Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House is peopled with lowlifes, ruffians, and whores, the level of humanity on which Capra often had found him- self in the past four years. But his acquired, self-protective cynicism had not obliterated his stubborn streak of romanticism. Nor had his rebellion against the discipline of the Catholic church and his skepticism about its doctrines destroyed his instinctive, almost mystical attachment to the Christian ethic. The heroine of Fulta, in Capra’s reworking of Kipling, is a Mary Magdalene figure, brazen and fickle, who nevertheless is transfigured by Christian redemption, filmed luminously at the end “as if she was inspired by heaven.” The characters and setting of the poem are introduced with lines of verse superimposed over stylized tableaux, composed and lit in a rather pretentious painterly style that Capra foreshadowed in his college paper [about cinema], yet with a degree of sophistication that belies his later protestations of cinematic naiveté. Capra’s narrative style is fast-paced and elliptical, his direction of actors broad but balletic, minimizing the obvious deficiencies of his spartan set and his grab-bag cast. (…) Capra’s finished film was shown to a local representative of the Pathé Exchange, a nationwide distributor based in New York, which bought it for 3,500 dollars, more than doubling the initial investment. The film opened on April 2, 1922, at the Strand Theater on Broadway, playing for one week with five other shorts on a program headed by Charlie Chaplin’s featurette Pay Day. According to Doc Harris [one of the film’s producers], Fulta “played all the big houses” and was regarded as “more or less of an epic”. Laurence Reid wrote in “Motion Picture News” that it was “stirring at all times and unusually rich in characterization (…) a masterpiece of realism, carrying dramatic value and a spiritual flavor”. “The New York Times” said that it “consists of faithful and vivid illustrations of the poem, with, however, an energetically sentimental ending which surely Kipling never dreamed of”. Capra always had a sentimental spot for Fulta. He retrieved a print from Ball in the 1930s and care- fully preserved it, eventually donating it to the Library of Congress. He sometimes showed it to his friends, and when interviewed for a “New Yorker” profile in 1940, he commented: “It’s a very melodramatic thing – not bad at all”.

Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Simon & Schuster, New York 1992 (revised edition, St Martin’s Griffin, New York 2000)