On a cold night just after New Year's, I watched one of Frank Capra's movies--not a bad way to keep warm, if you choose the right Capra. I wanted to tune in on an old American wavelength. A Capra resonance, an atmosphere, seemed to have returned off and on during the fall. It suggested some earlier American self-image, a kind of innocence arising from vulnerability and loss: post-traumatic sweetness. (The trauma in Capra's case, of course, was the stock-market crash and the Great Depression.) Had we renewed our citizenship, for a little while, in Frank Capra's America?
Capra's movies are the...