Movie Quote of the Day (‘Pocketful of Miracles,’ on Its ‘Lady for a Day’)

Junior (played by Mickey Shaughnessy), seeing boozy beggar Apple Annie (played by Bette Davis) transformed into a duchess: “She's like a cockroach what turned into a butterfly!”—Pocketful of Miracles (1961), written by Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend, based on an earlier screenplay by Robert Riskin and the Damon Runyon short story “Madame La Gimp,” directed by Frank Capra

Fifty years ago today, Frank Capra’s remake of his 1933 Gotham fairy tale, Lady for a Day, premiered, with a bigger budget, bigger stars, and longer running time, in New York City. Its failure this time around led the great director to decide that the thrill was gone out of moviemaking in an age when a star (to his aggravation, only a middling one like Glenn Ford) could force him into a compromised product. Partly as a result, this would be his last completed feature film: three years later, he pulled out of Marooned when he tired of incessant studio demands for script approval and budgets.

Capra was right in this respect: among his quartet of holiday movies (the others: Lady for a Day, Meet John Doe, and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life), this one ranked last. I’m afraid that, like another holiday film, Love, Actually four decades later, the final product of Pocketful of Miracles failed to deliver on its tremendous promise. Miscast are Bette Davis and Ford, as, respectively, the street woman desperate that the daughter who has lived abroad for years not realize how far she has fallen, and the unexpectedly tenderhearted racketeer who decides to turn her into a duchess (or, at least, appear like one). Moreover, the extra 40 minutes gained since Lady for a Day puffed up what at heart is a comic fairy tale.

Not to say that there aren’t moments, even whole stretches, of pure enjoyment. When he wasn’t coping with cluster headaches over his feuding co-stars, Capra delighted in his terrific group of supporting players— not just Shaughnessy but also Sheldon Leonard, Edward Everett Horton, Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy of It’s a Wonderful Life), and especially Peter Falk, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his turn as Dave the Dude’s underling, the ironically named Joy Boy.

And then there is the dialogue. Much of the best of it sprang from unaccredited Jimmy Cannon (“superb slinger of Broadway’s argot,” Capra called him in his autobiography, The Name Above the Title). The sportswriter managed to blend seamlessly Runyon’s original lingo with his own, so it’s hard to tell the source of such lines as the above, or Joy Boy's exclamation upon seeing a room after a quarrel between Dave and girlfriend Queenie: “Look at this place, like the inside of a goat's stomach!"

For another Runyon Yuletide take, in undiluted form, you might want to turn to the short story “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” in the Everyman Library anthology Christmas Stories. It now only features the colorful characters and hilarious dialogue that Hollywood and Broadway (Guys and Dolls) have long loved about Runyon, but also an O.Henry-style ending and a distinct undercurrent of danger downplayed on film and the stage (we are, after all, reading about people engaged in criminal enterprises).