Want to know the best Frank Capra movies? How about the worst Frank Capra movies? Curious about Frank Capra’s box office grosses or which Frank Capra movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Frank Capra movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Frank Capra (1897-1991) was an Italian-American film director, producer and writer. Capra was one of America’s most influential directors during the 1930s, winning three Best Director Oscars® in a five year time period…(1934-1938). His movies even created a new word… the adjective….”Capraesque”. Capraesque means…”Of or evocative of the movies of Frank Capra, often promoting the positive social effects of individual acts of courage.” So we figured if he could create brand new words…the least we could do is the give the man a UMR page.
His IMDb page shows 58 directing credits from 1921-1964. This page ranks 24 Frank Capra movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. His short films (5 movies), his documentaries (14 movies, his television projects (2 movies) and most of his early movies (13 movies) were not included in the rankings. Sadly I was only able to find box office grosses for one of his movies made from 1926 to 1929.
Frank Capra Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Frank Capra movies by the stars of his movies.
- Sort Frank Capra movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Frank Capra movies by yearly domestic box office gross rank
- Sort Frank Capra movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Frank Capra movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Frank Capra movie won.
- Sort Frank Capra movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Frank Capral Table
- Sixteen Frank Capra movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 66.66% of his movies listed. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) was his biggest box office hit.
- An average Frank Capra movie grossed $139.58million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 22 Frank Capra movies are rated as good movies…or 86.66% of his movies. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) is his highest rated movie while Riding High (1950) is his lowest rated movie.
- Ten Frank Capra movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 41.66% of his movies.
- Six Frank Capra movie won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 25.00% of his movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00. 23 Frank Capra movies scored higher that average….or 95.83 of his movies. It Happened One Night (1934) got the the highest UMR Score while For The Love of Mike (1927) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Frank Capra
1. Francesco Rosario Capra was born in Bisacquino, Sicily, a village near Palermo.
2. Frank Capra read a newspaper article about a new movie studio opening in San Francisco. Capra phoned them saying he had moved from Hollywood, and falsely implied that he had experience in the budding film industry. He got the job and immediately went to the movies to figure out how to make movies. It must have been a great movie….because he quickly became one of the most respected directors working.
3. Claudette Colbert and Frank Capra. Colbert’s 1st ever movie was 1927’s For The Love Of Mike. During the filming Colbert and Capra did not get along at all. After the completion of filming, Colbert told one and all, “I shall never make another film”. When Paramount loaned her out to film Capra’s It Happened One Night…she was not happy at all. The other star,Clark Gable, was not happy either (he had his own reasons). Then Gable and Colbert did not get along during filming. Well…..somehow all of that unhappiness resulted in the 166th best film of all-time (according to IMDb.com).
4. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) won five major Academy Awards®: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Riskin). Only two other movies have accomplished this Oscar® sweep….those two movies are 1975’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and 1991’s Silence of the Lambs.
5. Frank Capra directed 3 movies on AFI’s Top 100 movies: 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and 1946’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
6. Frank Capra directed 7 movies that received a Best Picture Oscar® nominations. 1934’s It Happened One Night and 1938’s You Can’t Take It With Your won the Best Picture Oscars®.
7. Frank Capra directed 10 different actors in Oscar®-nominated performances: May Robson, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper, H.B. Warner, Spring Byington, James Stewart, Claude Rains, Harry Carey and Peter Falk.
8. Frank Capra was married twice in his life and had 4 children.
9. Frank Capra even quicker facts: (a) Entertainment Weekly voted Capra the 9th Best Director of All-Time. (b) Capra hosted the 1936 and 1939. (c) His last name means goat in his native Italy. (d) Was awarded an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award.(e) Honored on a US Postage Stamp in May 2012.
10. Check out Frank Capra‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globe® is a registered trademark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
Want to bring this up—you have “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” coming in #26 in 1933 with a gross of $2,400,000 and “Lady For a Day” that same year only doing $1,700,000. Joseph McBride’s pretty authoritative bio of Capra would indicate something more like the opposite, that “Yen” was a failure and “Lady” a good-sized hit. Any feedback? I’m doing a review of “Yen” for my blog at Movies Ala Mark (shameless plug) and want to see if I can do right by numbers. I use your site religiously, but I do find a few things that are at variance from other sources every so often. What say? Cheers,Mark
Hey Mark….thanks for the question. It has been awhile since I went down the Frank Capra path with regards to the research shown for this page. Pretty sure my The Bitter Tea of General Yen gross comes from a Walter Wanger book. That book breaks down most of his movies with cost, domestic gross, worldwide gross and profitability. As for Lady For A Day…I used lots of Capra books (my least favorite source to use) to get that gross. Many books will say things like….”he followed that with the smash hit, Lady For A Day.” The problem is it never explains what they consider to be a smash hit. Our records show all the movies that grossed over 1 million in rentals…..neither movie hit that threshold.
