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 need to say something and his technical brilliance begins to close, ultimately to produce Meet John Doe and It's a Wonderful Life, in which message and technique are one, in which the meaning is the whole film, not just a nugget of wisdom to be extracted from it and examined independently or simply ignored.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is primarily important as the blueprint for Capra's idealistic-American-hero films…. Capra pits idealism squarely against cynicism, and does it more and more sharply. In Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, John Doe, and Wonderful Life, Capra seemed to be getting progressively closer to what he most wanted to do and say with film. (pp. 2-3)

One difference between those two films, Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith, and Meet John Doe is that in the latter the accent has shifted, the spotlight is pulled back and up to encompass the simpleton hero and his exploiters….

The difference between Meet John Doe and It's a Wonderful Life is that both good and evil remain at the end of Wonderful Life; one doesn't cancel the other out. (p. 3)

Frank Capra's greatest talent lay in vivifying traditional concepts of brotherhood, of the importance of the individual, of the sacredness of life, and at the same time suggesting why such cherished concepts are inadequate to a full understanding of life. Meet John Doe and It's a Wonderful Life, in particular, recognize both the indispensability and the limitations of such concepts. Maybe there's a place and a need for blind yea-saying. (p. 4)

What I find so compelling about Meet John Doe and It's a Wonderful Life is that they take their simple-minded messages of uplift seriously, but in the larger context of a world which requires more than simple, if helpful, formulas, a world which, in fact, seems to require the hero's suicide when those formulas fail. They don't, on the one hand, take their uplifting messages at face value or, on the other, reject them. There's some play between affirmation and negation. Other movies like Meet John Doe (e.g., Ace in the Hole, Face in the Crowd), on the exploitation of the "common people," are purely cynical, as glibly and efficiently exploiting their subject as their heroes exploit the people. They're exhilarating but incomplete. They have a convincing negative but no positive. Their heroes are just shrewd operators, charlatans, and the fascination of the films lies almost exclusively in the audacity of their heroes' machinations. (pp. 5-6)

[The] main theme of Capra's—the longing for life versus the longing for death, or respite from life—is most urgently expressed in It's a Wonderful Life. It doesn't take either easy way out, making its case only for life or only for death. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the issues are left hanging, unfinished. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the undercurrents of remorse and self-pity are too heavy for the flimsily-constructed vehicle. Meet John Doe and It's a Wonderful Life are so constructed that suicide at one point seems to be the only answer for the hero. His feelings of bitterness and despair don't seem indulgent or fabricated. (p. 7)

If Capra must be categorized politically, I'd say that, based on his major films, he was apolitical, anti-political, or, based on Meet John Doe, a nihilist….

For all their political frenzy, Capra's films are not really definable in political terms. They were made with a vaguely-defined "public" in mind, not a party or an ideology. They break political "rules" and splice ideologies together. It's not for nothing that they're often called "fantasies."… (p. 9)

Capra's films (even his failures) generally display a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo, a deep dissatisfaction with life. They say, in effect, that life may or may not be good, but it could definitely be better….

Platitudinizing may mar the surface of most Capra movies, but Capra's dramatic sense wouldn't let it infect the whole (though his dramatic sense failed to detect the laxity of Lost Horizon, and the platitudes were stranded in the middle of nothing). The ideals of brotherhood, happiness, and true love aren't taken for granted. They're something to be struggled for, and won (as in It's a Wonderful Life) or lost (as with You Can't Take It With You, Lost Horizon, or the obviously-wrong, tacked-on ending of Meet John Doe), but the usually bitter fight the Capra hero must make to realize them indicates a deep discontent with things as they are. (p. 11)