Posted on 12/20/2013 6:56:20 AM PST by Kaslin
To many Americans, the season wouldn't be complete without at least a few scenes from "It's a Wonderful Life." The movie wasn't a box-office hit when it was released in the 1940s, but it's become a seasonal favorite since -- and even acquired some critical acclaim along the way.
Years ago I read a brief analysis of "It's a Wonderful Life" by a professor of American studies at Boston University. I should have known better. Any academic field with the word "studies" in its name is suspect from the start -- as opposed to a traditional discipline like history or literature. Naturally the professor's take on the movie was suspect, too. To him, it showed only that, while life can be "an enriching Norman Rockwell experience, it also can be smothering, where you end up marrying the girl you went to high school with, and you never get to go to Europe. ... It tells us George is one of the most sad and lonely and tragic characters ever imagined. I cry when I see it."
That may be about the only thing the professor and I have in common. I've shed a few tears myself watching "It's a Wonderful Life" over the years. But not for the same reason as the professor. To me, nothing in the movie seems as sad as his analysis of it. The movie makes marrying your high school sweetheart seem any number of things, including comedy, delight, education, vexation and fulfillment -- they all come with married life -- but tragedy? No. Frank Capra's tearjerker is a celebration of the ordinary middle-class virtues, which are not nearly ordinary enough in these oh-so-advanced times.
George Bailey a tragic figure? Come on. Why, he's the richest man in town, as his brother says at the melodramatic climax of the movie. He makes Mr. Potter, the stock plutocrat in the story, look like a pauper. That's because George Bailey has loved and sacrificed and built and given and stood alone a time or two. That is, he has lived. He has not gone through life as a tourist.
As for the idea that not getting to Europe is a tragedy, that notion would have much amused my immigrant mother. I can see her wry smile now. Which turned steely whenever she heard anybody say a bad word about America. You could almost see her thinking: Who knows America who knows only America? To her, the tragedy would have been not making it to America.
To me, the movie's message is that George Bailey's life has not been sad or lonely, let alone tragic. Even if George himself, played with all-American earnestness by Jimmy Stewart, thinks so at his lowest, most self-pitying, self-absorbed ebb.
Can the professor have been making the common mistake of using "tragic" as just a synonym for sad? Only a richly blessed people would confuse everything from a fender-bender to going broke with a tragedy. This is the land of second chances, not to say third and fourth. I know.
On these shores, tragedy in its original, legitimate, classical Greek sense -- that is, the inevitable fall of a noble character because of a fatal flaw, usually hubris -- has an artificial air about it. While in Europe, where the concept of tragedy originated, it seems to come naturally.
If there is a moral to Frank Capra's movie, it may be the comment from Clarence, George's bumbling guardian angel: "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives, and when he isn't around he leaves an awful hole to fill, doesn't he? ... You see, George, you really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?"
There's a lot more Eugene Field in that comment than Sophocles. The values of Bedford Falls are those our professional intellectuals are almost obliged to see through. Sometimes they're so busy seeing through them that they don't see them at all. Which is what George Bailey did -- till his eyes are opened and the Happy Ending ensues.
Equally undiscerning are those who would idealize small towns; they don't see the potential Pottersville inside every Bedford Falls. Just one man, like George Bailey, can make all the difference. Think of all those who make a difference in your town, your neighborhood, your life -- and all those who don't.
The most unsettling aspect of the popularity of "It's a Wonderful Life" is the realization that nostalgia for certain values tends to set in just as they're disappearing. Happily, nostalgia can bring those values back, too. We're free. We're Americans. We can choose how we live. With cheer and faith or bad temper and worst behavior.
If the professor's view of George Bailey as a tragic figure struck me as sadder than anything in the movie, at least it wasn't tragic. It was more comic, this being America.
The first time I saw it, I was running over a 102 fever. It was the best thing ever... that night.
You’re too hard on Capra, and George who’s essentially the same character as Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and Good Sam (Gary Cooper again)—an innocent, a lovely man who can’t help helping his fellow men. Call me naive, but I don’t see that as socialism. Their charity was personal, not collective and governmental. John Doe is closer to what you’re talking about, but even he is an innocent.
That prof should be counting his blessings he didn’t have this woman in his class. I’d have ripped him a new one -— on an intellectual level of course.
It’s a Wonderful Life is not just about George Baily. This is a movie that demonstrates how each of us touch and enrich the lives of others so subtly yet in such profound ways that we are often as blinded as Baily was.
The movie is Biblical without preaching; it’s uplifting; it’s inspiring. The plot focuses on a man who loses what he believes are true riches only to discover their superficiality. And through this discovery he wins everything. His soul is changed. How many of us can say that in real life?
As an aside: Does anyone who has seen this movie not quote Zuzu when they hear a bell ring?
