Archives are capable of wondrous things, sometimes holding the key to all your academic mythologies deep in a box only a handful of people even know exist. That may be an overreach for some, but it wasn’t for me. When I visited the Frank Capra Collection at the Reid Cinema Archives housed at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, I stumbled upon proof of the existence of something I had only read vague rumors about in scholarly accounts of Capra’s life: the legendary pink Capra-corn. Or at least that’s how I’d thought of it for years, hearing tell of this one lost script that I just knew would be the key to my understanding of how Frank Capra’s immense career ended in abject failure, forcing him to retire from Hollywood 30 years before his death. What Capra commentary might we have had throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s if only he had been able to make this legendary film, Ride the Pink Cloud, as opposed to his career-ending flop Pocketful of Miracles?
The following excerpt is from my book, Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy – which studies the changes in Christmas films from 1946 to 1961 as a result of political, social, economic, and cultural changes both in Hollywood and the wider US in this post-war, early Cold War moment – offers my analysis of the legendary pink Capra-corn: Ride the Pink Cloud.
Ride the Pink Cloud
While making A Hole in the Head and the Bell Laboratories documentaries, Capra was ruminating on another script. He had been approached in 1956 by Columbia to remake Lady for a Day, but Capra wanted to write something new and compelling that matched his growing dissatisfaction with the contemporary world. Capra’s most critical biographer, McBride, wrote of this potential remake:
The Frank Capra who returned to Columbia to remake Lady for a Day in 1956 was a shell of the man who had made the original in 1933. Like most of the other projects he worked on in his later years, the remake foundered at Columbia because of “script problems,” a euphemism for his increasing incoherent socio-political ideas and for his inability to cope with the changing times in a meaningful way.
These “script problems” McBride references are a seldom discussed and underknown project of Capra’s that never progressed beyond the script. The project had several titles but is officially underscored as Ride the Pink Cloud on Capra’s own original pages. Only seven pages of the script exist in the Frank Capra Collection at the Reid Cinema Archives housed at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but from them the opening of the film, the setting, and the characters are made clear.
Dated April 15, 1957, Capra started the first draft of his never-produced script Ride the Pink Cloud. The cover page has typed – and crossed out – the title “The Mustard Seed”, a second illegible and scribbled title beneath it, and written above in pencil “Ride the Pink Cloud” above “(Lady for a Day)”. It is unclear what Capra meant by these titles and whether Ride the Pink Cloud was actually intended to be a remake or adaptation of Lady for a Day, but from the script’s first seven pages, that does not seem to be the case.
Set in Goshen, Washington, on the apple farm of Dave and Betty Smith, the film would have opened on a welcoming ceremony that “should lift the hearts of Americans and of the world.” In these opening pages, Dave has traveled to Korea and adopted ten war orphans whom he is bringing home that day to the fan fare of a local holiday that had closed the community’s banks and schools “to honor a simple American couple for an act of human kindness that has fired the imagination and kindled the hearts of humanity everywhere.” A Mr. Briggs of the State Department, commenting on the festivities, remarks that the event
“just grew and grew and grew! What with all the trouble, cold wars, etc. the world is hungry, hungry for human kindness.” When pressed whether this mass adoption was organized by the State Department as propaganda, he wholeheartedly answers in the negative and profusely praises the good nature of Dave. In the margins of the script next to this section, there are comments that do not appear to be in Capra’s own handwriting. One reads, “to my mind, the best speed on world affairs I’ve heard this year” with “year” underlined.
Mr. Briggs wants to invite the local paper to record the events but the head of the local Chamber of Commerce tells him that they would not cover such a story as there is nothing to “blast out here.” Red Neenan, the editor of the local paper is described as a “tough but civilized Mick” and then, when he is introduced, openly criticizes Dave Smith’s adoption of the orphans saying, “it’s either a publicity stunt, or else he wants some cheap apple pickers.” Marginalia that appear to be from Capra himself read “either way, it’s tough on those orphans.”
Red then returns to a conversation in progress about a store wanting a story about a Mexican girl being found innocent of shoplifting pulled from the paper. When he refuses, the store threatens to pull advertising funds to which Red responds that they ought to because the story of the girl being declared innocent of the store’s implied racial profiling is going on the front page, “pictures and all.” Red’s wife Mary, having witnessed his heated exchange, announces that this is the final straw: their telephone had been repossessed that morning and they cannot afford to feed their children. It is clear they are in financial straits due to Red’s moral code and pursuit of journalistic integrity putting his income in jeopardy.
