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Directors in general wear shabby looking work clothes, function mostly on sets or stages instead of offices, think more about getting money than about spending it, and are primarily concerned with cinema as a craft, not a business. Once the story is picked and the cast hired, the director is in sole charge until, cutting finished, the picture goes on view. A director's function is primarily that of a highschool, dramatic coach, raised to a fabulous power of complexity. He tells $5,000-a-week stars where to stand and how to speak, screenwriters with millionaires' incomes how to rewrite the classics they are translating into the topical vernacular, photographers where to point cameras as big as limousines, art directors to fabricate rooms, streets or cities. If producers are top dogs of the cinema as an industry, directors are its top craftsmen. Their pay runs from $200 a week (for beginners) to what Columbia pays Capra for turning out one or two films a year.
To say that Capra is now the cinema's outstanding director does not imply that he is tops in all respects. As they acquire prestige, directors acquire specialties. Capra's is a certain kind of peculiarly American, peculiarly kinetic humor, in which the most individual characteristic is an extraordinarily adroit and constant use of "business" to accent the comic line. Unlike Gregory La Cava (Stage Door) or Leo McCarey, whose The Awful Truth took top honors for direction at the Academy this year, Capra has no interest in jokes whose appeal is touched with neuroticism. He is sufficiently versatile to have made a successful picture from a story as fantastic as James Hilton's Lost Horizon. But as a master of pace, he is certainly no better in his department than England's enormously fat, lethargic Alfred Hitchcock (Thirty-Nine Steps) in the department of nightmarish melodrama. For sheer sentiment he is probably no match for pudgy, high-voiced George Cukor (Camille, Holiday). For action pictures he is topped by John Ford (Hurricane), or Victor Fleming (Captains Courageous, Test Pilot). For capitalizing girlish sweetness at the box office, he is certainly no rival to Viennese Henry Koster, imported by Universal two years ago, to whom Deanna Durbin and Danielle Darrieux owe a large part of their current popularity. For urbane, continental sophistication, he is outclassed by Ernst Lubitsch, who last week announced that he would henceforth produce his own pictures, backed by Myron Selznick, Producer David Selznick's agent brother.
Directors, unlike producers, are rarely graduates of the cloak-&-suit trade. They are more apt to be onetime actors, writers, theatre directors or assistant cameramen. The career of the cinema's current No. 1, better story material than some of the screen plays he has worked on, provides a fair example.