Frank Capra’s mostly wonderful life in Hollywood was not without a few missteps along the way

Even in retirement, the film Frank Capra loved best — “It’s a Wonderful Life” — continued to bring him pleasure.

In 1980, a group of friends who watched the 1946 Christmas classic together each year invited Capra to Manhattan for the ritual. According to Capra biographer Sam Wasson, the 83-year-old director made the trip from Southern California and sent along his own print to screen. The improbable evening turned into a moving tribute to both Capra himself and his tale of the suicidal banker George Bailey, who comes to realize that his life has indeed been wonderful.

So, too, was Capra’s, despite some misbegotten movies and his struggles with depression and other ailments. Hollywood chronicler Wasson (“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.,” “The Big Goodbye”) uses dialogue from “It’s a Wonderful Life” to frame his narrative. And he quotes a remark by Jimmy Stewart, who played the film’s protagonist, that “the best Frank Capra story is the story of his own life.”

“Frank Capra” is fond and admiring, even gushing at times. But the book is also candid about its subject’s missteps. These included Capra’s weak-kneed response to the anti-Communist crusade that roiled mid-20th-century Hollywood and his occasional failure to adequately credit his collaborators.

Francesco Capra, born in Sicily, arrived in Los Angeles with his family at age 6. His impoverished immigrant household, and especially his mother, prioritized work over education. But as a child, Capra was already ambitious; he peddled newspapers for cash but stayed in school. At the California Institute of Technology (then the Throop Polytechnic Institute), he studied to be a chemical engineer.

His interests turned out to be eclectic. After hoboing across the U.S. and Canada (and selling shares in a bogus gold mine), he was drawn to movie-making. Directing “gave him a long-awaited power advantage, avenging him” for childhood slights.

In describing Capra’s bumpy apprenticeship, “Frank Capra” doubles as a history of Hollywood’s early days and its transition from silent films to talkies. It also offers a measured defense of the old studio system, which curtailed freedom but provided stability.

Capra achieved many of his greatest successes in the employ of Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn, a profane, hard-boiled character who operated by instinct and ruled by fear. Under Cohn, yes meant yes; there was no bureaucracy to navigate, no series of endless maybes, as Capra would later encounter.

Wasson unabashedly celebrates Capra’s directorial mastery. In particular, he writes, Capra excelled at motivating great performances. But he also possessed technical expertise, editing chops and a keen sense of story. His movie sets were uncommonly happy. Clark Gable enjoyed working with Capra so much on “It Happened One Night” that he offered to do another movie with him for free.

The biography paints the director’s close collaboration with Robert Riskin, whose screenplays included “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” and “Meet John Doe,” in idyllic terms. A later rift stemmed from a dispute over a writing credit, according to Riskin’s daughter Victoria. It never healed, and Capra even skipped Riskin’s funeral.

The screenwriter’s contributions, Wasson notes, were key to Capra’s reputation for plots pitting the virtuous little guy against the corrupt system, with “the everyday David trouncing the corporate Goliath.” (Critics who remained uncharmed dismissed this work as “Capra-corn.”) In his 1930s heyday, Capra won three best director Oscars, for “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” and “You Can’t Take it With You.”

Industry respect translated into leadership positions, including the presidency of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and later the Screen Directors Guild. The groups’ already complicated labor battles and internecine politics intensified in the 1940s and ’50s, when the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood for alleged Communist sympathies.

The populist tone of Capra’s films made him vulnerable. Or so he feared, even though, for much of his life, he was a registered Republican. He was also a veteran twice over, though he never saw combat. He trained as an artillery specialist in World War I and in World War II, he supervised the creation of patriotic films, including the “Why We Fight” series. In 1945, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

Nevertheless, after the war, he was “tentatively denied” a security clearance that was required for a Caltech project. Panicked, Capra, already “an informer for the FBI,” wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Defense’s security board pledging his loyalty and naming various screenwriters and others as possible “Reds.” The clearance materialized.

Capra was generally fortunate in his personal life. After a failed first marriage and a dalliance with Barbara Stanwyck, he married a charming widow, Lucille “Lu” Reyburn, who adored him. They had four children, and she was “perfectly cast as Mrs. Capra,” according to Wasson, who suggests that their love only deepened over time.

As Hollywood evolved, Capra struggled to find his place in it. His own company, Liberty Films, produced “It’s a Wonderful Life” but later fizzled. And his subsequent directing efforts were, for the most part, either abortive or undistinguished. But he managed two late-life triumphs: a 1971 memoir, “The Name Above the Title,” and passionate engagement on college campuses and elsewhere with a new generation of fans.

Like Capra, Wasson is an entertainer, fun to read even when he digresses, as in his account of Jimmy Stewart’s stellar wartime record. His prose is energetic, occasionally overexuberant — and, above all, a paean to Capra’s enduring importance.

“So great was Frank Capra’s influence on Hollywood’s public image and handling of its inner politics, so definite were his powers of star-making, his artistry and his technical innovation across genres, that there would be no Hollywood as we knew it or know it without him. And what’s more,” Wasson insists, “without Frank Capra, we would have a very different picture of America.”

Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

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