Wiki has the budget of Lady For A Day at $300,000…..we have the rentals for that number more than double than the budget….which would have made Lady For A Day a very successful movie with regards to profit. Wiki has The Bitter Tea of General Yen with a million dollar budget….our rental number is about $200,000 less the budget…so it was a failure in the eyes of Columbia. I think when writers look back at a career…they associate a failed filmed with low box office…and a profitable film with high box office. Call it the Waterworld effect….that movie got labeled a box office bomb….because the budget was so high…..it actually grossed over $350 million at the worldwide box office….it just cost so much to make it got labeled as doing nothing at the box office.
And of course….I have to mention that Columbia was notorious for playing around with the box office grosses….all in efforts to ensure the movie makers did not reach their incentives….and earn more money. Look up the history of Frank Capra and It Happened One Night. Which basically goes back to our basic guideline we tell people. Our box office estimates are our “best guess” the actual number will never be known….however…with the amount of research and our database…we feel our “best guess” is usually pretty good….and if numbers or better sources pop up…we will be glad to change our estimates.
Hope that explains it….sorry for such a long winded answer.
Great answer, actually, and thanks. I’ll see if I can find a copy of the Wanger book.
Hey Mark. Thanks for the kind words. Seems like their is pdf file out there with that information. Continued success with your blog.
1 I duly attended Campbell College Belfast on Saturday evening for a special Christmas showing of It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie was introduced by a member of staff who was the College movie buff and he gave us so many Possibly Interesting Facts that I almost thought that Bruce Cogerson had suddenly taken up a post there and had appeared among us. Included in the information that was new to me at least was that –
(1) It’s a Wonderful Life began its own cinematic life as a Christmas card. Philip Van Doren Stern could not get a publisher for his short story The Greatest Gift so he reworked it in the form of a 21 page Christmas card and sent to all of the major Hollywood studios and RKO bought it for 10,000 dollars.
(2) Although subsequently profitable and now an all-time classic it was as Bruce indicates abovea flop on initial release and Capra lost half a million dollars of his own money on it (about $6 million in today’s cash).
(3) The movie was shot at the height of summer 1946 and the cast and crew were sweltered and all that snow we saw was of course fake.
(4) In 1999 in the last of those 20th Century movies opinion polls that John puts a lot of store in Jimmy was voted the most popular of all the great stars in the entire century. D**n it John missed out again – Jimmy is just 3rd of my all-time faves after Widmark and Greg!
2 BRUCE. I notice you have flagged up Laddie’s page again which normally means you have made adjustments but I can’t immediately detect anything new – you’re not doing a hatchet job on the grosses of another of my idols?
CORRECTION AND APOLOGIES 1 (1) of my previous Capra post should read “could not get a PUBLISHER for his short story”.
Fixed.
Hey Bob….great stuff on It’s A Wonderful Life….and the perfect time of the year to share it. Yep television made It’s A Wonderfule Life the classic it became…versus it’s initial release….which made some decent money at the box office…but it’s cost was to hard to overcome to make it profitable. As for Stewart….1st or 3rd….the man was a legend.
As for Ladd…..he is only one the heading because his name was a perfect for balance in the heading….nothing new there…before putting Ladd in that spot the header was “off center”….so Laddie came in and saved the day.
Hi
I once read a review by a high brow critic on Capra’s movies. He was pretty scathing. He thought they were all too sentimental, populist and naive. Because I always remembered the review, I made a point of watching any of his films that came up.
I really think Capra was an idealist. He thought the best of people and believed that people at their best could make a difference. The theme of Its A Wonderful Life, about how a man can touch the lives of so many other people is hardly sentimental because its true. I think Its A Wonderful Life is a really uplifting movie and I never tire of watching it.
I’ve always enjoyed Lost Horizon, apparently they were going to do the Shangri la scene in colour but it would be too expensive. Which is a pity because it would have really looked well.
Although less celebrated, State of the Union is excellent, and in this Presidential year, is still very relevant.
Hey Chris. I think some of the massive success Capra experienced got him lots of love…but his fair share of dislike. Sounds like that high brow critic had an axe to grind with Capra. I agree with you, he was a huge idealist. I think Capra ran across a lot of the people you mentioned as he went from nothing in the movie business to one of the most powerful people in the movie business. It’s A Wonderful Life only gets better and better as it ages. As much as Capra spent making Lost Horizon…it is amazing that the did not give him the money to make that part colorful. I think State of the Union is the best Hepburn/Tracy movie…..and yes it is a perfect movie to watch today. As always…thanks for your movie thoughts.