The key factor in Columbia Picture's Depression-era climb and its development of a distinctive house style was, without question, its remarkable run of Capra-directed hits—notably Platinum Blonde (1931), Miracle Woman (1931), American Madness (1932), Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can't Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). All were huge moneymakers for Columbia Pictures, which finally shed its Poverty Row stigma during the 1930s, and they brought critical recognition as well. Capra's films scored six Academy Award ® nominations for Best Picture and five nominations for Best Director. It Happened One Night and You Can't Take It with You both won the Best Picture Oscar ® , and Capra won Best Director three times in a five-year span (1934, 1936, and 1938), a feat unmatched in industry history.
Equally important to Columbia's surge was Harry Cohn, whose authority over the studio—and Columbia Pictures at large—increased dramatically in 1932, when he prevailed in a struggle with Joe Brandt and his older brother Jack for control of the company, thanks to the unexpected backing by A. H. Giannini of the (renamed) Bank of America. Consequently, Brandt sold his stake in Columbia and Harry Cohn assumed the presidency, appointing Jack Cohn vice president and treasurer. Harry opted to remain in Hollywood, thus becoming the only president of a major motion picture firm to run the company while overseeing production in the Hollywood factory. Cohn was among the least "creative" of Hollywood's studio bosses, but he was among the most heavily involved in day-to-day operations. Moreover, he opted to keep Columbia in the ramshackle
Harry Cohn, who co-founded Columbia and ran the company until his death in 1958, is among the most distinctive and paradoxical of Hollywood moguls and studio bosses. As both the president of Columbia Pictures and the head of the studio, he was the only individual in classical-era Hollywood to occupy both the "home office" and "front office" of a Big Eight producer-distributor. And despite his well-deserved reputation for being a brutal, vulgar tyrant who ruthlessly abused and exploited his employees, Cohn maintained a production operation that not only turned a profit year after year for over three decades, but also turned out scores of canonized Hollywood classics.
Cohn evinced his tight-fisted, lowbrow temperament early on, as personal secretary to Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle, but his more tyrannical and abusive traits seemed to develop later, along with the studio's rise to power and his own ascent to the presidency in the early 1930s. This may have been fueled by Cohn's naive infatuation with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was the subject of a flattering (and commercially successful) Columbia documentary, Mussolini Speaks (1933), and whose offices in Italy so inspired Cohn that he replicated them at his own studio headquarters. Cohn also prowled the lot incessantly and was notorious for spying on as well as bullying and humiliating his employees. He was scarcely a creative production executive, yet he was more closely involved in day-to-day operations than any other studio boss.
Like his counterpart, Jack Warner, at Hollywood's other family-owned and operated studio, Harry Cohn quarreled with his top talent, overworked and ruthlessly typecast his contract players, and routinely suspended those who failed to cooperate. Cohn also had a tendency to hire left-leaning writers, due in part to Columbia's renegade status as well as the topical, socially conscious nature of its output. In fact, Columbia and Warner Bros. were home to far more blacklisted writers (and members of the infamous Hollywood Ten) than any other studio. The two sets of brothers (both named Jack and Harry, coincidentally) also were fierce rivals professionally. Cohn, like studio boss Jack Warner, constantly battled his brother Jack Cohn in the New York office for larger operating budgets and more authority over sales and marketing. Harry Cohn's status as company president gave him far more leverage over his New York-based brother than Jack Warner enjoyed, however, but it scarcely diminished the frequency or the ferocity of their fraternal battles.
By the 1950s Cohn had won the grudging respect of his peers and even his adversaries as Columbia enjoyed a run of hits that matched its halcyon Capra era and as the studio's pioneering and truly visionary foray into television series production paved the way for the other studios. The death of Jack Cohn in 1956 was a devastating blow, however, and the reviled "White Fang" lost much of his bite during the last two years of his life.
Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), You Can't Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), The Talk of the Town (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), All the King's Men (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Picnic (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Schatz, Thomas. "Anatomy of a House Director: Capra, Cohn, and Columbia in the 1930s." In Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System , edited by Robert Sklar and Vito Zagarrio, 10–36. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Thomas, Bob. King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn . New York: Putnam, 1967.
