Capra was building a distinguished academic record when his father, having just bought a lemon grove with his savings, died in a farm accident, a tragedy that would resonate in several of the directors future films.
Capras touch was already apparent in the comic story of a Belgian war veteran, a wide-eyed innocent who goes to America in search of a girl, his pen pal during the war, and ends up defeating a corrupt gang of bootleggers that had taken over her small town.
Capra eagerly met the challenge of sound and was in the forefront of those seeking to liberate early talkies from the confinement of the sound stage.
All of the scholarly commentators on Capra's work (and on that of most other directors) assume, seemingly without question, that the function of criticism is to move from relatively superficial and unimportant perceptual events (everything you actually hear and see on the screen) to a realm of profound, and invariably invisible or hidden, "deep" meanings.
But in the case of Capra (and many other filmmakers) what American academic critics seem not to have recognized is that their one-style-fits-all critical procedure may do violence to the experience they attempt to characterize.
The only problem (which is, in Capra's view, of course no problem at all, but a cause for celebration) is that her symbols won't stand still the way she wants them to.
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