I Kiss the Ground

A steamer was docking in New York harbor. It was 1903. An illiterate Italian peasant picked up his six-year-old son Francesco from “the black dark hole of a creaking ship crammed with wretched, praying, terrorized immigrants,” carried him up steep iron stairs to the deck, and shouted, “Cicco, Look at that!” The boy could only see the crowds of people on their knees on the deck “crying and rejoicing.” But his father cried, “That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem.”

And the boy looked up and saw what he later described as “a statue of a great lady, taller than a church steeple, holding a lamp over the land we were about to enter.” They had just spent 13 miserable, degrading days in steerage crossing a stormy Atlantic Ocean after leaving their home in Sicily. Now they were looking up at the Statue of Liberty. And his father said, “It’s the light of freedom, Cicco. Remember that. Freedom.”

The six-year-old immigrant boy recalled this scene and his father’s words 79 years later in a speech accepting the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. In the course of his life, he had made himself one of the greatest and most beloved American film directors of the 20th Century—Frank Capra.

 Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897. After arriving in New York, the Capra family made their way by train across the continent to Los Angeles, where Francesco’s older brother Benjamin was already living. Growing up in his mother’s house in L.A., young Cicco did all kinds of jobs; he ran errands, sold newspapers, dug ditches, pruned orange trees for 20 cents a day, and even worked as an extra in the movies. But his ambition was to excel at school and, against great family pressure to quit school and get a full-time paying job, he persisted. Eventually he graduated from what would later become the California Institute of Technology with a chemical engineering degree. He was the only one of the seven Capra siblings to go to college.

 After he had already won his second Director Oscar in 1936 and his third in 1938, he took his mother to the premiere of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’” When the picture was over, she turned and asked, “When are you going to get a job, Frankie?” But he had the job of his dreams.

 In the decade before American entry into World War II, Capra was the most successful director in Hollywood. It was in these years that he created the classics “It Happened One Night “(1934), “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936), “You Can’t Take It with You” (1938), “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) and “Meet John Doe” (1941), winning three Best Director Oscars in the process among many other honors and awards. His post-war classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” (1946) remains a Christmas season favorite to this day.

You see in Capra’s films his lifelong love affair with American freedom and with the American common man. I “didn’t think he was common,” Capra said. “I thought he was a helluva guy. I thought he was the hope of the world.” Capra thought it was his privilege and duty as a film maker to bring to life for his audiences the true ideals of American democracy and the true heroic character of ordinary free men. Capra himself was living proof that for those willing to make the effort the American Dream did come true. In his great films in the 1930s and 40s, Capra created such an indelible impression of the beauty and nobility of America that, looking back decades later in a disillusioned time, actor/director John Cassavetes mused, “Maybe there never was an America—maybe it was only Frank Capra.” But there was and is an America, and that was the source of Frank Capra’s greatest inspiration.

When he was 85 years old and accepting the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1982 before hundreds of Hollywood stars and celebrities, he recalled his family’s arrival in America 79 years before. He told the story of that steamer arriving in New York City and of his family’s journey by train across the country to Los Angeles. He reserved the last words of his speech to speak directly to his mother and father and brother and sisters who were no longer living. He said, “I believe that they will hear me.” Then he said to his departed father and mother and brother and sisters: “Remember the day we arrived at the Southern Pacific Station here in Los Angeles, and papa and mama kissed the ground? Look! The American Film Institute has given me its Life Achievement Award and for that I am thanking them and all my friends who have come here. But for America, just for living here, I kiss the ground.”