I watched a “the making of” video on IAWL on Youtube...it said that Frank Capra got mail for years about Potter keeping the money and not be called out for it.
The story was about a man realizing what he has, and how the world would have been very different without him in it.
It was not a crime novel about an old grouch stealing 8,000 dollars.
Liberals are going to find something wrong with everything...but I say, “let them pout”...I still enjoy IAWL every year.
It’s a “story”, not a DOCUMENTARY.
Just watched this beautiful movie after many years. Frank Capra was a wonderful filmmaker and James Stewart gives the performance of a lifetime. There are so many idiots out there writing and talking about films who are so ignorant. The appalling Never Trumper and film critic John Podhoretz just tweeted that he never found Laurel and Hardy funny. Someone who thinks that shouldn’t be let anywhere near film criticism - which used to be a respectable genre of writing.
Inciteful comments.
“If it represents American traditions as “good”, ATTACK IT!” must be a required course for today’s national press corpse.
I enjoyed the alternate ending played by the SNL gang. Then too, The Hebrew Hammer tells it all.
>>He then rather absurdly goes on to claim that “It’s a Wonderful Life” represents socialist, New Deal-style economics, and that it was intended for “the workers at a Soviet collective circa 1949,” with the message “who cares that you have no shoes? Back to the factory for Mother Russia.”
Frank Capra was a lifelong Republican who never voted for FDR (and there were plenty of FDR campaigns)
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/03/books/it-wasn-t-such-a-wonderful-life.html
It Wasn’t Such a Wonderful Life
By BARRY GEWENMAY 3, 1992
...Audiences flocked to see “Capraesque” movies like “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Meet John Doe” — parables of ordinary people forced to stand up against the greed and corruption of the rich and powerful. Those dramatic comedies, with their depictions of hardship, their “common man” heroes (usually Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper) and their celebrations of small-town virtues, gave expression to a country struggling to climb out of the Depression; they have, ever since their release, been identified with Roosevelt and the New Deal. Yet it is one of the great surprises of Joseph McBride’s masterly, comprehensive and frequently surprising biography, “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,” that the man who seemed to put the spirit of the New Deal on the screen was, in reality, a closet reactionary and a dogged Roosevelt hater...
...In part, the misperception was due to Capra’s writers, who generally ranged from New Deal Democrats to card-carrying Communists. One of Capra’s great strengths as a director in the 1930’s was his ability to work with anyone who had something to contribute to his pictures, even those who were far to his left. He was also enough of a popular entertainer to cater to his audiences; he understood that during the Depression the most hissable villains were grasping bankers and businessmen.
But ultimately the misunderstanding over Capra’s politics seems to be a case of people seeing what they wanted to see. In his analysis of “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” Mr. McBride points out that the Gary Cooper character, far from being some sort of socialist or New Deal liberal, was, if anything, an “enlightened plutocrat” whose philosophy of voluntary giving was little different from that of Republican businessmen opposed to the New Deal; and he shrewdly notes that while Deeds got into trouble for trying to distribute most of the $20 million he inherited to desperate farmers, he was still planning to keep $2 million for himself...
In the real world, the bank examiner would not have cared if they made up the lost deposit. They would be on the hook for having a drunk handling their money. Sure, George Bailey would not Toto prison, but the S&L would be in trouble.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God
Well, to be fair, there is a bit of a socialist idea behind the Building-and-Loan. The FHLB was founded in 1932 to subsidize home loans. I doubt that most S&Ls could have made it without the subsidies.
But does that make it socialist or communist? We could debate that all day - to no avail.
Their collective self-loathing, hatred, vitriol, anger, vulgarity and constant need to put down everything good in America can only explained by their warped mental outlook on life in general.
How they get up in the morning and can stand to look at themselves in the mirror is beyond me.
IAWL is a holiday classic and their need to tear it down reflects badly on them and not the movie.
It’s nothing more than a diatribe against capitalism.
Back in the 1930’s and 1940’s a number of screen play writers were either Communist and/or Socialist. Those themes were woven into a number of movies.
One in particular that I remember was a film with Van Heflin and Barbara Stanwyck called “B.F.’s Daughter”, Heflin’s character was a Progressive Anti-Capitalist.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is in a sense Anti-Capitalist. My problem with the film is just about all the characters are stereotypes, especially Potter’s.
The Bailey’s are without a doubt the most inept business people I have ever seen. They go to the extreme in trying to put people first yet they cut their own throats by not using any excepted business sense.
Why would anyone have someone as irresponsible as Uncle Billy as the company comptroller? He was an alcoholic as well as incompetent.
In any event there is enough subtle Socialism woven into the script to question it’s true purpose.
One thing we lose sight of about the thirties (yes, the movie was made in the forties, but the Depression was still on everyone's mind) is the idea that big scale capitalism had failed.
Many people thought that if free enterprise was to endure (and many people thought it wouldn't, or shouldn't) it would have to continue on a smaller scale, closer to actual producers and consumers. So distributivism was in the air. As was the "back to the land" movement.
There were many co-operatives and mutual companies -- experiments that weren't thought of as socialist alternatives to markets and free enterprise, but as populist alternatives to big business. Savings and loan associations were a part of that.
I do not consider it socialism, even though it is not entirely conservative (and I consider socialism just a euphemism for communism).
Frank Capra was certainly a leftist, and John Wayne refused to be in one of his movies for that reason: Wayne loathed the man.