Dir. Frank Capra, USA, 1946, 130 mins
Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers
Not too many people went to see ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ when it opened in 1946. Despite the established star of Jimmy Stewart, the allure of Donna Reed and the appeal of Frank Capra in the director’s chair, the film quietly dissolved into obscurity. This seems rather perverse now: the film is a staple of Christmas programming the world over and has been shown so widely that it’s recognisable even to those who haven’t seen it; the film is also wonderful.
So many of us have seen it, or bits of it, because the inheritor of the copyright from RKO let it lapse in the 1970s. TV executives the world over gleefully slotted the film into their schedules with alacrity: it was free and they could fill two hours of Christmas Eve with it. This lasted until 1994, when NBC bought the rights.
But a wonderful film, not just seasonal sentimentality? Yes, though not for the reasons one might imagine, given its reputation. Pauline Kael called it ‘patronizing’ and ‘doggerel’. The film’s script – the result of many a reworking by many a writer – certainly believes in leading the viewer by the nose. But it’s hard to object when what you’re shown is so interesting. The film is both optimistic about the potential for good within people and from their actions, and a harsh but not cartoonish depiction of capitalism.
George (James Stewart in one of his most jewelled performances) runs the family bank – the Bailey Savings and Loan – in his small home town of Bedford Falls. This isn’t a small town of those small town values so often searched for or parodied in American cinema. It’s the small town in which George has grown up to have his major ambition – to travel the world – thwarted as he stays at home to run the family concern. Said family concern has admittedly done much good in the town, providing poor people with good homes that they can afford; but it’s all under the shadow of local potentate Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore on excellent form).
The quick portrayal of the Building and Loan’s activities is there to underscore the power of commercial realities rather than the benefits of business in a town where everyone relies on one another. It takes only one mistake (not made by George) to bring the family firm to its knees, beholden to Potter. Having given up on many of his dreams, George refuses to face the concept of going to jail for his albatross of an inheritance and contemplates suicide. But before he can jump into the churning waters amidst the swirling snow (Capra used a new kind of movie snow for this production, his first with his own production company), someone else does. This turns out to be Clarence (Henry Travers) – George’s guardian angel.
Such is the film’s control of tone that the arrival of an angel with no wings except the bingo flesh ones under his arms doesn’t come as a lurch, but seems quite natural. Clarence shows George Bedford Falls as it would have been if George had never been born: Pottersville. It is a dismal spectacle of poor housing, misery and alcoholism. George’s brother dies as a child, as George isn’t there to save him; George’s employer kills a patient by accident – because George isn’t there to prevent the mistake – and turns to drink. George starts to realise that in his wife and family he had vast wealth. Donna Reed’s performance as Mary Bailey is luminous with wry, gentle understanding and carries what might otherwise have been a mawkish backdrop to the drive of the plot. The scene where Mary and George first fiercely kiss is one of the best of its kind in cinema. On ‘cut!’ Capra turned to the continuity girl to ask how the take had been. She pointed out that Stewart and Reed had omitted two pages of dialogue. Capra replied, ‘With technique like that, who needs dialogue?’.
The wonderful thing about the film is that it mixes extremes of warmth and desperation whilst controlling its tone. The portrayal of romantic and family love is tempered with the iciness of George’s self-dislike, his failure to escape his limiting destiny. When George leaves Pottersville and returns to Bedford Falls, where the Baileys still need bailing out. What saves them is another duality. The respect of the community, resulting in a torrent of dimes and nickels they can only just afford to give, is twinned with the $20,000 guarantee put up by George’s childhood friend Sam Wainwright. So George doesn’t just have the physical presence of the decorated war hero, his brother, but also the financial presence of the war profiteer. When he hugs his youngest child to him by the Christmas tree at the end of the film, in one of the defining images of screen Christmas, we can remember that he’d only recently made her bawl with his aggressive unhappiness.
The moral of the fable – no man is a failure who has friends – is thus a deeper one than it might appear to be. It is Capracorn at its finest and you should see or buy it immediately.
Richard Dilks
‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is available to buy on Region 2 DVD
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