In a final plea, Mary begs her husband to come back with her to New York where he can return to being a big city editor and give up the small-town news to which he is clearly not suited. She says to him, “Come down to earth. This idea you’re another Ed Howe or a William Allen White might have sounded big in the men’s bar at the Waldorf, but it doesn’t even make a murmur out here in the sticks a million miles from nowhere,” adding later, “when the dream’s over, come on back, Mr. Galahad.” The pages end with Mary telling her husband that chasing his dream has soured him and made him “hate people who adopt orphans.”
These seven pages of a script do not seem to suggest a remake or even adaptation of Lady for a Day. Instead, they introduce a grim look at the world, immediately commenting on the Cold War, the harshness of reality, the existence of children made orphans by an American war effort, the very real suspicion that the State Department would stage an adoption of those orphans for pro-American propaganda, the financial challenges of small-town America, distrust of media outlets,commercialists’ control over those media outlets, and, most surprisingly for Capra, the death of a man’s American dream. This film was never made, but the script’s first draft was evidently read and remarked upon by at least one other person who praised Capra’s perspective on world affairs and made some editorial suggestions throughout these seven extant pages. McBride suggests that there was a much longer script that Capra presented to Columbia and then shopped around to other studios when rejected. It is unclear how long the final draft was or what stage of completion it reached, but regardless, the ideas within it are far starker than the light-hearted comedies and musicals Capra had been producing throughout the 1950s, echoing his growing distrust, disillusionment, and disdain for the America of the early Cold War.
While the full picture of Ride the Pink Cloud does not exist today and much of this analysis is projected from a script’s opening scenes, the trajectory of Capra’s thinking can be seen in how he chooses to frame the introductions of characters, a consistent trend in his previous films. Capra’s concern with the media here highlights a different perspective from that of State of the Union nearly a decade prior. In the 1948 film, the concern with the media was that there were dangerous links between establishment politicians using the media in dishonest ways to further their own careers and ambitions, a sentiment also seen in his earlier Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). In the opening pages of Ride the Pink Cloud, however, Capra’s presentation of the media has shifted to focus on a cynical reporter who distrusts the motivations of individuals who are doing ostensibly good things and, especially, those of the State Department. The journalist, Red, is wary of an individual adopting orphans and challenges the inherent worth of doing so for their new father, raising the issue of whether Dave is an intrinsically good person or whether he has staged an event for the positive publicity or even potentially adopted the children to exploit as cheap laborers.
On his introduction, again, Red is having a conversation with a store representative about the store seemingly racially profiling a young Mexican girl. The representative wants the story pulled so as to mitigate any negative press, but Red refuses, adamant that the story remains to protect the girl’s reputation. These actions are those of an even more assertive George Bailey-type from It’s a Wonderful Life: a man willing to put his own personal life on the line – as he does when his wife leaves with the children – in pursuit of justice and integrity in a small town. Red is wary of the US government for their potential propagandizing – ironically a role Capra himself played for the government during WWII – and of businesses that would willingly and eagerly destroy the life of an immigrant by not publicly retracting false accusations of her alleged crimes – the kind of a position in which Capra had found himself in 1950.
Further, Red is framed as a bitter individual and sarcastically likened by his wife to Galahad, a Knight of the Round Table from Arthurian legend in search of the Holy Grail. This reference is a powerful insight into Capra’s own political predicament in the late 1950s as he confronts the unobtainable nature of the American Dream he had so frequently extolled in his own works. The progression of Capra’s portrayals of the media – from a tool of corrupt politicians to individuals like Red refusing to uncritically report on the government in pursuit of social justice – is exemplary of his own growing criticisms of the US.
