Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Story: Damon Runyon
Producer: Harry Cohn
Starring: Warren William, May Robson, Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell, Jean Parker, Ned Sparks, Walter Connolly, Nat Pendleton
Year: 1933
Country: United States
Running time: 96 min.

(4.5/5)

Frank Capra is best known for a series of films in the late 1930s through mid-1940s that are generally inspirational, hopeful, and often politically-motivated to the extent that a simple, caring common person overcomes the greed of a more powerful person or entity. These films, including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take it With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life, are often termed somewhat derisively as “Capracorn,” which I think is actually quite unfair – these films have a lot more darkness and nuance to them than you’d expect from the way most people discuss Capra – but the focus on them also detracts from Capra’s many other films that are less well-known and extremely worthwhile. LA’s best repertory cinema, The Cinefamily operating out of the Silent Movie Theatre, is addressing just that issue this month with a retrospective focusing on Capra’s pre-1934 work. By the time he hit the Oscar jackpot with It Happened One Night in 1934, he’d already directed twenty films, nearly all of them hits. I’ll confess that I hadn’t seen any pre-1934 Capra films before this, but with a couple of double features under my belt, I’m already a believer.

Lady for a Day has the distinction of being a film that Capra himself remade a few decades later as A Pocketful of Miracles (which I haven’t seen), and also has a fair reputation among classic movie fans, so I was really looking forward to checking it out. I wasn’t disappointed at all. The Cinefamily programmer pointed out that virtually no one in the cast is recognizable to anyone except fans of 1930s film, and that’s likely true – however, to someone who IS a fan of 1930s film, what you’ll find in this film is a veritable rollcall of early ’30s character actors. It’s basically a film built completely out of character actors, in fact, placing people in the lead roles who are normally relegated to supporting or comic relief parts. This makes a lot of sense when you realize that the film is based on a story by Damon Runyon, known for his tales of the New York underworld teeming with vibrant and idiosyncratic characters – everyone here feels like they have a backstory and an individual personality, even if they only appear in one or two scenes and have only one line of dialogue.

May Robson (perhaps best known as Katharine Hepburn’s aunt in Bringing Up Baby) plays Apple Annie, a woman selling apples in the streets of New York to eke out a meager living in the midst of the depression. She’s prone to drink and lives in a shabby one-room apartment, getting joy only from the letters she receives from her daughter in Europe. But, see, her daughter thinks she’s a well-to-do society matron living at the posh hotel Annie uses to send and receive letters. Which becomes an issue when her daughter wants to bring her fiance and his father (a Spanish nobleman concerned about the kind of family his son is marrying into) to meet Annie. To the rescue comes Annie’s best customer, gambler/gangster Dave the Dude, who sets up an elaborate ruse to fool the visitors into think Annie is the rich, high-class lady her daughter expects.

What makes this admittedly far-fetched storyline work is the combination of a snappy and clever script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin and the spot-on performances by everyone in the cast, bringing Runyon’s world to life. Robson brings a desperate humanity to Apple Annie, who could easily be merely a caricature – the scene where she pleads with the snooty hotel manager to help her keep her daughter from finding out the truth of her circumstances is heartbreaking in the midst of a film which is generally a comedy. Later in the film she becomes a bit too much of a passive figure as others do the heavy scheming, but she carries the first half of the film almost completely alone. Comic relief is brought in spades by stone-faced Ned Sparks (also hilariously dour in Gold Diggers of 1933 and others), who spouts off one-liners with the best timing in the business, and Guy Kibbee in probably his most well-rounded role ever as the pool shark Dave the Dude finds to play Annie’s husband. Speaking of Dave the Dude, Warren William plays him mostly straight, but he still gets an essential subplot as his gangster activities threaten to derail the whole scheme when the police start tailing his gang. Meanwhile, Glenda Farrell (who tends to steal scenes in all of her films) is fantastic as the nightclub owner Missouri, whose unrequited love for Dave the Dude ripples just under the surface throughout the film. And the highly underrated/underused Jean Parker carries the straight romantic portion of the film charmingly as the guileless daughter.

The film runs a brisk 96 minutes, and the economy with which Capra and Riskin maneuver through a fairly complicated main plot, multiple subplots and character bits for a large cast, and numerous tone switches that all ring true, is fairly astounding, especially since all the subplots tie back into the main plot in an integral but uncontrived way. The film is hilarious, but you never lose sight of the Depression hovering just outside the door, or the life that Annie must return to eventually, even as the admittedly idealistic ending unfolds. I decided about twenty minutes into the film that I was going to love it, and that feeling was only confirmed as the film went on. They really don’t make them like this anymore.