The "Un-Happy Ending" Re-vieing the Cinema of Frank Capra [Paperback]

Literary Nonfiction. Film Studies. In this book, Vito Zagarrio looks beyond the established concerns of Capra's interpreters. He illuminates aspects of Capra's works that were, so to speak, hiding in plain sight. Not invisible but unnoticed, as Holmes says inA Case of Identity. Zagarrio reaches back in time before the standard canon of Capra scholarship to dig out neglected works made before the director's Academy Award-winning 1934 filmIt Happened One Night. In important early films such asLadies of Leisure(1930) andForbidden(1932), he discovers a despair deeper than humiliation and more permanent than the political machinations in which Smith and Doe found themselves enmeshed.