According to [Harry] Cohn, The Matinee Idol, a burlesque of the theater centering on the tribulations of a hammy tent company run by Bessie Love, “started the audience laughing in the first fifty feet and never allowed them to stop except for little impressive human touches injected here and there which never failed to register”. The “Variety” reviewer, Sid Silverman, gave resouding approval to what he called a “solid laugh and hoke picture (…) It’s a picture a good organist can have a circus with. The chest-heaving and gesturing drama lays itself open to all kinds of kidding sobs”. Columbia was starting to spend more money on Capra’s film, and that helped elevate The Matinee Idol in status to a movie that “Variety”, said could play on its own without a second feature on the bill. “A few more thousands spread between production and cast,” the trade paper observed, “would have made this one worthy [of] the deluxe sites around the country”. Rediscovered by the Cinémathèque Francaise in 1992 and restored by Columbia in 1997, The Matinee Idol drolly reflects Capra’s experience of amateurish theatrics at Manual Arts [High School] in the Civil War play The Crisis.

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