise that took the story into different territory and left a much more curmudgeonly character in place: conservative to the point of reactionary, at odds with the celebratory themes of American life in which his films traded. Capra wasn’t an embodiment of the American Dream so much as a contrary figure fighting perceived injustices, McBride argued, forever dealing with his inadequacies and outsider status. So much so that, when push came to shove and he was eventually investigated after the war for his supposed “un-Americanness,” Capra reacted not by defending his freedoms but by accusing others of maligning those freedoms in the name of communist ideology. In short, says McBride, in 1951 Capra named names, not publicly before the House Committee on Un-American Activities but clandestinely to the National Security Resources Board and the FBI. 

The Catastrophe of Success thus found itself stripping away the myths, the half-truths, and the sidestepping of serious consequences at the root of Capra’s career. Friends told McBride that it had the makings of a blockbuster tale. The only trouble was that his initial collaborators became his arch nemeses when they discovered what he was doing and set out to bury the entire enterprise.

Over six hundred pages, McBride regales us with how that betrayal unfolded and took over his life for several years. By the close there is no doubting one’s sympathy for his case. Contending with successive editors at the Random House imprint Alfred A. Knopf—where he was first contracted to write Frank Capra under the guiding hand of legendary editor Robert Gottlieb—and with Jeanine Basinger, the keeper of Capra’s papers at Wesleyan University’s Cinema Archives, McBride is hampered at every turn in his attempts to research and publish the definitive Capra story. He has accidents—his car literally falls off a mountain—and meets obfuscation that is rivaled in its intensity only by the incompetence and intransigence he regularly encounters. 

As McBride tells it, some of the people at Random House displayed an almost comical disregard for niceties or professionalism. Against such unwitting foes, he spends what seems like a lifetime wrestling with permissions sought and promises broken. The chief culprits keep assuring that all will be well and that he can access and quote from the archives as extensively as he likes.

But these pledges kept being negated. In particular, the all-important Security Board file Capra wrote that revealed his collusion with the authorities during the anticommunist witch-hunt of the late Forties and early Fifties mysteriously disappeared from the archives. An array of other personal complications also developed. Over the course of nearly a decade, McBride lays out every piece of chicanery against him, in what is anything but a straightforward tale. The legalistic and moral entrapments are not his doing, of course, but McBride’s “difficult” reputation, as even he acknowledges, begins to precede him as he gets wind of what people are saying behind his back. In recounting these frustrations, Frankly’s retelling of them gets increasingly more bitter and angry. He clearly feels there are lessons to be learned in placing trust in the wrong individuals.

But it is also apparent in reading Frankly that one can be too close to one’s subject, if not the material and company one is keeping. McBride quotes Gottlieb as early as page 12, protesting that he knew he was in trouble when his editor told him, “You know it all—you may know too much. You will regret you ever met me. The Slasher will go to work.” The “trouble” McBride refers to here is in the final two sentences of the quote, not least Gottlieb’s reputation for slicing and dicing long manuscripts. As it turned out, however, many of the most significant issues were reflected in the first sentence. 

 The middle chapters of Frankly chronicle an endless battle with Knopf/Random House that lasts the better part of 250 pages. Here, as McBride reminds us of his journalistic training, he seems determined to doggedly transpose every single conversation he has about the book. He takes notes in offices, records phone conversations, sends faxes, and seeks meetings ad nauseam, fighting for the controversial pieces of evidence that will make Frank Capra the promised blockbuster, but that leaves the manuscript teetering on the edge of 1,500 pages. 

This due diligence certainly forms an archival tapestry of evidence against people and publishers that would surely rival the efforts of a skilled private investigator; and the result is that, again, there can be no doubting McBride’s version of events. But sometimes he picks out the minutiae of a conversation—and the timeline often jumps about in a not entirely transparent fashion—to confer a truth that has intricacy and inference written all over it. But these individual truths, while proving a point on any given day, divert the reader from the larger issue at hand. What was there to fear at Knopf from revealing Capra’s true nature in McBride’s biography? 

