Frank Capra Trivia
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48 free Frank Capra trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Frank Capra trivia quiz covers the director whose life was the American Dream personified: a boy from a Sicilian village who arrived in steerage aged five and went on to win three Best Director Oscars in five years. The easy questions are the ones any classic-film fan should get: the Christmas movie with George Bailey and his angel, the first film to sweep the top five Oscars, the star of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the studio he built up from Poverty Row. From there it digs deeper: the Caltech chemical engineering degree, the banjo and the odd jobs, the $75 one-reeler that started it all, the comedian Harry Langdon, the writer Robert Riskin, Harry Cohn's 'name above the title', the Chopin project that made him quit Columbia, General Marshall's Why We Fight, the Disney animators and the Oscar for Prelude to War, Liberty Films, the copyright slip that turned a flop into a classic, and the science films that ran in classrooms for thirty years. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Capra and his major films before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our It's a Wonderful Life, classic Hollywood and Oscars quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which Mediterranean island was Frank Capra born in 1897?
Sicily
Sicily. The family left when he was a small boy and settled in Los Angeles, where Frank sold newspapers after school to help keep them afloat.
Q 02What does the surname Capra mean in Italian?
Goat
Goat. He was born Francesco Rosario Capra, and chose the name Frank Russell Capra for himself when he became an American citizen in 1920.
Q 03How did the Capra family travel to America in 1903?
In steerage on the steamship Germania
In steerage on the steamship Germania, the cheapest way across. Capra remembered 13 days with no privacy or ventilation and called it the most degrading place you could ever be.
Q 04Capra worked his way through which university, graduating in chemical engineering in 1918?
Caltech
Caltech, then still called Throop College of Technology. He played banjo in bars to help pay his way, and late in life he left the school part of his ranch as a retreat.
Q 05Which future Second World War air hero attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles alongside Capra?
Jimmy Doolittle
Jimmy Doolittle. In April 1942 he led 16 Army bombers off the deck of an aircraft carrier to strike Tokyo, the first American raid on Japan's home islands.
Q 06What did Capra teach to artillerymen in the Army during the First World War?
Mathematics
Mathematics. He taught in San Francisco until he caught the 1918 flu and was discharged, then drifted through odd jobs for years before stumbling into films.
Q 07Capra's first film, Fultah Fisher's Boarding House, was based on a ballad by which writer?
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling. Capra overstated his Hollywood experience and talked a San Francisco actor-producer into letting him direct the one-reeler.
Q 08After writing Our Gang gags for Hal Roach, Capra joined which slapstick producer known as the 'King of Comedy'?
Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett. He gave Capra a first chance to direct for a big studio in 1925, then fired him as incompetent three days into the shoot.
Q 09Capra directed The Strong Man and Long Pants for which baby-faced silent comedian?
Harry Langdon
Harry Langdon. The pair split after Long Pants and Langdon took over directing his own films, a move many believe sank his career within a few years.
Q 10Which Columbia Pictures mogul hired Capra and employed him through his 1930s heyday?
Harry Cohn
Harry Cohn. His studio was a Poverty Row outfit short of money, stars and prestige, and its breakthrough came with the hits Capra directed there.
Q 11Capra's Ladies of Leisure (1930) made a star of which actress, who went on to make several more films with him?
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck. Her first two talkies had flopped when Capra cast her; the film was her breakthrough, and she became one of his favourite leading ladies.
Q 12Which screenwriter, Fay Wray's husband, formed a famed writer-director team with Capra?
Robert Riskin
Robert Riskin. A New York playwright who went west when the talkies needed dialogue, he won an Oscar for It Happened One Night and later became Capra's partner in an independent company.
Q 13Which Oscar first belongs to Capra's It Happened One Night (1934)?
A sweep of the 'Big Five' categories
Q 21In Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, what does the young senator resort to when the Senate moves to expel him?
A filibuster
A filibuster. Smith talks into a 24th hour while his secretary signals from the gallery which rules will let him keep the floor, then faints amid baskets of telegrams demanding he quit.
