Frank Capra - Early Career - Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures

Early sound films

Capra returned to Harry Cohn's studio, now renamed Columbia Pictures, which had then been producing short films and two-reel comedies used as "fillers", which played between main features. Columbia was one of the many start-up studios located on "Poverty Row" in Los Angeles, and like the others, was unable to compete with the larger studios which often had their own production facilities, distribution and theaters. Cohn rehired Capra in 1928 to help his studio produce new, full-length feature films, in order to compete against the major studios. Capra would eventually do twenty films for Cohn's studio, including all of his classics.

Because of Capra's engineering education, he adapted more easily to the new sound technology than most directors. He welcomed the transition to sound, recalling, "I wasn't at home in silent films." Most of the other studios were unwilling to invest in the new sound technology, assuming it was a passing fad. There were many in Hollywood who considered sound a threat to the industry and hoped it would pass quickly; McBride notes that "Capra was not one of them." When he saw Al Jolson singing in The Jazz Singer in 1927, considered the first talkie, Capra recalled his reaction:

It was an absolute shock to hear this man open his mouth and a song come out of it. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Few of the studio heads or crew were aware of Capra's engineering background until he began directing The Younger Generation in 1929. The chief cinematographer who worked with Capra on a number of films, was likewise unaware. He describes this early period in sound for film:

It wasn't something that came up. You had to bluff to survive. When sound first came in, nobody knew much about it. We were all walking around in the dark. Even the sound man didn't know much about it. Frank lived through it. But he was quite intelligent. He was one of the few directors who knew what the hell they were doing. Most of your directors walked around in a fog – they didn't know where the door was.

During his first year with Columbia, Capra directed nine films, some of which became highly successful. After the first few, Harry Cohn said "it was the beginning of Columbia making a better quality of pictures." According to Barson, "Capra became ensconced as Harry Cohn's most trusted director." His films soon established Capra as a "bankable" director known throughout the industry, and Cohn raised Capra's initial salary of $1,000 per film to $25,000 per year. Capra also directed a film for MGM during this period, but soon realized he "had much more freedom under Harry Cohn's benevolent dictatorship", where Cohn also put Capra's "name above the title" of his films, a first for the movie industry. Capra wrote of this period and recalled the confidence that Cohn placed in Capra's vision and directing:

I owed Cohn a lot – I owed him my whole career. So I had respect for him, and a certain amount of love. Despite his crudeness and everything else, he gave me my chance. He took a gamble on me.

Capra directed his first "real" sound picture, The Younger Generation, in 1929. It was a rags-to-riches romance comedy about a Jewish family's upward mobility in New York City, with their son later trying to deny his Jewish roots in order to keep his rich gentile girlfriend. According to Capra biographer Joseph McBride, Capra "obviously felt a strong identification with the story of a Jewish immigrant who grows up in the ghetto of New York... and feels he has to deny his ethnic origins to rise to success in America." Capra, however, denied any connection of the story with his own life.

Nonetheless, McBride insists that The Younger Generation "abounds with parallels to Capra's own life." McBride notes the "devastatingly painful climactic scene", where the young social-climbing son, embarrassed when his wealthy new friends first meet his parents, passes his mother and father off as house servants. That scene, notes McBride, "echoes the shame Capra admitted feeling toward his own family as he rose in social status."

During his years at Columbia, Capra worked often with screenwriter Robert Riskin (husband of Fay Wray,) and cameraman Joseph Walker. In many of Capra's films, the wise-cracking and sharp dialogue was often written by Riskin, and he and Capra went on to become Hollywood's "most admired writer-director team."