Posted on 11/25/2007 1:17:12 PM PST by mware
While watching the new colorization of “It's a Wonderful Life" on DVD - this time they got it right; no longer do you get the feeling you're watching a black-and-white film through stained glass - I thought: you know who would love this? Why, that visionary American innovator Henry F. Potter. That's right, Mr. Potter - the unsung hero of “It's a Wonderful Life," the canny businessman who tried (and, alas, failed) to turn boring, repressed Bedford Falls - a town full of drunks, child beaters, vandals and racial and sexual harassers - into an exciting new destination nightspot called Pottersville
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Building and loan, savings and loan - Does the Janitors Savings and Loan keep its money in Wells Fargo?
His brother Harry — he saved his brother Harry from drowning when they were kids in winter — and Harry went on and fought in WW2 as a fighter pilot, shot down bad guys just before it was about to crash into a ship of our guys!
And the pharmacist Mr Gower - who lost his son in war, he was so very upset on news that his son had died in war and almost mistakenly gave a child the wrong medicine which would have poisoned him — but George knew something was wrong, didn’t deliver the meds, saved the boys life and Mr Gower from a fatal mistake.
On it goes.....
And of course Mary would not have been happy if she didn’t get to marry George and have his babies, she would have been stuck in a gloomy library, sad and blue in potterville.. and George’s mom, how sad she would have been living the rest of her life after her son Harry dying as a child.
And who - who would have rehabbed the beautiful old house that Mary and George lived in - Norm Abrams would be happy!
You’re onto something there. It just seems to me that as painful as it may be in the short term, in the long term as a society we are all far better off not subsidizing stupidity, and to add insult to injury, punishing hard work, thrift, playing by the rules, etc. This dynamic is now so pervasive and insidious that it cannot be a matter of accident but of conscious design.
Got to blame that one on Robert Capra.
here is a comment he made about that scene.
The Motion Picture Association of America's strict production code in 1946 censored such phrases and words as "nuts to you", "impotent", "dang", "lousy", and "jerk". But Capra managed to bypass the production code stipulating that criminals be punished for their crime: Potter never met justice for stealing the $8,000. Capra noted several times that he had received more mail about this point than anything else in the film.
“The author fails to mention that George was out driving drunk and damaging the property of others”
And leaving the scene. We never get to see the resolution of these charges
That’s excellent!
LOL, thanks for sharing.
“His brother Harry — he saved his brother Harry from drowning when they were kids in winter — and Harry went on and fought in WW2 as a fighter pilot, shot down bad guys just before it was about to crash into a ship of our guys!
And the pharmacist Mr Gower - who lost his son in war, he was so very upset on news that his son had died in war and almost mistakenly gave a child the wrong medicine which would have poisoned him — but George knew something was wrong, didn’t deliver the meds, saved the boys life and Mr Gower from a fatal mistake”
He did things you’re supposed to do. You don’t get special breaks for doing the right thing. You do them. Hell, Old man Potter could probably be shown doing something good in his life. What the movie shows is that he was the recipient of $8,ooo in ill gotten gains he never suffered any punishment for
I think Robert was the WW2 photographer.
“Didn’t they run their own bank?”
They ran a savings & loan, not a bank, which was a cooperative to finance homes. They couldn’t do banking services like today.
Be that as it may, Bailey was, as so many Freepers have pointed out, unable to compete in the global marketplace, and deserved to fold. Potter is the true hero. He made loans available to illegal immigrants and changed them into profitable junk bonds which made fortunes for bank stockholders. He traded on the currency markets and profited from the falling dollar.
If Potter were alive today, he would be the subject of numerous laudatory Wall St Journal and Fortune articles about his aggressive, no-holds-barred business sense. He would be right up there with Jack Welch, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Sandy Weile.
And when it came out that he pocketed the Bailey’s $8,000. a judge would have ruled in his favor under a new interpretation of “currency eminent domain”.
If Potter was forced to resign, as bank CEO he would get a fat golden parachute bail out worth millions, and be hired on at some other bank as their new CEO. He would also write a book and be on Cavuto and Bartiromo to shill it.
Wake up you sentimental fools. Bailey set Bedford Falls back a hundred years. Let’s hear it for Potter!
If I remember correctly Potter would not loan money to the immigrants because he didn't like his odds of getting his money back. The Bailey Building and Loan, however, was the 1950s version of Countrywide.
someone posted a while ago how the culture seems like Bedford Falls without without George Bailey. I thought it was a brilliant analogy. I then developed the idea...where has George Bailey gone? He has gone, hasn't he? Why else does our culture represent that cynical, polluted mess that was portrayed (brilliantly, prophetically) in the movie?
He's gone. He's drunk on porn, run off with his associate at work, chasing the almighty dollar, dressing like Hulk Hogan, or who knows what else. He's not being an upstanding citizen. And his children have taken after him.
And so here we are.
I thought it was a brilliant idea, but the person on the other thread just responded with, "hunh?"
Well they offered something like a savings account. Why else was there a run to get their money out?
Just a heads up, A Christmas Story is going to be on tonight TNT, 8 PM (EST)
It really is interesting the take on It’s A Wonderful Life. I always took it, as George being a conservative, sticking to his principles, refusing to knuckle under to a bully who was trying to control the whole town.
Kind of like the Clintons, you know. It does happen in life - bad people run roughshod over people better than themselves, and die old and well-fed with lots of money in the bank. It's A Wonderful Life is not a morality tale. Potter gets off scott free; the Potters so often do. But tell me - in the end, who would any viewer rather be - George Bailey or Potter?
Author gets up and bites himself every morning.
Close. The famous photographers are Robert Capa (no r in the last name) and his younger brother Cornell.
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