Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life

The principal aim of this lecture is to understand better the films of one of America’s greatest film makers by placing his work in the historical context of Jeffersonian democracy. Although Capra’s films were mostly set in his contemporary America the lecture looks at the reasons why that rural idyll, so foreign to the growth of a modern urban country, resonated so powerfully with audiences during the Great Depression. Capra won the Best Director Oscar for three times in four years for It Happened One Night (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can’t Take it With You (1938). Probably his best film, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, was released in 1939, the same year as Gone with the Wind so the winning run came to an end. Finally I will be asking whether this spirit of small town America still exists in the post-Trump America of the twenty-first century. More worrying, is Trump’s America basically the latest version of Capra’s America?

THE ARTS SOCIETY ACCREDITED LECTURER

Dr Colin Shindler

Colin Shindler has been lecturing on American and British social and cultural history for over 20 years. He was awarded his PhD at Cambridge University and subsequently lectured on film for their History Faculty between 1998 and 2019 exploring its relationship to modern British and American social and cultural history. He also teaches a variety of adult education courses at Madingley and Higham Hall in Cumbria and has lectured on cruises.

Between 1975 and 1999 he pursued a wide-ranging career as a writer and producer in television, radio and film. He won a BAFTA award for his production of A Little Princess. His production of Young Charlie Chaplin was nominated for a US Prime Time Emmy. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Buster and was the producer of various television dramas such as Lovejoy and Wish Me Luck. He has written three novels as well as numerous television scripts and radio plays but regards his greatest cultural contribution as choosing the title music for the police series Juliet Bravo.

His most recent radio play Leni Goes to Hollywood, about the German film director Leni Riefenstahl, was broadcast on Radio 4 in August 2021. Other radio plays for R4 included How To Be An Internee (about P.G. Wodehouse) and one on Private Eye & The Profumo Affair (Rumours). Both were selected by the BBC as Drama Podcast of the Week

He is the author of Barbed Wire and Cucumber Sandwiches: The Controversial South Africa Cricket Tour of 1970 which was short listed for the MCC/Wisden Cricket Book of the Year in 2021. He is best known for his childhood memoir Manchester United Ruined My Life which was short listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

His other publications include Hollywood Goes To War: Films & American Society 1939-1952 and Hollywood in Crisis: Films & American Society 1929-1939. I'm Sure I speak for Thousands of Others (2017) was a history of unpublished letters written to the BBC and his non-fiction novel Garbo & Gilbert in Love was an imaginative reconstruction of the infamous relationship of the two MGM stars. He is currently working on the television adaptation of his novel Hollywood Nazis. His next book is titled Granada Land: Coronation Street and the Emergence of the North 1960-1970.

GALLERY