The "un-happy Ending" Re-viewing the Cinema of Frank Capra

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 in A 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 film It Happened One Night. In important early films such as Ladies of Leisure (1930) and Forbidden (1932), he discovers a despair deeper than humiliation and more permanent than the political machinations in which Smith and Doe found themselves enmeshed.