Love Letters to Old Hollywood

When you think of Frank Capra, you think of humanity and what we're capable of -- idealism, love, cruelty, greed, kindness, hope... I've always ascribed to the belief that to watch a Capra film is to study mankind. Yet, lately I've begun to wonder just how much of the qualities we label as Capra's were actually his. You see, many of the filmmaker's greatest and most iconic films were penned by Robert Riskin, a prolific, stunningly good screenwriter. The men worked beautifully together... until they didn't. But that's a story for a different time. What I'm interested in is how do you delineate what came from Capra and what came from Riskin? Obviously, this is a huge, research-heavy question that I couldn't possibly undertake at the moment. Instead, let's (barely) scratch the surface of this idea by looking at  Magic Town , a 1947 film written and produced by Riskin that everyone has defined as Capra-esque despite the director not being ...