It’s not that Pocketful of Miracles is
completely unknown: The comedy has, after all, been shown numerous times over
the years on TCM, and its stars included the very recognizable Bette Davis, Glenn
Ford, and, in her big-screen debut, Ann-Margret.
But even many fans of older movies don’t recognize it,
as was borne out for me a few days ago, when another fan of such fare could not
bring it to mind when I spoke to her. And lines from the film have
not entered popular memory, as they have with It’s a Wonderful Life or a
much more recent movie, A Christmas Story.
Making the movie, Capra admitted a decade later in his
autobiography, The Name Above the Title, was a “miserable” experience.
It soured him so much on how the industry had changed since his heyday at
Columbia Pictures in the 1930s that it turned out to be his swan song.
Part of the reason why the production turned out to be
so joyless and disappointing was that Capra had begun it with such high hopes.
It was, after all, a remake of Lady for a Day, which had earned him the
first of six Oscar nominations for Best Director back in 1934.
Among Capra’s generation of older directors, the idea
of remaking their own black-and-white films of more than 20 years before had a certain
appeal, as evidenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934
and 1956), and Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (released first in 1939, then redone
as An Affair to Remember).
The logic behind their reasoning seemed overpowering,
even inescapable: If Hollywood was going to remake these (and it would), who better
to do so than the original creative force who knew not only what aspects of it
were worth preserving but also what could be corrected and what could be added
that wasn’t around a generation before (notably, color and bigger screens)?
There were only a couple of problems with this in
Capra’s case, but they were significant. First, although he was eager to adapt
Damon Runyon’s Prohibition Era tale “Madame Le Gimp” for a later generation, Hollywood
executives did not feel similarly, believing audiences would find it dated.
Second, Hitchcock and McCarey had, in James Stewart
and Cary Grant, stars not only well-cast but also uninterested in throwing
their weight around. But Capra had as his male lead Glenn Ford, who, as
associate producer, had helped finance the film and was not shy about determining
its direction.
In particular, Ford insisted that, as gangster moll
Queenie Martin, his girlfriend Hope Lange should replace Shirley Jones,
a recent Oscar winner for Elmer Gantry whom Capra had already promised
the role. The reluctant director acceded to his star’s cast-her-or-I-quit
threat, but it rankled.
One of the few fundamental deviations that Pocketful
of Miracles made from Robert Riskin’s script for Lady for a Day was
a larger presence for Queenie (whom 1930s audiences would have
recognized as a fictionalized stand-in for nightclub hostess Texas
Guinan). It is hard not to see the hand of Ford in that decision.
Lange was hardly a disaster in her role. But her
presence represented a mounting list of initial casting choices that weren’t
turning out as Capra had wished.
Ford himself was not his preference for superstitious
gangster “Dave the Dude.” But his desired choices—Steve McQueen, Jackie
Gleason, Kirk Douglas, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra—didn’t work out, for one
reason or another. (Sinatra’s association with the production would, in the
end, be limited to turning its theme song into a hit.)
Likewise, Bette Davis was not whom Capra had in
mind for street peddler Apple Annie. But Shirley Booth felt she couldn’t improve
on May Robson’s Oscar-nominated performance in Lady for a Day; Helen
Hayes couldn’t find space in her schedule; and Katharine Hepburn and Jean
Arthur (so memorable in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington) both turned down the role.
Davis, with increasingly lower-profile roles since her
triumph a decade before in All About Eve, was eager for the work and the $100,000 salary, and agreed
to take on the part when Capra offered it.
As great an actress as she was, Davis was, at 53, younger
and less believable as woebegone Annie than the two-decades-older Robson. But
Capra had a more immediate problem with her, caused by—yes, Ford.
The trouble began a week after Davis came to the set, when Lange requested a dressing room next to Ford. That room belonged to Davis, who was miffed about yielding her position to a younger, less-established actress.
In
a well-intended but clumsy attempt to smooth things over, Ford only made
matters worse by saying in an interview that he was repaying Davis for giving him
his start in films by putting her in this movie, hoping it would be a comeback
vehicle for her.
“Who is that son of a bitch that he should say he
helped me have a comeback!” Davis stormed. “That shitheel wouldn’t have
helped me out of a sewer!”
From then on, the production was “shaped in the fires
of discord and filmed in an atmosphere of pain, strain, and loathing," Capra
wrote in The Name Above the Title.
Years later, he regretted that with Davis, he “didn’t
see that needed consolation and reassurance after so long away.” But on set, he
was not inclined to mediate the noticeable tension between her and Ford, and he
developed increasing headaches.
It’s hard not to read Capra’s memoir without the sense that, over and above everything else, he resented Ford for undercutting his authority and creative freedom as the director: “My ‘one man, one film’ Hollywood had ceased to exist. Actors had sliced it up into capital gains.”
The results showed on the screen. It wasn’t so much in
the performances of the supporting players. (Particularly wonderful are “It’s a
Wonderful Life”’s Uncle Billy, Thomas Mitchell, here in his last movie role; Mickey
Shaughnessy, given perhaps the funniest line of the film, “She's like a
cockroach what turned into a butterfly!”; and Peter Falk, nominated for a Best
Supporting Actor Oscar as Dave the Dude’s cranky right-hand man “Joy Boy”).
Rather, the trouble is apparent in the film’s pace—which,
uncharacteristically for Capra, is uneven, even slack at points. Lady for a
Day had a running time of an hour and 34 minutes—plenty of time to tell its
story and be on its way. In contrast, Pocketful of Miracles clocks in at
two hours and 16 minutes but feels like it could use a good half hour cut.
Capra received a Directors Guild of America nomination for this film. But overall, he agreed with reviewers like The New York Times’ A.H. Weiler, who noted, “Mr. Capra and his energetic troupe manage to get a fair share of laughs from Mr. Runyon’s oddball guys and dolls, but their lampoon is dated and sometimes uneven and lifeless.”
A couple of years later, Capra expressed interest in
directing an adaptation of the Broadway satire The Best Man, but
creative differences with playwright Gore Vidal kept him from taking on that
project, probably for the best.
Pocketful of Miracles was
an exercise in nostalgia for a world that had passed. So had the studio system
in which Capra had once flourished.
(The image accompanying this post shows Ford, Falk and Davis. Though it seemed imperative to have the two feuding co-stars in a still for my commentary, I couldn't resist including Falk, whose performances gives viewers as much pleasure as it did Capra.)
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