In today’s world, in which even beloved Keith Richards seems old-fashioned, this ancient film (if you ignore the corn) still hits a sweet spot
This film is so familiar to many that there’s not much point to dissecting it as to plot and meaning. So a few comments from my own angle are what I’ll mainly offer.
One of the reasons it’s so familiar, at least to older audiences, is that it lost its copyright protection in the 1970s, due to a clerical failure to file paperwork for re-registering it for copyright. Thus it entered the public domain, and television stations then ran it as dependable Christmas fare without worrying about paying royalties to whoever had owned it up through its loss of copyright.
Incidentally, RKO was the studio that first distributed it. It was made—somewhat in a manner like today’s indie films—by a production company, Liberty Films, that was started by famed director Frank Capra and some partners; RKO then distributed the film. It premiered in December 1946 (and as many may know, it wasn’t a big box office hit; it became a renowned and favorite work apparently only after years of TV distribution).
The version I just saw on DVD is distributed by Paramount (who can figure out how they got it?), and included some extras such as a making-of doc (hosted by TV’s Happy Days actor Tom Bosley—a rather sentimental production apparently made in the 1980s for TV, and still not too bad for all that), and then there’s a clip of what seems a long introduction narrated by Capra’s son (this extra is more banal).
I’m not a big fan, or expert, on many old films (pre-1955 or so), but this one appeals to me in certain ways, including technical (it seems ahead of its time in some ways, such as with freeze frame and stuffing in details). And of course its emotional impact is nice (though whether you regard it as overly sentimental or, as some viewers did when it first came out, as a bit morbid may depend on your age and/or the state of your life).
Stars and other PR-ready features
James Stewart plays George Bailey, the older son of the owner of a building & loan (a sort of savings bank that, as its largest risk, floated mortgages), who wants to go to college but stays home while his younger brother goes to war and later distinguishes himself in various ways. George, through an apparent mixture of a sense of familial obligation and straitened circumstances, takes over his father’s business after the latter’s stroke. This B&L happens to be a major community staple in terms of keeping poorer homeowners with the dignity of owning their own home. But this kind of business carries risks; and not helpful is the regional, ambiguous asset/bane of Henry Potter, the “richest and meanest man in the county,” as the narrator says.
Potter is some kind of financier/businessman who has a growing ownership stake in many properties in the town—he is on the board or such of the local bank, which has more financial stability than the Bailey B&L, and comes to prop it up. A lot of this, in its rudimentary Hollywood script way, and to the extent I can follow it after one-and-a-quarter recent viewings of the film, sounds a lot like the current economic conditions of subprime mortgages. That is, financial help is extended to poorer elements of the U.S. population with a seemingly nice aim of spreading home-ownership, ending up being an area of huge financial risk; the recent version was propagated (in not altogether ethical ways) by large investment banks, with the mechanisms of the mortgages being designed in such a way that when a financial crisis hit (in late 2008, with investment banks suddenly freezing up in the mutual credit area, if I understand it right), the whole system started to “seize” like an engine. Thus the investment banks ended up being both to blame for the crisis and yet somehow aloof to the whole mess—later able to continue doing their thing, and both seemingly immune to reform and yet also crucial to the continued functioning of the U.S. economy.
This movie’s Potter is more of a populist-myth type of figure, akin to the “robber barons” and other foci of criticism among those early in the twentieth century who lamented the shortcomings of capitalism (whether or not they sympathized with communism), and this sort of “locus of money evil” was especially a focus of ire during and after the Great Depression. (Think also of local mega-owner heavy Elvira Gulch, or whatever her name was, in The Wizard of Oz [1939].) However realistic Potter is either to the particular history of the 1930-40s or as a more general, multi-era kind of money baron, he certainly seems a good movie trope as a “mostly bad guy” who majorly affects Wonderful Life’s plot at certain times. (And his type is so meaningful that today we would say he is just the sort who would have funded a super-PAC this past year to try to get Mitt Romney elected.) He is played by Lionel Barrymore, yes, of the family including today’s Drew (lately on the cover of Allure magazine), and he plays his role just a touch short of camp, with a sort of vaguely malicious glee married to his role—the manners of a man who knows what he is, and knows nearly everyone in the county hates him but doesn’t give a fig, because (in part) he knows how essential he is to the local economy.
Watershed of crisis
The key plot changer in the movie is the situation where the Bailey B&L is on the verge of being completely insolvent, and there is a run on it by local folk. These honest-enough souls, working stiffs, don’t quite know how such a financial firm works, and (shortsightedly, not totally unreasonably) they want to pull their money out lest it disappear. Potter, for his part, has bought the local bank, which has propped up the B&L; he also has called the bank’s loan to the B&L, and because the B&L essentially is filled with mortgages that apparently are plagued with late payments, he realizes he threatens to cause the B&L to implode; therefore, he offers all its local-folk shareholders 50 cents on the dollar for their shares, in effect to do an end run around George Bailey as a businessman. As a good old-time movie bad guy does, he also generally nurses an animus toward the Bailey firm as being the only major business in town he hasn’t gotten a major ownership stake in. Anyway, whoever watches this can get his or her own take on the financial crisis that sets of George’s crisis of spirit, because even today’s financial convulsions we can’t always fully understand.
The main point of the film is to show how George, who both seems disappointed in life because he hasn’t taken the career route he had originally wanted, and now has the nerves-shattering impending financial collapse of the B&L looming over him, is depressed enough to want to commit suicide. He is saved by the one boldly unrealistic feature of the film, a deus ex machina in the comical form of Clarence, the angel who comes to help George. Indeed, the film is narrated by a task force of angels including Clarence who are interceding in George’s personal crisis. Clarence, somewhat like a technique in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, shows George what his life would have been like if he’d never been born, including the hypothetical situation of how his brother, whom he’d saved from drowning in 1919, would not only have died young, but would have been unable to save fellow soldiers in World War II.
Stewart in the key role
The movie marries a carefully sentimental local-man story with touches of the dramatic history of the previous decades—Roaring Twenties good times, Great Depression troubles, and World War II stark drama (these classic travails are shown in a stagy montage). Who makes the central George character work so well in Stewart, and this was his first film (according to a DVD extra) that he did after returning from service in World War II. If Stewart had seen some things during his service that left a lasting mark on him that communicated evil (as that war did with so many others), he perhaps used it to advantage in this film.
A DVD extra says Capra—who populates this film with so many fun touches, telling details, and bits of humor—saw that Stewart, who had typically played positive roles in the past, could bring some bitterness and melancholy into play that would suit the part as well as, one presumes, allow flourishing of his ability as an actor. Of course, we know that Stewart showed this emotional virtuosity later under the hand of Hitchcock, with Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958).
Stewart has always been one of my favorite old-time actors, if not the favorite, and I defend him against those of more modern tastes who caricature him as an innocent yokel with a halting, oddly Midwestern way of talking, like the character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), another Capra film. I think of Stewart more as the mature sort who shows his stuff in Vertigo.
In Wonderful Life, Stewart sometimes seems, with his voice, a little too much as if he’s talking in the back of his throat, or like he’s gargling marbles at times—I don’t know if he was partly affecting this to give his George Bailey a real aw-shucks flavor. But when he stretches to his emotional range, he is marvelous. And even when he’s in his happier time, it’s interesting to see Stewart cover several bases in quick succession (as at the dinner table scene with George’s father), responding to a number of characters with different, generous looks or gestures.
Donna Reed is the suitable “girl next-door” as his wife. The man who plays the druggist who is drunk and mistakenly puts poison in capsules had played Jesus in a De Mille film in about 1927, according to the DVD.
