| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930–1960. By Eric Smoodin. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. xii, 301 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-8223-3384-8. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8223-3394-5.)

Frank Capra's career spanned the classic period of American sound cinema, and his movies, most of them acclaimed by his industry peers and extraordinarily popular with audiences, have continued to enjoy a half-life as representative texts of depression, wartime, and postwar America, with It's a Wonderful Life (1946) also a television ritual of the holiday season. Drawing on not much more than intuition, cultural and film historians have assumed that Capra's box office triumphs and the consistency of his preoccupations indicate that his contemporary audience had a particularly intense relationship with his movies and that they articulated some of its deepest feelings. Eric Smoodin tests this assumption by examining how actual viewers of Capra's films responded to them, and, while his empirical research generally confirms its validity, his book also demonstrates how singular characterizations of this audience are misleading. Its largest ambition is to reinvigorate film reception studies and to supply a model that complicates how Hollywood's audience is to be understood, as inflected by local considerations and thus not homogeneously national, influenced by ballyhoo and other forms of publicity before patrons even enter the theater, segmented by the circumstances of viewing, and often involved in institutional discourses discrete from film production that help to shape reception.

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