Zierold, Norman. The Moguls: Hollywood's Merchants of Myth . New York: Coward-McCann, 1969.
Thomas Schatz
Gower Gulch plant not only to cut costs, but also to maintain personal proximity to all phases of production.
One exception to Cohn's hands-on supervisory role was the so-called Capra unit. Here Cohn relied on Sam Briskin, Columbia's vice president and studio manager, whom Capra considered his own "unit manager," the one responsible for "all the production details." Capra's key creative collaborator was writer Robert Riskin (1897–1955), who signed with Columbia in 1931 and, after contributing to both Miracle Woman and Platinum Blonde , was Capra's sole collaborator on American Madness —and on seven of the next eight Capra-directed pictures as well. Theirs was an ideal melding of talents: Riskin's glib, rapid-fire dialogue, Runyonesque characters, tightly constructed plots; and Capra's deft pacing, genius for integrating verbal, visual, and physical humor, and skill with actors. Other key members of the Capra unit were the cinematographer, Joe Walker (1892–1985), who lit and shot all of Capra's 1930s pictures, as well as the editor, Gene Havlick (1894–1959), and the art director, Stephen Goosson (1889–1973).
Casting Capra's films—and all of Columbia's A-class pictures, for that matter—was a more complicated issue, given Columbia's relatively meager star stable. Capra's films generally co-starred a freelance star or loan-out from another studio playing opposite a Columbia semi-regular. From the mid-1930s onward, Capra worked most frequently with the "outside" stars Gary Cooper (1901–1961) or James Stewart (1908–1997) playing opposite either Jean Arthur (1900–1991) or Barbara Stanwyck (1907–1990), who had nonexclusive contracts with Columbia. In whatever pairing, these costars represented what became the essential Capra screen types: the aggressive, fast-talking, quick-witted career woman and the deliberate, low-key, tongue-tied male, out of his element among city slickers but ultimately capable of timely, heroic action. Capra's comedies usually centered on the male hero, whose common sense and homespun values put him at odds with the hustling heroine and with some malevolent political or industrial forces as well. The hero prevails, of course, thus projecting a world in which sexual antagonism and deep-seated ideological conflicts might be resolved.
To ensure an adequate supply of first-run product, Cohn also developed a cycle of operatic romances starring soprano Grace Moore (1898–1947), a former Broadway and Metropolitan Opera star who had a breakthrough hit with One Night of Love (1934). It established a pattern of first-run engagements in the United States and Europe that would be repeated in Love Me Forever (1935), The King Steps Out (1936), and When You're in Love (1937). Even more important to Columbia's Depression-era fortunes was Cohn's decision to increase and upgrade Columbia's overall comedy output as the Capra-directed screwball comedies caught on. This trend coalesced with Twentieth Century (1934), a madcap comedy directed by Howard Hawks (1896–1977) and coscripted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It starred John Barrymore (1882–1942) as an overbearing, over-the-hill Broadway director and Carole Lombard (1908–1942) as his former protégé, who is en route to Hollywood and a movie career despite his ardent protestations. This film hit led to two 1935 comedies— The Whole Town's Talking , directed by John Ford (1894–1973) and co-starring Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973) and Jean Arthur; and She Married Her Boss , directed by Gregory La Cava (1892–1952), with Melvyn Douglas (1901–1981) and Claudette Colbert (1903–1996)—that solidified the trend toward romantic comedies with a top outside director and outside star teamed with a rising Columbia ingénue.
The trend continued with Theodora Goes Wild (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Holiday (1938), and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), all of which were written, like the Ford and La Cava hits, by one of Columbia's top staff writers—that is, Jo Swerling (1893–1964), Robert Riskin, or Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)—who
In 1939 Capra decided to leave Columbia in the wake of his back-to-back hits, You Can't Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , eager to try his luck as an independent producer-director (with Riskin as a partner) and to end his battles with Harry Cohn. Capra signed a lucrative one-picture deal with Warner Bros. for Meet John Doe (1941), which gave him enormous authority and creative control. The film was a disappointment, starting a tailspin that would end Capra's career by the late 1940s and indicating that Capra was a consummate "studio auteur " whose talents ideally suited the resources and constraints afforded by Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures.
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