Pocketful of Miracles

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For the album by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, see A Pocket Full of Miracles.
Pocketful of Miracles
PocketfulPoster.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed byFrank Capra
Written byHal Kanter
Harry Tugend
Based on a screenplay by Robert Riskin
Produced byFrank Capra
StarringGlenn Ford
Bette Davis
Hope Lange
Arthur O'Connell
CinematographyRobert J. Bronner
Edited byFrank P. Keller
Music byWalter Scharf
Production
company
Franton Productions
Distributed byUnited Artists
Release date
  • December 19, 1961 (1961-12-19)
Running time
137 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$2.9 million
Box office$5 million ($42.7 million in 2019 dollars)

Pocketful of Miracles is a 1961 American comedy film starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford, produced and directed by Frank Capra, filmed in Panavision. The screenplay, by Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend, was based on Robert Riskin's screenplay for the 1933 film Lady for a Day, which was adapted from the 1929 Damon Runyon short story "Madame La Gimp." That original 1933 film was also directed by Capra — one of two films that he originally directed and later remade, the other being Broadway Bill (1934) and its remake Riding High (1950).

The film proved to be the final project for both Capra and veteran actor Thomas Mitchell but also featured the film debut of Ann-Margret.

Supporting player Peter Falk was nominated for an Academy Award, but George Chakiris won that year for West Side Story.

Plot[]

Soon after buying an apple from alcoholic down and out street peddler Apple Annie (Bette Davis), Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford) a successful New York City gangster meets his future girlfriend Elizabeth "Queenie" Martin (Hope Lange). As a result he becomes superstititious that buying apples from Annie bring him good luck.

Dave has an important meeting with Steve Darcie "Mr. Bigelow" (Sheldon Leonard), the syndicate boss, to decide whether to allow Dave to control the New York territory in exchange of Steve receiving $50,000. Dave counters with Dave controlling the territory in exchange of Dave receiving payment of $100,000.00 "as a token of good faith".

Annie, it turns out, has a daughter named Louise (Ann-Margret), who was sent to a school in Europe as a baby, but is now a grown woman. Louise believes her mother to be wealthy socialite Mrs. E. Worthington Manville, and she is bringing her aristocratic fiancé Carlos (Peter Mann) and his father, Count Alfonso Romero (Arthur O'Connell), to meet her. Annie has been pretending that she resides in a luxurious hotel (writing her letters on stolen hotel stationery) and has Louise's letters mailed there, then intercepted by an employee who hands them over to her.

Dave's good-hearted girlfriend Elizabeth "Queenie" Martin (Hope Lange) persuades him to help Annie continue her charade. Dave is worried that if he does not help Annie out his luck will end. Queenie takes on the task of transforming the derelict into a dowager. Dave arranges for cultured pool hustler "Judge" Henry G. Blake (Thomas Mitchell) to pose as Annie's husband. He installs her in an out-of-town friend's suite in the hotel, complete with Hudgins (Edward Everett Horton), his friend's butler.

When Dave keeps postponing a meeting with syndicate boss Steve to help Annie, his right-hand man Joy Boy (Peter Falk) becomes increasingly exasperated. Steve Darcie decides to give the New York territory to Dave on Dave's terms. Dave manages to engineer a lavish reception with New York's mayor and governor as guests. Louise and her impressed future husband and father-in-law return to Europe, none the wiser about her mother's real identity.

Cast[]

Production[]

Frank Capra had directed Lady for a Day in 1933 and for years had wanted to film a remake, but executives at Columbia Pictures, which owned the screen rights, felt the original story was too old-fashioned. In the mid-1950s, when Hal Wallis offered to buy it as a Paramount Pictures vehicle for Shirley Booth, Columbia head Harry Cohn decided to offer it to Capra instead, hoping he could lure Booth to his studio. Unable to persuade either Abe Burrows or Garson Kanin to update the plot, Capra began working on the screenplay himself. His modern version, which involved Korean War orphans and an apple farm in Oregon, was filled with Cold War rhetoric and retitled Ride the Pink Cloud. Cohn insisted Capra find a collaborator, but he thought the draft submitted by Harry Tugend was no better, and he dropped the project.[1]

In 1960, Capra bought the screen rights from Columbia for $225,000,[2] and the director made a deal with United Artists, where it was decided to film the story as a period piece set in the 1930s. Capra originally cast Frank Sinatra as Dave the Dude, but the actor walked out due to disagreements about the script. Kirk Douglas, Dean Martin, and Jackie Gleason rejected the role. Then Glenn Ford approached Capra with an offer to help finance the film through his production company if he was cast as the lead. The director felt Ford was wrong for the part but out of desperation he agreed to the arrangement, which called for each of them to receive 37½ percent of the film's profits. Ford was paid $350,000 up front, but Capra received only $200,000. Because the film never earned back its cost, he lost an additional $50,000 in deferred salary.[1]

