I interpret [the slump of Capra's films in the later thirties] as Capra's initially faltering attempt to assimilate an acute, new, altruistic impulse (which he accounts for, somewhat mystically, in his book) into his highly-refined filmmaking technique. (p. 2)

If Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and You Can't Take It With You happened to become box-office hits, it's almost entirely due to Capra's technical, sugar-coating skills, to his gift for entertaining, to the fact that [his] first "message" movies didn't just awkwardly "say something." There is a discernible gap between the entertaining surfaces of Mr. Deeds and You Can't Take It With You and their simplistic, preachy cores, and the surfaces were what attracted the public. Lost Horizon seems to me defective even on the surface, and its success baffles me. It's only with the end of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that the gap between Capra's...