Frank Capra arrived in New York Harbor in 1903 as a seasick five-year-old in steerage, and grew up to visually define the American dream on film. This episode follows the Sicilian-born chemical engineer from selling newspapers for ten years in Los Angeles, working his way through Caltech, contracting the Spanish flu in the army and losing his father, to years of drifting the American West by freight train before bluffing his way into a $75 job directing a one-reel silent film in a converted San Francisco gymnasium.

The discussion explains how Capra's engineering background let him solve the sound-era problem of hidden microphones with a boom pole, how Harry Cohn's Poverty Row studio Columbia gave him creative freedom, and how It Happened One Night swept the Oscars before a crisis of purpose pushed him toward moral fables like Mr. Smith Goes ...