Excellent film that I could never tire of watching - but definitely not the colorized version, eeek!
Having been up on that bridge once or twice in my life, the film really speaks to me - and I think a lot of people who will watch it with an open heart. It is not a Christian film, but there is definitely a Christian message of love, and the value of every life.
No man is a failure who has friends. This could just as easily have been written - No man is a failure who has Love. Or as I once saw on a handmade sign in the back of an old truck - No man is a failure who loves God.
I wish I could think of a logical rebuttal, but all I got is - It’s a Wonderful Movie’.
There’s something new in every viewing. And Barrymore was FANTASTIC, as were Mitchell, Gloria Graham, Ward Bond, so many others (even Alfalfa!).
I can see where you think George Bailey is pushing "airy-fairy kumbaya socialism." But I don't think that is quite right either. He is pushing the Christian American Dream - do good, help your fellow man. It is he and his savings and loan helping people, not he assuming a government role and forcing his beliefs on the populace.
In conclusion, I think a lot of people miss the entire point of the movie, which is with God, everything is possible. It is so subtle that I think most people miss it. I get teary-eyed whenever I think about it. In the bar, George prays to God for help. Even though God is aware of him - in fact has been his whole life - it is not until George asks for his help does God step in with an angel. And then at the end, when George is on the bridge and his life is truely falling apart, he first prays to Clarence, with no effect. Only when he says, God help me, does he return back to his life and the snow starts to fall again.
Another thing I love about the movie is I think one of the earliest takes on an alternate reality. The world George is taken to actually exists in one of the trillions of possibilites of his life. He is taken to a world without him and it is indeed a tragic and scary place. All the lives he touched - Violet, his mother, Mary, Bert the cop, Ernie the cabdriver. Only Potter is the same and without George to be there, his evil is allowed to run rampant, corrupting everything.
I think I am going to see this movie again tonight.
We had one like that in our town and it just went out of business.
LOL!
Just saying you have a soft spot for Mr. Potter is bad enough - he is everything that is bad about capitalism today - basically making money off the misfortunes of others and [probably] having more money than he could spend in a hundred lifetimes.
People like Potter [and there are many] are what gives capitalism a bad name, but George Bailey epitomizes christian capitalism whereby he used his limited success to help his fellow man get a roof over his head and out of Potter’s high rent flop houses.
And George is smart enough to keep enough money back to allow the bldg and loan to survive and thrive as well even if it meant struggles for his family in a drafty old house. One where Mary Bailey turned a nearly condemned wreck into a shining jewel. You, sir, should be ashamed to equate anything George Bailey accomplished w/ socialism.
But then I knew I would not like nor agree with your post when you came out backing Potter. Cripes!
Well thank you for that post. I agree 100% - epitomizes everything I felt about my favorite christmas movie I first saw 35 or so years ago...
If I may, three brief points:
1. Don’t go jumpin’ bad ‘bout NO Frank Capra film, EVER, sucker.
2. George came to realize how small worldly experiences were compared to the riches of real living. Too bad some folks only end up as a ‘American Studies’ professors.
3. Donna Reid is the hottest female to ever grace the silver screen. George struck it rich in wa-a-a-ay more ways than idiots like the professor will ever know.
Pottersville Forever!!
Bingo.
Beavis & Butthead had the best take on it; the angel shows them how much better the world would have been if they had never been born...
George Bailey had a nice wife and kids, integrity, and people sure liked him. But the message of the movie is a scathing indictment of everything that built America. It says loud and clear that you can’t have all those things and still follow your “selfish” economic self-interest.
My issue is with this false dichotomy at the heart of the film. Bedford Falls (and America) weren’t built by nice, beloved frustrated do-gooders. They were built by people with brains and ambition, working for their own economic self-interest. Why did that work in America and nowhere else? Because only here, a lack of money or land or a noble title was no barrier to entry.
Without naked economic self-interest, rocket engines and transistors and the Salk vaccine do not get invented.
Nobody is well-served when incompetents “want to help people.” George Bailey was wildly unsuited to the profession his family guilted him into. The whole town — America — is much better off when people who like to build houses and know how to build houses build them — NOT the George Baileys of the world. That’s how you get the best possible product at the best possible price.
It’s telling that Bailey couldn’t even fix his own stair bannister after years and years — what the hell was he doing building houses? Would you want to buy one of his crap houses?
The free market can do better than the government in nearly everything. People like George Bailey go into “government service” all the time, but just look at the results. Squalid public housing. Failing public schools. Obamacare! But hey — I WANT TO HELP PEOPLE!
And it’s interesting that Frank Capra didn’t stay put in his podunk town and do “public service” in some job he hated — he got the hell out of Dodge and went to Hollywood to be a big-shot movie director. Think he did it for free?
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