OFF-CENTERPIECE : MOVIES : Capra’s ‘Broadway Bill’ Finally Gets Untracked

As much as Frank Capra would like to be remembered as the director of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” he most certainly would say the opposite of “Broadway Bill.”

It wasn’t that Capra was ashamed of his racetrack comedy; he liked it fine. But the period during which the movie was released was one of trauma for the famous filmmaker and--to the public, anyway--he chose to forget about it.

As for Paramount, the studio that owns “Broadway Bill,” having a selective memory was just business. Paramount bought “Broadway Bill” from Columbia for remake purposes and then locked the original away from view.

Now, nearly 50 years later, “Broadway Bill” is coming back into view. Paramount is re-releasing Capra’s 1934 lost classic that has languished in the studio’s vaults virtually unseen for nearly 50 years.

As strange as it now seems in Hollywood, the practice once was for one studio to buy another studio’s successful films outright for remake purposes, which was the fate of Columbia’s “Broadway Bill,” co-starring Myrna Loy and Warner Baxter. It was remade by Paramount in 1949--again with Capra directing--as “Riding High” with Bing Crosby and was, in most critics’ assessment, a far lesser achievement.

“It’s not one of his greatest films, but an interesting film from his peak period--just after ‘It Happened One Night,’ ” said Joseph McBride, a Daily Variety film critic whose biography, “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success” has just been published by Simon & Schuster.

Stranger still, except for the occasional screenings of 16-millimeter prints and bootleg copies, “Broadway Bill” fell into complete obscurity despite the flurry of interest in Capra’s life and work--first with the celebration of his 90th birthday four years ago and then with his death last year. It has never been shown on television and no legitimate copies of it exist on videotape, according to Michael Schlesinger, manager of Paramount’s Theatrical Repertory Sales.

“For the longest time, Paramount kept ‘Broadway Bill’ out of release because it had its own version. Successive administrations didn’t even know it existed,” he said.

“Broadway Bill” is the name of the film’s title character, a racehorse that is nursed back from illness by his small-time owner Dan Brooks (Baxter) and his wife’s younger sister (Loy). Broadway Bill goes on to beat out chief rival and track favorite Gallant Lady, only to drop dead of a heart attack at the finish line.

In his autobiography, Capra himself, curiously, skipped over the making of “Broadway Bill.” McBride’s explanation is that Capra was suffering a double illness--one psychological and another physical. When the film opened on Thanksgiving Day at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Capra was hospitalized from an infection related to a burst appendix that had never been treated. Near death, he admitted to a deep anxiety that he could never top “It Happened One Night,” despite generally favorable reviews on “Broadway Bill” and the picture’s modest commercial success. A short time later, Capra’s wife also gave birth to a 6-pound, 13-ounce boy, whom doctors later determined to be deaf and possibly autistic. McBride postulates it was such a dark time for Capra, the director “could not deal honestly with the events of his own illness.”

Now, with the new wave of interest in so-called “director’s cut” versions of movies as well as obscure works of famous filmmakers, Schlesinger, who was hired two years ago to manage Paramount’s film archives, has made it his priority to get “Broadway Bill” out of legal limbo.

“Obviously, we (Paramount) would have liked to have re-released it when Capra was alive, but there were underlying story rights, musical rights, all kinds of rights that had to be cleared. Then there was the problem of the negative. The only fine-grain 35-millimeter in existence was at the Library of Congress,” he said.

Now that a new print has been struck, “Broadway Bill” will have its premiere at the Film Forum in New York on May 1 and at the NuWilshire in Santa Monica on June 4. It will then be released to cable and on video.

Will it takes its place alongside other Capra classics? “No one can can say until they see it,” Schlesinger said.