Q 22Which US ambassador in London urged Columbia to keep Mr. Smith Goes to Washington out of Europe?
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. With war breaking out, he feared a film about a bought-and-paid-for Senate would hurt America's standing abroad and pressed the studio to withdraw it; Columbia released it anyway.
Q 23Mr. Smith Goes to Washington won only one of its eleven Oscar nominations, in which category?
A sweep of the 'Big Five' categories: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. The winner was a cheaply made comedy from Columbia, then one of Hollywood's minor studios.
Q 14Who starred opposite Claudette Colbert as the roguish reporter in It Happened One Night?
Clark Gable
Clark Gable. MGM lent its star to little Columbia for the part, by Hollywood legend as a punishment, and he came back with the Best Actor Oscar.
Q 15Capra's 1934 screwball classic was based on which 1933 short story, also its shooting title?
Night Bus
Night Bus. Samuel Hopkins Adams published it in Cosmopolitan in 1933, and Capra went through Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullavan and Miriam Hopkins before he landed a leading lady.
Q 16Which cartoon character may have been partly inspired by It Happened One Night?
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny. Animator Bob Clampett said the rabbit's carrot-munching was modelled on a scene in which the film's hero chomps a carrot while talking fast with his mouth full.
Q 17As of 2026, which director has more Best Director Oscars than Capra?
Ford
John Ford. He won four to Capra's three, yet none was for a western, the genre that made his name.
Q 18Which 1936 Capra film features a tuba-playing greeting-card poet who inherits a fortune?
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. When Deeds decides to give the whole fortune away to people ruined by the Depression, his relatives haul him into court to have him declared insane.
Q 19Capra's 1938 Best Picture winner You Can't Take It with You adapted a play by which duo?
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Capra's version of their Pulitzer-winning Broadway hit put him on the cover of Time in August 1938, hailed as the top director in the industry.
Q 20Which actor played the naive senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?
James Stewart
The story was loosely based on Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler and the Teapot Dome investigation.
Best Original Story
Best Original Story. Lewis R. Foster won for the tale behind the film, a slim return for a hit that had the Senate's Democratic leader, Alben Barkley, fuming that it made the chamber look like 'a bunch of crooks'.
Q 24Capra developed a Columbia biopic of which composer, George Sand's lover, later filmed without him as A Song to Remember?
Chopin
Chopin. Capra was announced as its director in 1938 but left Columbia the next year; the studio went ahead without him, and Charles Vidor's Technicolor version finally reached cinemas in 1945.
Q 25Who starred as the drifter turned 'common man' in Capra's Meet John Doe (1941)?
Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper. His down-and-out ex-ballplayer is paid to pose as the author of a faked letter threatening a Christmas Eve suicide, and the ending gave Capra so much trouble that his original was scrapped.
Q 26Capra's 1937 film Lost Horizon, adapted from James Hilton's novel, is set in which hidden paradise?
Shangri-La
Shangri-La. Capra's most lavish production ran far over budget, and the studio needed years of reissues before it finally turned a profit.
Q 27Which actor starred in Capra's 1944 black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace?
Cary Grant
Cary Grant. Shooting wrapped in 1941, but the deal with the play's producers barred a release until the Broadway run ended, so the film sat on the shelf until 1944.
Q 28Days after Pearl Harbor the 44-year-old Capra agreed to join the US Army Signal Corps at what rank?
Major
Major. He hurried Arsenic and Old Lace to completion first, then reported to Washington in February 1942 to start making films for the troops.
Q 29Which Army Chief of Staff wanted the Why We Fight films made and picked Capra for the job?
George C. Marshall
George C. Marshall. He wanted millions of new draftees shown why they were fighting, and reckoned a Hollywood storyteller would hold their attention better than the Army's own training-film makers.
Q 30Which Why We Fight film shared the Oscar for best documentary of 1942?
Prelude to War
Prelude to War. It was made only to be shown to new recruits, but President Roosevelt was so impressed that he wanted civilians to see it too, and it went on general release in cinemas.