Capra is the last survivor of that great quartet of American comedy; Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges. An Italian, born in Palermo, he brought to Hollywood the secrets of the commedia dell'arte. He was a navigator who knew how to steer his characters into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra's comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence in life.

The growing harshness of social life after the war, the spread of egoism, the obstinate conviction of the rich that they could "take it with them" made his miracles even more improbable. But, in the face of human anguish, doubt, unrest, and the struggle just to manage daily life, Capra was a kind of healer, that is, the enemy of "official" medicine...