THEY RAISED A TOAST TO CAPRA

There are occasions in Hollywood when even those luminous names who have been part of the town’s history must feel warmly pleased to be on hand to eyewitness another memorable piece of that history.

On Wednesday afternoon, his old studio, Columbia, gave director Frank Capra a luncheon at Chasen’s restaurant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Academy Award sweep (five Oscars) for Capra’s imperishable “It Happened One Night.”

(Capra pointed out that Dave Chasen himself, in his pre-restaurateur days, had acted in Capra’s “Rain or Shine” in 1930.)

The Oscar triumph was historic because it, more than anything else, lifted Columbia from the ranks of the minors struggling along in Gower Gulch, known earlier in history as Poverty Row, and gave it status as one of the Hollywood majors.

So a few of Capra’s pals turned out to do him honor: two of his approximate contemporaries, John Huston and Rouben Mamoulian; his longtime cinematographer Joseph Walker (now 93), Jimmy Stewart, Ralph Bellamy, Viola Dana (now, like Capra himself, 87), Margo Albert (remembering the life-changing experience of being in Capra’s “Lost Horizon”), Frank Faylen, Lionel Stander, Alexis Smith and Craig Stevens, Hope Lange and Coleen Gray, Peter Falk (who did one of his early films for Capra).

Film makers from succeeding generations came to pay homage: George Schaefer, Gilbert Cates, Taylor Hackford, Walter Hill, Paul Mazursky, Ivan Reitman (whose “Ghostbusters” was Columbia’s, and the industry’s, largest-grossing film in 1984), Howard Zieff and, from Europe, Jerzy Skolimowski.

Peter Falk remembered doing a scene in “Pocketful of Miracles” in 1961 in which he had to put on his coat and leave a room, furious. The first couple of times he tried it, it was angry but not funny. Capra told him to go off and have a cup of coffee. When Falk came back to do the scene again, he discovered Capra had turned the coat sleeves inside out. By the time Falk had struggled into the coat, briefly putting it on backward like a straitjacket, the scene was still angry, but now hilarious.

Capra himself, as has been his work habit for well beyond a half-century, got the biggest laughs of the afternoon, wishing that everyone at the luncheon had had the excitement of knowing Harry Cohn, Columbia’s co-founder.

Capra remembered a day when Cohn ordered him to his office at once. Capra arrived to find that Cohn, evidently having forgotten that he called Capra, was roaring furiously and throttling his brother Jack, who ran the studio’s New York offices, over some creative differences.

The tinkling bell of an ice cream wagon was heard from the street. Cohn stopped in his tracks, took orders, ran to the window and yelled down for chocolate, then went back to throttling his brother while they awaited the ice creams.

“That,” Capra said, “was Harry Cohn.”

Guy McElwaine, the current president and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures, now part of the Coca-Cola conglomerate, took the occasion to announce a three-year grant to the UCLA Film Archives to help preserve the 100-film Columbia library there (now including a new print of “It Happened One Night”).

Columbia is also making grants to Wesleyan College to help maintain Frank Capra archives located there, and to Cornell, where the editing room at its Performing Arts Center is being named for Capra.

The week does not pass, McElwaine was saying at the luncheon, when he does not receive a proposal from producers or directors who want to make “a Capra picture,” or to remake one.

The fact is that Capra has very probably been one of the most admired as well as the most universally liked directors in the history of Hollywood. That explained the special warmth of the luncheon, which had the feeling of a family reunion. It is a particular test of individuality and greatness that other directors of yesterday, today and tomorrow wish they had made your pictures, and Capra is high on that very short list of the envied and emulated.

Hitchcockian has gone into the film vocabulary to cover a magnitude of sophisticated suspense. Capra-esque has gone into the same vocabulary as conveying a sentimental but comedic innocence in which, at the end of expertly told stories, the good guys and the self-reliant surviving women they love win for a change, and hearts are warmed.

When complaints are raised that they don’t make films the way they used to, it is often as not the kind of films Frank Capra made that the complainants have in mind.

They don’t, of course, make the world the way they used to, either. With the best will in the world, television if nothing else has inundated us with so much reality that it is harder than it used to be to surrender to optimistic make-believe.

Capra himself said years ago that he had abandoned film making because there no longer seemed a market for the kind of films, the only kind of films, he cared to make.

But the continuing appeal of the films he did make, including the now-perennial “It’s a Wonderful Life” (which was not that ecstatically received in first release), suggests that the particular combination of idealism and optimism, the celebration of ordinary men and women finding extraordinary capacities within themselves--his Populist persuasion--and the gentle, inventive comedy that Capra and his writers created was no passing, cyclical enthusiasm.

And, now and again, a film still earns the modifier Capra-esque, so it was wonderful on a midweek afternoon to be able to raise a toast to the man whose name was above the title and whose name continues to be meaningful in front of the title.