Hope Lange as Queenie Martin

Budgeted at $2.9 million, the film began principal photography on April 20, 1961.[1] Cast as Apple Annie was Bette Davis, who accepted the role after Shirley Booth, Helen Hayes, Katharine Hepburn, and Jean Arthur turned it down. Davis was undergoing financial difficulties, and the need for the $100,000 paycheck overshadowed her concern about making her Hollywood comeback (her last American film had been Storm Center in 1956) in the role of an elderly hag.[1][3] From the beginning, she clashed with co-star Glenn Ford, who had demanded Hope Lange, his girlfriend at the time, be given the dressing room adjacent to his, one that had been assigned to Davis. Davis graciously insisted any dressing room she was given would be adequate, noting "Dressing rooms have never been responsible for the success of a film."[2] Despite her effort to avoid an unpleasant situation, Davis was given the room Lange had wanted, and from then on Ford began treating her like a supporting player. In an interview, he suggested he was so grateful to Davis for the support she had given him during the filming of A Stolen Life in 1946, he had insisted she be cast as Apple Annie in order to revive her sagging career, a condescending remark Davis never forgot or forgave.[2][3]

Because of Ford's involvement with the financing of the film, Capra refused to intervene in any of the disagreements between the two stars, but he suffered blinding and frequently incapacitating headaches as a result of the stress.

Ann Margret was paid $1,500 a week.[4]

Filming was completed in late June 1961, and Capra painfully struggled to get through the post-production period.[1][2][3] Upon its completion, he professed to prefer the remake to the original, although most critics, and in later years film historians and movie buffs, disagreed with his assessment.[1]

Reception[]

The critic for The Hollywood Reporter was one of the few reviewers to look upon the film favorably, calling it "a Christmas sockful of joy, funny, sentimental, romantic [and] frankly capricious."[1] In The New York Times, A.H. Weiler noted, "Mr. Capra and his energetic troupe manage to get a fair share of laughs from Mr. Runyon's oddball guys and dolls, but their lampoon is dated and sometimes uneven and listless . . . Repetition and a world faced by grimmer problems seem to have been excessively tough competition for this plot."[1]

Variety thought the plot "alternates uneasily between wit and sentiment" and added, "The picture seems too long, considering that there's never any doubt as to the outcome, and it's also too lethargic, but there are sporadic compensations of line and situation that reward the patience. Fortunately Capra has assembled some of Hollywood's outstanding character players for the chore . . . The best lines in the picture go to Peter Falk...[who] just about walks off with the film when he's on."[5] In Films in Review, Elaine Rothschild stated "this unbelievable and unfunny comedy proves only that director Frank Capra has learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the 28 years that intervened between the two pictures. Pocketful of Miracles is not merely out of whole cloth, but out of date, and watching it is a painful experience."[1]

Exhibitors protested Bette Davis's star billing as they considered it would negatively impact the box office performance and, despite the appearance of Glenn Ford, the film failed at the box office.[6]

Awards and nominations[]

Award Category Nominee(s) Result
Academy Awards[7] Best Supporting Actor Peter Falk Nominated
Best Costume Design – Color Edith Head and Walter Plunkett Nominated
Best Original Song "Pocketful of Miracles" – Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn Nominated
American Cinema Editors Awards Best Edited Feature Film Frank P. Keller Nominated
Directors Guild of America Awards[8] Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures Frank Capra Nominated
Golden Globe Awards[9] Best Motion Picture – Comedy Nominated
Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Glenn Ford Won
Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Bette Davis Nominated
Most Promising Newcomer – Female Ann-Margret Won
Laurel Awards Top Song "Pocketful of Miracles" – Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn Nominated

Others[]

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

Home media[]

MGM Home Entertainment released the film on VHS in 1997 followed by the Region 1 DVD on September 18, 2001. It is in non-anamorphic widescreen format with audio tracks in English and Spanish and subtitles in Spanish and French. It received a US Region A Blu-ray release on November 18, 2014 from Kino Lorber.

Remakes[]

Pocketful of Miracles is the basis for the 1989 Hong Kong film Miracles starring Jackie Chan and Anita Mui, which itself was later remade as the 2008 Hindi-language Indian film Singh Is Kinng starring Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif.

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i McBride, Joseph (April 15, 1992). Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 627, 635–639. ISBN 978-0671734947.
  2. ^ a b c d Stine, Whitney (January 1, 1974). Mother Goddam: The Story of the Career of Bette Davis. New York: Hawthorn Books. pp. 277-278, 286. ISBN 978-0801551840.
  3. ^ a b c Higham, Charles (December 1, 1982). The Life of Bette Davis. New York: Macmillan Publishing. pp. 257–258, 260. ISBN 9780440106623.
  4. ^ Meet Ann-Margret: Hard Work, Ambition Propel a Young Actress To the Top in Hollywood By DAVID H. KELSEY Wall Street Journal 7 Apr 1964: 1.
  5. ^ Tube. (November 1, 1961). "Film Reviews: 'Pocketful of Miracles'". Variety. p. 6. Retrieved 2017-08-04.
  6. ^ Beaupre, Lee (May 15, 1968). "Rising Skepticism On Stars". Variety. p. 1.
  7. ^ "The 34th Academy Awards (1962) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved 2011-08-22.
  8. ^ "14th DGA Awards". Directors Guild of America Awards. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
  9. ^ "Pocketful of Miracles – Golden Globes". HFPA. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
  10. ^ "AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers Nominees" (PDF). Retrieved 2016-08-14.

External links[]

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