Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons

Elizabeth Rawitsch received her PhD in Film, Television, and Media Studies from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research on classical Hollywood film, national identity and American popular culture has appeared in The Journal of Popular Film and Television and In Media Res .

'Considered "American" to the core, Frank Capra actually spent his life in ethnic-national borderlands, negotiating an identity between the place of his birth on the island of Sicily and the relatively new nation of Italy as well as between the ethnic Italian enclaves of his youth in California and Hollywood, the "melting pot" of Americanism for the world. To prove he was not a foreigner, not a fascist, not "exotic," and not the "enemy," he turned to Asia and the Pacific, creating a vision of "Eastern horizons" to legitimize a particular American identity for himself and his audiences. In this carefully researched and convincingly argued book, Elizabeth Rawitsch explains how Capra used his camera in service to his adopted nation to create "global dialogues" involving Asia in which the notion of "America" was always an ideological work in progress. Her fascinating analysis of the Jackie Chan vehicle, Miracles(1989), based on Capra's Lady for a Day and Pocketful of Miracles, is one of the many highlights of the book. Rawitsch's exploration of the afterlife of Capra's oeuvre in Hong Kong provides a fitting reminder of Capra's continuing contribution to the dialogue between the national and the global on contemporary screens.' Gina Marchetti, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong 'Just when you thought there was nothing more to say about legendary director Frank Capra, Elizabeth Rawitsch's new book casts significant and illuminative light on a facet of Capra little discussed. The director' shandling of, and philosophy towards, "the East" is a crucial aspect of all his output, and Rawitsch's work explores the features, foibles and failures at the heart of Capra's chinoiserie. With primary evidence and new readings of some of his more obscure and/or neglected movies - notably The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Lost Horizon-Rawitsch has constructed a fascinating new picture of a complex and complicated filmmaker. Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons is a tremendous accomplishmentand a terrific addition to the literature not only on Capra, but on Hollywood projections of the world, American identity, and transnational cinema in the golden age of the film industry and beyond. Strongly recommended.' Ian Scott, author of In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Mr. Capra Goes to China? The Far East, Authorship, and National Ideology 1. “Give Her Americanism”: Frank Capra, National Ideology, and the Global Community 2. “Can You Be Both?” Race, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Capra’s America, 1922–19613. “Where the Fruit Trees Look Like Women and the Women Look Like Fruit Trees”: The Bitter Tea of General Yen and the Blurring of the East/West Binary4. “Sometimes He Calls It Utopia”: Lost Horizon and the Politics of Imperialism5. “A Free World and a Slave World”: The Fractured Far East in The Battle of China and Know Your Enemy: Japan 6. “Tahiti? Inside Me?” Frank Capra, South Sea Exoticism, and American Domesticity Conclusion. Mapping a “United States of the World”: Authorship and the Cinema of International RelationsNotesFilmographyBibliographyIndex