In his lecture “The Un-Happy Ending. Re-viewing Capra, the Italian-American”, Dr. Zagarrio looked beyond the established concerns of Capra’s interpreters. He illuminated aspects of Capra’s works that were, so to speak, hiding in plain sight. Zagarrio reached back in time before the standard canon of Capra scholarship to dig out neglected works made before the director’s Academy Award-winning 1934 film It Happened One Night. In important early films such as Ladies of Leisure (1930) and Forbidden (1932), he discovered a despair deeper than humiliation and more permanent than the political machinations in which Smith and Doe found themselves enmeshed.
Vito Zagarrio (Università degli Studi Roma Tre) is an Italian film director and scholar. He is the author of numerous volumes on the history of Italian and American cinema.
The lecture was presented Monday November 3 by Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Italian Studies Program in collaboration with The Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.