Regarding the title of this seeming self-portrait of a script, it is unclear what the “Pink Cloud” is. It could perhaps be an allusion to the red imagery used for communists or, possibly, an idiom from Alcoholics Anonymous. In September 1955, American psychologist Harry M. Tiebout penned an article for the publication AA Grapevine – the journal for Alcoholics Anonymous – entitled “The Pink Cloud and After”. In this article, Tiebout describes for the first time in writing the philosophy behind the pink cloud during recovery, a “blissful” state of euphoria just after entering sobriety when “the ego which has been full of striving, just quits and the individual senses peace and quiet within.” Tiebout continues, “The result is an enormous feeling of release and the person flies right up to his pink cloud and thinks he has found Heaven on earth.” It is possible that Capra became aware of the phrase and its larger philosophy around the time of its conception and related to the idea of euphoria after dropping the pursuit of an unobtainable goal. While it is unclear exactly who the protagonist of Ride the Pink Cloud is, Red, his idealistic pursuit of fair journalism that has brought his family to ruin, and the sarcastic reference to him as Galahad – the pursuer of the Holy Grail – seem to fit with this potential understanding of the pink cloud.
If this reference to the euphoria felt after the ego is checked is accurate and if Red is the main character of the proposed film – and both seem likely – it enhances the argument that Ride the Pink Cloud would have been the logical continuation of Capra’s own politics. In these opening pages of Ride the Pink Cloud, it is clear that Capra is attempting to channel the small-town politics of It’s a Wonderful Life into a connection with the wider world. A local “hero” adopting children made orphans by the US military as the opening scene highlights the importance, to Capra, of a small American town to the wider world. By welcoming immigrants into the small town, Capra echoes the scenes in It’s a Wonderful Life in which George welcomes and houses the immigrant populations of Bedford Falls and embraces them as a vital part of the local community and economy. Red’s concern at the staging of this event by the State Department in Ride the Pink Cloud only furthers the divide Capra sees between real American people in small American towns and their government. Having worked for decades on films centered on the experiences of Americans with optimistic messages and inspiration to work hard in pursuit of proclaimed American values, Capra’s opening pages here read as a dropping away of the pretenses of positivity in favor of a much more critical distrust of the contemporary world and the motivations within it.
Ride the Pink Cloud had the potential to complete a trajectory of Capra’s own politics as captured on film across two and half decades comprising the Great Depression, WWII, the post-war period, and the tail end of the first full decade of the Cold War. His own experiences as an immigrant finding Hollywood fame through his art and his celebration of American values, his critical patriotism, and his gradual disillusionment with all of it as the government and studios began to turn on him are all seen on screen and in the start to this script. Ride the Pink Cloud’s portrayals of the media and challenges to the government are not, as McBride comments, “incoherent socio-political ideas” but rather are a distillation of his own experiences and interactions with the US government throughout the 1950s, causing not an “inability to cope with the changing times” but rather an ability to react to his own cynicism about an increasingly out of reach promise sold by the same US propaganda he once made. Ride the Pink Cloud was blocked by every studio Capra brought it to.
Capra was not out of touch; the studio heads and other Hollywood executives blocking his very apt reflections on the harsh realities of the Cold War were out of touch. For instance, in 1957, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences banned communists’ eligibility for winning Oscars, doubling down on anti-communist sentiments years after HUAC left Hollywood. Coincidently, that same year at the Oscars, Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten won the Academy Award for Best Story under the pseudonym “Robert Rich” for The Brave One. This ban was repealed just two years later in 1959 for having been “unworkable” and “impractical.” The pressures on Hollywood detailed in this study, both political and social, to oust communism from the movies and create more pro-American content worked in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for critics and audiences alike. By the later 1950s, however, the same Hollywood elites, who established the blacklist and approved of which scripts would be produced and when, were the ones who decided that Capra’s timely script Ride the Pink Cloud was unsuitable for production and unfit for audiences.
Affording Capra his understanding of the nuances of a complicated moment removes the entirety of the blame for the end of his career on his own inability to read an audience or his perceived “selling out” as his critics have argued. Instead, Capra was led in the wrong direction and allowed himself to be steered there having lost faith in himself as a director over the course of his own turbulent 1950s. Taken in conjunction with Disney’s quite opposite experiences up to 1961, the ways in which the two filmmakers reacted to and engaged with the crushing political pressures on their industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s had a clear impact not only on the films they made, but also the relative successes of their own brands and name recognition. To fully explore that duality between success and the willingness to adapt to the moment, the next section will analyze the two 1961 Christmas films from Disney and Capra, Babes in Toyland and Pocketful of Miracles, with the backdrop of Wilder’s 1960 hit, The Apartment.
From Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy. Used with permission of the publisher, De Gruyter Brill. Copyright © 2025 by Vaughan Joy.
