It's a Wonderful Life

Who can ever really know what kind of a difference he or she has made in life? Contemplating suicide one cold Christmas eve during a low point in his life, a small-town banker named George Bailey (James Stewart) is visited by an absent-minded angel named Clarence (Henry Travers), who offers him a chance to find out.

There's not much point in writing a big summary for a film like It's a Wonderful Life; any attempt to do so would just insult readers who practically know the film by heart after repeated viewings. Parodied in countless movies and TV shows, the film has become part of the background noise of Christmas in America, so omnipresent one hardly even notices it anymore. Before it fades away entirely into the engrams of our mass unconscious, then, let's take this opportunity to come together and examine it, critically, as a film.

It's a Wonderful Life's journey from obscurity to timeless holiday classic is an interesting one. The long-forgotten film entered the public domain in 1974 after its owner, Republic Pictures, failed to renew the copyright. Because it no longer cost anything to exhibit the film, it soon became a Christmastime fixture on public television and small UHF stations around the country. As more people saw the film it spread like wildfire, until just about everyone was well and truly sick of it. Then, in 1993, Republic Pictures "discovered" that it still owned the copyright on the short story upon which the film was based, "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern. It's a Wonderful Life is therefore properly considered a derivative work under the law, and prospective exhibitors or resellers must obtain permission from the source material's copyright owner. NBC now owns exclusive broadcast rights to the film, and a high-quality, officially sanctioned DVD was issued a few years ago (a welcome arrival after years of poorly-dubbed VHS versions from various shady companies). "The best and worst things that ever happened to It's a Wonderful Life is that it fell out of copyright protection and into the shadowy no-man's-land of the public domain," wrote Roger Ebert in his recent review of the film. Quite so.

In It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra created an entirely new Christmas story for the ages, one that has little to do with Santa Claus or presents or even the birth of Christ, and a lot to do with friendship, fellowship, and the value of a single life. Capra's unique blend of optimism, humanism, and traditional values have been derided as "Capra-corn" by critics, and indeed some of his films' protagonists are so upstanding as to be laughably priggish. (Anyone who can watch Mr. Deeds Goes to Town without wanting to give Gary Cooper a serious ass-kicking for his own good is not somebody I want to know.) Here, though, Jimmy Stewart makes George Bailey three-dimensional, portraying his highs and his lows accurately and sympathetically. He "sells" the character so well that one never doubts Clarence's revelation about the impact he has had on Bedford Falls and the friends he has made, and it is a lucky person indeed who can imagine himself in George's shoes, with Clarence by his side, and find that his own positive influences on his friends and his world have been greater.

Even if you've seen It's a Wonderful Life countless times, like every other American, consider giving it another look.

Points to ponder:

• I can't help but wonder if Eustace and Tilly, the Bailey cousins who work at the Building and Loan, are intended as a reference to the New Yorker's bemonocled mascot, Eustace Tilley.
• Parsing It's a Wonderful Life as a social or political statement is a difficult task for the modern audience. The politically conservative Capra was not a fan of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the slightest, yet It's a Wonderful Life strikes the modern viewer as being uniquely a product of the New Deal. The moneyed class is represented by Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a cigar-smoking, waistcoated plutocrat who used the Great Depression to further enrich himself at the expense of others. George, the "little guy" who always tries to do right by his fellow man, is part of the engine that creates and reinforces traditional American values--yet George, like Potter, is an archetypal capitalist, creating wealth not with the sweat of his brow but with wealth itself. How relevant is this film today? How have societal attitudes toward wealth, class, and social responsibility changed since it was made?