Pocketful of Miracles is a 1961 American comedy film directed by Frank Capra. The screenplay by Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend is based on the screenplay Lady for a Day by Robert Riskin, which was adapted from the Damon Runyon short story Madame La Gimp.
The film proved to be the final project for both Capra and veteran actor Thomas Mitchell. It also featured the film debut of Ann-Margret.
Plot
Dave the Dude is a successful but very superstitious New York City gangster who buys apples from street peddler Apple Annie to bring him good luck. On the eve of a very important meeting, he learns Annie has an adult daughter named Louise, who was sent to a school in Europe as a child. Louise believes Annie is wealthy socialite Mrs. E. Worthington Manville, and she is bringing her aristocratic fiancé Carlos and his father, Count Alfonso Romero, to the States to meet her mother.
Dave's girlfriend Queenie Martin convinces him to help Annie continue her charade for the benefit of Louise. While Queenie takes on the task of transforming the derelict into a dowager, Dave arranges for pool hustler Henry D. Blake to pose as Annie's husband, the dignified Judge Manville, and hires a man to pose as her butler Hudgins. As Dave continues to postpone his appointment with another powerful gangster, his right hand man Joy Boy becomes increasingly exasperated. Dave manages to engineer a lavish reception with both the mayor and the governor as guests, and Louise and her impressed future husband and father-in-law return to Europe none the wiser about her mother's real identity.
Production
Frank Capra had directed Lady for a Day in 1933 and for years had wanted to film a remake, but executives at Columbia Pictures, which owned the screen rights, felt the original story was too old-fashioned. In the mid-1950s, when Hal Wallis offered to buy it as a Paramount Pictures vehicle for Shirley Booth, Columbia head Harry Cohn decided to offer it to Capra instead, hoping he could lure Booth to his studio. Unable to persuade either Abe Burrows or Garson Kanin to update the plot, Capra began working on the screenplay himself. His modern version, which involved Korean War orphans and an apple farm in Oregon, was filled with Cold War rhetoric and retitled Ride the Pink Cloud. Cohn insisted Capra find a collaborator, but he thought the draft submitted by Harry Tugend was no better, and he dropped the project. [1]
In 1960, Cohn sold Capra the rights for $225,000, [2] and the director made a deal with United Artists, where it was decided to film the story as a period piece set in the 1930s. Capra originally cast Frank Sinatra as Dave the Dude, but the actor walked out due to disagreements about the script. Kirk Douglas, Dean Martin, and Jackie Gleason rejected the role. Then Glenn Ford approached Capra with an offer to help finance the film through his production company if he was cast as the lead. The director felt Ford was wrong for the part but out of desperation he agreed to the arrangement, which called for each of them to receive 37½ percent of the film's profits. Ford was paid $350,000 up front, but Capra received only $200,000. Because the film never earned back its cost, he lost an additional $50,000 in deferred salary. [1]
Hope Lange as Queenie Martin
Budgeted at $2.9 million, the film began principal photography on April 20, 1961. [1] Cast as Apple Annie was Bette Davis, who accepted the role after Shirley Booth, Helen Hayes, Katharine Hepburn, and Jean Arthur turned it down. Davis was undergoing financial difficulties, and the need for the $100,000 paycheck overshadowed her concern about making her Hollywood comeback (her last American film had been Storm Center in 1956) in the role of an elderly hag. [1][3] From the beginning, she clashed with co-star Glenn Ford, who had demanded Hope Lange, his girlfriend at the time, be given the dressing room adjacent to his, one that had been assigned to Davis. Davis graciously insisted any dressing room she was given would be adequate, noting "Dressing rooms have never been responsible for the success of a film." [2] Despite her effort to avoid an unpleasant situation, Davis was given the room Lange had wanted, and from then on Ford began treating her like a supporting player. In an interview, he suggested he was so grateful to Davis for the support she had given him during the filming of A Stolen Life in 1946, he had insisted she be cast as Apple Annie in order to revive her sagging career, a condescending remark Davis never forgot or forgave. [2][3] Because of Ford's involvement with the financing of the film, Capra refused to intervene in any of the disagreements between the two stars, but he suffered blinding and frequently incapacitating headaches as a result of the stress. Filming was completed in late June 1961, and Capra painfully struggled to get through the post-production period. [1][2][3] Upon its completion, he professed to prefer the remake to the original, although most critics and, in later years film historians and movie buffs, disagreed with his assessment. [1]
Cast
Critical reception
The critic for The Hollywood Reporter was one of the few reviewers to look upon the film favorably, calling it "a Christmas sockful of joy, funny, sentimental, romantic [and] frankly capricious." [1] In the New York Times, A.H. Weiler noted, "Mr. Capra and his energetic troupe manage to get a fair share of laughs from Mr. Runyon's oddball guys and dolls, but their lampoon is dated and sometimes uneven and listless . . . Repetition and a world faced by grimmer problems seem to have been excessively tough competition for this plot." [1]
Variety thought the plot "alternates uneasily between wit and sentiment" and added, "The picture seems too long, considering that there's never any doubt as to the outcome, and it's also too lethargic, but there are sporadic compensations of line and situation that reward the patience. Fortunately Capra has assembled some of Hollywood's outstanding character players for the chore . . . The best lines in the picture go to Peter Falk, who just about walks off with the film when he's on." [4] In Films in Review, Elaine Rothschild stated "this unbelievable and unfunny comedy proves only that director Frank Capra has learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the 28 years that intervened between the two pictures. Pocketful of Miracles is not merely out of whole cloth, but out of date, and watching it is a painful experience." [1]
Awards and nominations
DVD release
MGM Home Entertainment released the film on Region 1 DVD on September 18, 2001. It is in anamorphic widescreen format with audio tracks in English and Spanish and subtitles in Spanish and French.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i McBride, Joseph, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon & Schuster 1992. ISBN 0-671-73494-6, pp. 627, 635-639
- ^ a b c d Stine, Whitney, Mother Goddam: The Story of the Career of Bette Davis. New York: Hawthorn Books 1974. ISBN 0-801-55184-6, pp. 277-278, 286
- ^ a b c Higham, Charles, The Life of Bette Davis. New York: Macmillan Publishing 1981. ISBN 0-025-51500-4, pp. 257-258, 260
- ^ Variety review
External links
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Films Directed by Frank Capra |
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