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The Catastrophe of Success
By
Joseph McBride
Published by
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000
New York City
799 pages, illustrated
ISBN: 0312263244 (paperback)
Purchase from amazon.com here.
There is nothing quite like this angry book in the stacks of Capra literature that is available. McBride spends 650 pages narrating Capra's life and work, and then has 150 pages of notes and bibliography. He dissects Capra several ways, debunking Capra's autobiography The Name Above the Title, using some Freudian psychological analysis, and some flat-out guessing on the motivations of Capra who struggled from nothing to become one of the most successful moviemakers in all of Hollywood, only to have that career erode with self-doubt and events beyond his control.
There is a sourness about Capra in the book, specifically in vignette stories (of which there seem to be dozens) in which Capra boasts of his creative works at the expense of some other person, especially screenwriter Robert Riskin, who worked on most of Capra's most famous movies. McBride's angle of attack is one part just letting Capra's quotes add up to (apparently) obvious revelations about the mans character, and then one part piecing together a general biography culled from Capra's Hollywood history. The details are many and the amount of research that goes into every page is more than impressive, it's a staggering number of minor items that in the end creates an entire portrait. Intended or not, though, McBride's Catastrophe of Success is the Dorian Gray reverse to Capra's famous autobiography of some 20 years previous. Is this book an "attack" on Capra? And is it even a true picture of Capra?
McBride had access to Capra in his declining years, and the reported conversations are sad, funny and revealing. Like Orson Welles speaking of Faust, McBride seems to have human sympathy for Capra, but not moral sympathy. I don't know if this is a limitation. I know that McBride's book drives some Capra fans to apoplexy's of outrage.
The
book is well-written and engaging as both history and as a story. There are enough quotes from other Hollywood luminaries: John Huston, Barbara Stanwyck, Jimmy Stewart, and so forth, that Capra is shown as one of the main figures of the era called Hollywood's "Golden Age."
As much as McBride has pulled Capra apart into pieces, though, those pieces all put back together do not account for how Capra was able to make so many of those famous movies (Robert Riskin was hardly on hand for all of them). It is as if there are (at least) two "Frank Capra's," but McBride only had access to the one, and it makes for a distorted and mysterious view of the other Capra.
Purchase from amazon.com here.
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 ...there
are those who feel no affection toward the object of their
inquiry, such as Capra's biographer, Joseph McBride. Any
counter-reading of Capra must come to grips with McBride's
volume because of the depth of the work, the fact that it
as the first biography published after Capra's death, and
the necessity to distinguish one's own position from that
of the author. 
Above
all, McBride's biography seems to be a systematic personal
attack on the director.
Capra,
according to McBride, suffered a manic-depressive crisis
typical of the postsuccess phase: 'Capra had schemed and
sweated since childhood for the fame that was now his...
but when it came, it left him feeling strangely unworthy.'
(Vito Zagarrio, essay "It Is (Not) A Wonderful Life," pages 68 - 69, from Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System.
LINKS:
• The Beatrice has an interview with Joseph McBride, which is primarily about his Steven Spielberg biography book, but also touches upon his Capra book. [Below: From the interveiw at 'Beatrice']
I also thought that this would be an interesting contrast to my Capra book. Frank Capra was a man who was ashamed of being an Italian- American immigrant, who always tried to assimilate and deny who he was and that, I think, helped really destroy him as a person.
• A brief Wikipedia page about McBride is here.
• McBride's latest book(October 2007) is "What Ever Happened to Orson Welles" which seems to be a followup to his 1996 collection of writings on Welles. available from amazon.com
• McBride is a professor at San Francisco State University. The Staff bio page on McBride is here.
BOOKS BY JOSEPH McBRIDE:
- Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism (editor), 1968
- Orson Welles, 1972; revised and expanded edition, 1996
- Focus on Howard Hawks (editor), 1972
- John Ford (with Michael Wilmington), 1974
- Kirk Douglas, 1976
- Orson Welles: Actor and Director, 1977
- High and Inside: The Complete Guide to Baseball Slang, 1980; revised and expanded edition, High and Inside: An A-to-Z Guide to the Language of Baseball, 1997
- Hawks on Hawks, 1982
- Filmmakers on Filmmaking, Vols. I and II (editor), 1983
- Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, 1992; revised edition, 2000
- Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 1997
- The Book of Movie Lists: An Offbeat, Provocative Collection of the Best and Worst of Everything in Movies, 1998
- Searching for John Ford, 2001
- What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, 2006
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