Some 499 pages into Frankly, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s eloquent review of The Catastrophe of Success is cited and answers that question simply enough. McBride’s book, says Rosenbaum, is the story of a “gifted filmmaker and a rather questionable human being,” someone who succeeded in duping the public for a long time about his real political beliefs and, by downplaying the contributions made by his screenwriters, the actual role he played in the success of his films. There remains little that diverts us from that view in Frankly. So, do we need 601 pages to tell us about McBride’s fight to put that contradiction into words?

The truth is we don’t. The length and breadth of this regaling starts to come across as almost a conscious attempt by McBride not to mythologize his story as Capra did in The Name Above the Title; not to make it lighter, brighter, or any racier than it might be. He’s simply in pursuit of, as Dan Aykroyd says in Dragnet, “Just the facts, ma’am.” The facts emerge without doubt, but the route to them for a writer as gifted as McBride is sometimes dense and dry in much of this book. 

One can of course admire such a pursuit of the truth in and of itself. No one likes being misrepresented, least of all maligned when they know in their heart that their intentions and version of events are honorable. I say this being a great admirer of McBride’s work, which has informed my own writing for longer than I can remember. But among a few questionable choices in this book, Chapter 6, rather bluntly titled “Victory,” appears no more than a propaganda exercise in convincing the reader that a war already won is worth repeating to prove the point. McBride parades in this chapter the accreditations and acclamation that Catastrophe of Success garnered when finally published—by Simon and Schuster years after he had finally extricated the project from his original contract—but it seems unnecessary. 

McBride reminds us that he knows more about the subject than virtually the entire collective of Capra scholars. But we knew that already. His skill isn’t in question, and there is more than a whiff of scores being settled here, not just wrongs righted. But it also makes McBride blind to the real limitations of the critics’ charges that he lists in somewhat exacting detail. He acknowledges that his isn’t a “film studies” reading of Capra and chastises those critics and scholars who hold this up as the great/only limitation of The Catastrophe of Success. But what McBride misses in such criticism is the hidden compliment. It’s the only thing they’ve got on him, and if it’s all they can niggle away at, then it simply shows the ultimate triumph of Catastrophe’s outstanding pursuit and portrayal of the evidence—evidence the rest of us couldn’t or didn’t pursue. 

So, is Frankly a cautionary tale as McBride suggests? It’s certainly a book that represents a very personal journey, achingly so at times, but one the author clearly felt needed telling, even nearly thirty years after the publication of his controversial biography. His harrowing personal account throws a spotlight on the potential contrivances and duplicity of the publishing world, although in an earlier period. It also highlights pitfalls and processes fellow writers might either recognize or count themselves fortunate to have avoided. 

But Frankly can be a tough read at times. I found myself somewhat embarrassed to be wishing that a Joe McBride book (in this instance published by his own Hightower Press imprint) had received a more thorough edit. It feels drawn out, possibly overwrought at times as well. McBride has documented a shameful publishing tale that clearly cost him personally and professionally in ways no writer should have to endure. There is also no doubt that some of the central figures in this narrative—and their names don’t need repeating to underscore their bad faith, at best, and contemptuous duplicity at worst—acted in ways that none of us would wish on our worst enemies. 

Yet, one can’t help but feel at the end of Frankly that this book constitutes McBride’s own unmasking as much as that of his original publisher, or even Capra. Frank Capra took a fork in the road in the second half of his career; an ill-advised one that had devastating effects. His reputation was revived through his autobiography by a fabulist conceit, clever perhaps, devious possibly, but nevertheless by the kind of rehabilitation that artists have enjoyed for a long time. McBride exposed the conjuring trick, and some with vested interests didn’t like the implications of his findings for their own prospects, and a game of bluff, double-bluff, and sabotage followed.

His fight to expose Capra’s past came at a significant personal cost, but one senses that there is a more magnanimous tale struggling to emerge from the heart of this book. Just as The Catastrophe of Success is the definitive Capra book, McBride’s version of these events from many years ago will constitute the definitive testimony of the struggle to publish it. Nevertheless, somewhere in the writing of Frankly animosity crept in, revenge even, and while both feelings are understandable, they unfortunately leave a somewhat bitter taste that McBride’s admonitory saga doesn’t deserve.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1