The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Fantasy drama

DIRECTOR

Frank Capra

WRITERS

Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra

STARS

James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore

BEFORE

1934 Frank Capra has his first major hit with the screwball comedy It Happened One Night.

1939 In Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, James Stewart plays a naive but honest man who takes a place in the US Senate.

AFTER

1950 In Henry Koster’s Harvey, Stewart has a big hit playing a likeable man who speaks to an invisible human-sized rabbit.

Ironically, the release of Frank Capra’s most enduring motion picture was one of his greatest disappointments. Despite being amply praised by his peers, who appreciated the movie’s craft, and winning five Oscar nominations plus a Golden Globe for its director, the movie flopped at the box office. Through the years, however, popular perceptions of the movie changed, and over the course of his life Capra saw it become one of the best-loved movies of all time. Today, It’s a Wonderful Life has become a festive favorite that seems to embody the Christmas spirit.

In the 1930s, Capra had been the voice of Hollywood. He refined the screwball comedy genre with the peerless It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, but he became best known for feel-good movies in which the common man triumphs over cynical corporations or corrupt politicians—themes that resonated strongly with audiences during the Great Depression.

George Bailey (James Stewart) woos Mary (Donna Reed), just before tragedy strikes: George’s father dies. He has to take over the family business, and never leaves Bedford Falls.

A new mood

Had it been made 10 years earlier, It’s a Wonderful Life might have been another hit for Capra, but in 1946 he was out of step with the prevailing mood in the US. World War II had robbed the nation’s young of any sense of innocence, and audiences no longer had an appetite for pure escapism. Film noir was on the rise, in which morally ambiguous detectives were little better than the criminals they chased.

Yet to the modern eye, It’s a Wonderful Life seems surprisingly dark, an attempted suicide being the central premise for a story in which a man discovers the true worth of his own life.

Capra’s masterstroke is to begin with a series of whispered prayers for help, heard by heavenly beings who decide to intervene in the life of one George Bailey (James Stewart). They send an angel, but the only one available is Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers) who, at the tender age of 200, has yet to earn his wings. As Clarence studies George’s life in flashback, from boyhood to adulthood, Capra paints a portrait of a loyal townsman who has sacrificed his dreams of travel and career in order to follow in his father’s footsteps, helping the local community and working at a small bank in Bedford Falls, New York. In the process, George protects the community from the greedy bank director and slum landlord, Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore).

"I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries."

Frank Capra

After George makes the wish that he had never been born, an angel, Clarence, shows him what would happen if he had never existed

James Stewart was born in 1908 in Indiana, PA. After a brief stint on Broadway, he followed his old roommate Henry Fonda to Hollywood. His movie career took off in 1938 when Frank Capra cast him in the comedy You Can’t Take It With You. The following year, the pair made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which earned Stewart an Oscar nomination. He took time off to join the war effort, but his popularity did not fade, and his first postwar movie, It’s A Wonderful Life, brought a third Oscar nomination. The movie epitomized Stewart’s quiet, folksy charm, which was again brought to the fore in the 1950 hit Harvey. He also made a number of Westerns, and collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock. He died in 1997.

1938 You Can’t Take It With You

1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

1946 It’s a Wonderful Life

1958 Vertigo

Shocking decline

George’s rapid transition from saint to suicidal drunk is shocking and credible, perhaps rooted in Capra’s own struggle with depression in his early twenties, when, as an Italian immigrant, he found work difficult to come by. Years of self-sacrifice and disappointment lie behind George’s breakdown, and as a portrait of despair his downward spiral is utterly compelling.

While contemporary audiences may have been put off by the story’s divine intervention, Capra’s movie wasn’t so much about magic realism as tragic realism: the angel doesn’t appear at the bridge until the movie’s final quarter. Another director might have focused more on the drama that makes George want to end his life, but Capra keeps it from us, not so that it becomes a mystery but because, when we do find out, it adds to the pathos of a man trying to do right.

George and Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell, second from right) celebrate at the close of business on the day of the bank run. With $2 left, they are still in business.

On the brink

Potter is the villain of the piece. When George realizes that his uncle Billy has mislaid $8,000 of the townspeople’s money, he goes to Potter—his lifelong enemy—to negotiate a loan. George has nothing but a life insurance policy to offer as collateral, and Potter sneers at him: “You’re worth more dead than alive.” Within this loaded insult lies one of the movie’s main tenets: just as one life can make all the difference, so can its absence.

In despair, George drives to the toll bridge to jump to his death. The movie’s most famous moment doesn’t occupy much of its running time but it sticks in the memory for its darkness. Wishing aloud that he’d “never been born,” George is taken by Clarence to a parallel reality, one in which George never existed, and where Bedford Falls (now Pottersville) looks very different. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives,” says Clarence, and this ultimately is the movie’s message.

Perceived as an optimistic movie, perhaps it can also be seen as one that shows the world as a glass half empty rather than half full. For Capra, George is one man who makes all the difference in people’s lives; he is not the Everyman that we all are or could be. In that sense, the movie may be a warning that we are not all in it together: some people, happily for those around them, are simply less selfish than others.

"It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife."

Wendell Jamieson
The New York Times, 2008

The movie opened in 1946 and was a box-office flop. Postwar America was in the mood for morally ambiguous noir, not feel-good small-town sentimentality.

Accidental classic

The movie’s later popularity involves another twist. Due to a legal error, it fell out of copyright in 1974, enabling it to be shown on TV with no repeat fees. The oversight has since been corrected by the studio, something George might have had a few things to say about.

At the height of his career, Frank Capra was the biggest director in Hollywood, leading the escapist assault on the Depression years with a slew of Oscar-winning comedies. Having moved to Los Angeles from Sicily at the age of five in 1903, he studied chemical engineering but struggled to find work. After bluffing his way into a movie studio in San Francisco, he landed work in Hollywood, directing silent one-reelers with comedy mogul Hal Roach. Effortlessly moving into the sound age thanks to his engineering skills, Capra came into his own in the 1930s. After making propaganda movies in World War II, he saw his star begin to wane; his best-known movie, It’s A Wonderful Life, was not a commercial hit. Increasingly disillusioned with Hollywood, he started making educational movies on science in the 1950s. He died in 1991.

1934 It Happened One Night

1938 You Can’t Take It With You

1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

1946 It’s a Wonderful Life

What else to watch: It Happened One Night (1934) ✵ You Can’t Take It With You (1938) ✵ Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) ✵ The Philadelphia Story (1940) ✵ Harvey (1950) ✵ Vertigo (1958)