Elmer Harris was the credited screenwriter on That Certain Thing, a fact that Capra’s book doesn’t mention. Nor did Capra receive a production credit – that was not granted until his fifth picture for Columbia. As for the $ 1,000 salary, it is unlikely that Capra had any other choice except to reject it and go back to being a gag man. And if Capra did act that cocky, it was his way of hiding the embarassing fact that he was overjoyed to take anything he could get, and a way of conveying his ambivalence toward the movie business. One reason Capra was so eager to claim the authorship of That Certain Thing was that of all his early Columbia films, its story is the most “Capraesque”. Ralph Graves is a millionaire’s son, disinherited for marrying a poor, ambitious Irish girl (Viola Dana). Graves’ father (Burr McIntosh) has made his fortune with a chain of restaurants operating on the theory of “Slice the Ham Thin”. Dana and Graves start a small company to sell box lunches to working men; their motto is “Cut the Ham Thick”. (…) Capra had touched on elements of this plot in some of his previous films, satirizing the hypocrisies of the rich in his Graves and Alice Day films for Sennett and using the big corporation vs. small entrepreneur conflict as a spring-board for the plot of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp. But never before had he managed to find these concerns crystallized into such a simple and crowd-pleasing dramatic formula. It was one which would serve him, in one way or another, for much of his mature work. The typically Capraesque blurring of class lines in the romantic plot combined with an equally characteristic economic perspective that proposes a method of getting rich without gouging the working-man.

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