As the winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and recipient of countless other Hollywood honors, Frank Capra holds his own among cinema's brightest directorial stars. In fact, Capra's whole body of work makes him, in one scholar's summing-up, "America's best-known and most beloved filmmaker."

It's only fitting, then, that Capra's life and work have been the subject of so many tributes, from the star-studded Hollywood affair that was the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award presentation to this recent graphic novel.

But let's get real. Capra's reception isn't all about the kind of love and hugs and kisses shown in his films. He's had his fair share of detractors, and his films have prompted critics like this one to see him as a manufacturer of false and pacifying images—pictures of social harmony meant to appease audiences at a time when U.S. society was (as it still is) both unequal and unjust.

"Maybe there wasn't really an America, maybe there was only Frank Capra," director John Cassavetes mused. It's as if, Cassavetes says, Capra offered reassuring images—"fantasies and fables of American possibility and unity"—to distract Americans, to make them forget that the nation was theirs to make, or remake, into something more just and equal.

"His films," Leonard Quart writes, "carried messages like, 'No man is a failure' and 'Each man's life touches so many other lives,' sentiments he artfully and movingly weaved into the body of his work. These sentiments provided consolation and comfort for his audience—a sense that good neighborliness and Christian charity would suffice to purge injustice and inequity from American society" (source).

But of course sentiments—and sentimental films—don't really bring about this kind of social change. They weren't enough in Capra's day, and they aren't enough now. And this is what makes critics like Quart so upset about the fanfare that still greets Capra's work wherever it is screened. Just as the director himself lived a version of the American dream, his films—these critics say—still peddle a false, even a dangerous, version of this dream to the masses.

So, you see, it hasn't quite been all accolades for Capra; he's also created some controversy. But even the heated debates are proof—just like all those achievement awards—of his films' lasting power.