Pocketful of Miracles - Production

Production

Frank Capra had directed Lady for a Day in 1933 and for years had wanted to film a remake, but executives at Columbia Pictures, which owned the screen rights, felt the original story was too old-fashioned. In the mid-1950s, when Hal Wallis offered to buy it as a Paramount Pictures vehicle for Shirley Booth, Columbia head Harry Cohn decided to offer it to Capra instead, hoping he could lure Booth to his studio. Unable to persuade either Abe Burrows or Garson Kanin to update the plot, Capra began working on the screenplay himself. His modern version, which involved Korean War orphans and an apple farm in Oregon, was filled with Cold War rhetoric and retitled Ride the Pink Cloud. Cohn insisted Capra find a collaborator, but he thought the draft submitted by Harry Tugend was no better, and he dropped the project.

In 1960, Capra bought the screen rights from Columbia for $225,000, and the director made a deal with United Artists, where it was decided to film the story as a period piece set in the 1930s. Capra originally cast Frank Sinatra as Dave the Dude, but the actor walked out due to disagreements about the script. Kirk Douglas, Dean Martin, and Jackie Gleason rejected the role. Then Glenn Ford approached Capra with an offer to help finance the film through his production company if he was cast as the lead. The director felt Ford was wrong for the part but out of desperation he agreed to the arrangement, which called for each of them to receive 37½ percent of the film's profits. Ford was paid $350,000 up front, but Capra received only $200,000. Because the film never earned back its cost, he lost an additional $50,000 in deferred salary.

Budgeted at $2.9 million, the film began principal photography on April 20, 1961. Cast as Apple Annie was Bette Davis, who accepted the role after Shirley Booth, Helen Hayes, Katharine Hepburn, and Jean Arthur turned it down. Davis was undergoing financial difficulties, and the need for the $100,000 paycheck overshadowed her concern about making her Hollywood comeback (her last American film had been Storm Center in 1956) in the role of an elderly hag. From the beginning, she clashed with co-star Glenn Ford, who had demanded Hope Lange, his girlfriend at the time, be given the dressing room adjacent to his, one that had been assigned to Davis. Davis graciously insisted any dressing room she was given would be adequate, noting "Dressing rooms have never been responsible for the success of a film." Despite her effort to avoid an unpleasant situation, Davis was given the room Lange had wanted, and from then on Ford began treating her like a supporting player. In an interview, he suggested he was so grateful to Davis for the support she had given him during the filming of A Stolen Life in 1946, he had insisted she be cast as Apple Annie in order to revive her sagging career, a condescending remark Davis never forgot or forgave. Because of Ford's involvement with the financing of the film, Capra refused to intervene in any of the disagreements between the two stars, but he suffered blinding and frequently incapacitating headaches as a result of the stress. Filming was completed in late June 1961, and Capra painfully struggled to get through the post-production period. Upon its completion, he professed to prefer the remake to the original, although most critics and, in later years film historians and movie buffs, disagreed with his assessment.