Among the Hollywood directors who made comedies in the Depression era, Frank Capra was the most consistently concerned with themes of class and social distinction. As Leland Poague has suggested, the unifying thread of Capra's films is an examination of “moral questions having to do with class, economic status [and] life style as defined by class and economic status.” Like the Marx Brothers, Capra emerged from a working-class immigrant background that informed his views of class relations and made him highly critical of the upper-class WASP establishment. At the same time, as an auteurist director within the Hollywood studio system, Capra repeatedly presented the story of a social outsider who is forced to work within the structure of a restrictive, manipulative, or corrupt social order. In Capra's films of the 1930s, we see the juxtaposition of two dominant narratives of class in America. On the one hand, Capra's comedies enact a celebration of the American success ethic (or “American Dream”) in which Capra had himself participated. On the other hand, the films reflect an acute awareness of the reality of the class conflict to which Depression-era Americans were subject.

In many of Capra's films, the upwardly mobile trajectory of the success story is brought into tension with some form of class conflict; the ultimate resolution of this tension determines whether the film offers an ultimately utopian social vision or a more subversive view of American society.