First Time Viewer – It’s A Wonderful Life in Middle Age 

Beginning in grade nine, I commuted every day on the Q35 bus from Queens to Brooklyn, straight down Flatbush Avenue to Midwood High School. Midwood had a magnet program that formed half the school, attracting kids from all over the city; the other half consisted of kids from near the school that couldn’t get in otherwise, and it made the school severely segregated –one program a model working- and middle-class mosaic, the other one almost completely West Indian and poorer. Gym was the only democratizing, and extremely fraught, force. 3,000 kids in one building in the middle of Brooklyn, sorting through adolescence and societal fissures together and all at once in 1990s New York. 

Midwood was a portal to many new worlds, some important and formative, some traumatizing, like Mr. O’Neill’s Latin class. If you had Mr. O’Neill, it meant spending one period every day essentially in Catholic school with a priest who hadn’t been told about Vatican II or spitefully rejected it. An actual former Roman Catholic priest, Mr. O’Neill clearly relished some of the pedagogical tools he previously relied on – definitely public humiliation, especially if you weren’t one of his star pupils, which I was not. I was very shy and quiet, even more so in this new setting, and he equated that with inferior intellectual abilities. In front of the whole class, he would loudly remark his amazement each time I would do well (“95! How DID you manage that, Miss Friedman?”; another time he called on me and I blushed, and he yelled at me to lighten up). He genuinely thought I was dim. A teetotaling bow-tied anachronism, Mr. O’Neill was there to mold young minds and create good citizens by various means. Part of this missionary project included pushing Frank Capra’s classic It’s A Wonderful Life. Each year he would give extra credit to anyone who watched it during the holiday break. As a result, I have steered clear and avoided it my entire life. Until now. 

Recently my boyfriend Bob and I watched Rope, Hitchcock’s often underrated take on Leopold & Loeb, with Jimmy Stewart starring as the wise professor who puzzles out his former students’ scheme for the perfect crime. I mentioned to Bob that I had never seen It’s A Wonderful Life. He was bewildered, amazed, and determined to correct this gap in my American cultural zeitgeist resume. Over the years, especially because Mr. O’Neill telegraphed his politics and moralism, and because the film plays on a loop during the holiday season, It’s A Wonderful Life has gained so many layers of Christmas and folky schmaltz to me, like a rock perpetually gathering tinsel moss, and I just assumed that’s all it was. However, it is a classic, it is Jimmy Stewart, and it was playing at 9:30 pm on a Saturday night at IFC. We decided to go, and I was looking forward to it. We had a lovely dinner at Bar 6 and somehow, magically, managed to miss all of SantaCon as we wend our way downtown a 6^th Ave alight with holiday decorations and fairy lights. Some light snow even started falling. I was ready to be transported from one snow globe to another. 

We shared the theatre with only about 6 other people, all sitting behind us. It was perfect – in the dark it felt like just us, a snowy Bedford Falls, and the continuously deferred plans of Mr. George Bailey. I was very quickly, almost jarringly, disarmed by this immediately serious movie (both in subject and in its channeling of emotional reality – its creation of an entire world I quickly suspended my disbelief for). I came anticipating a light-hearted Christmas romp, some typical “Capra-corn,” especially with Arsenic and Old Lace fresh in my mind from a recent viewing. 

We meet George Bailey through his heavenly intercessors, as they look down and try to keep this good man from throwing away “that most precious gift (of life),” as he looks down at the icy water from the edge of a bridge.  St. Joseph (we just hear his voice, with a few celestial orbs pulsating to clarify he is speaking) summons Clarence, an angel trying to earn his wings, to intervene.

St. Joseph’s explanation to Clarence of his mission allows us to see the highlight reel of all the extraordinary things the handsome, charming, kind, George Bailey has done in his life. They include jumping into a frozen pond  when he was 11 to save his younger brother (his brother would go on to become an fighter pilot in WWII, saving hundreds and possibly thousands of lives); to another incident when he was a mere boy — intercepting his boss at the pharmacy when the older man almost accidentally kills a child by sending a toxic prescription; to playing a central role in helping the residents of Bedford Falls buy homes and realize their modest goals during his wise and generous stewardship of the Bailey family building & loan company. We see these early portraits of George as a man of utter decency and courage and the almost instantaneous ripple effects of those attributes: lives saved, dreams fulfilled, days made better. 

However, we also get to know George Bailey as an intelligent, ambitious man who has been planning his escape from this small town from an early age. He sees the world just beyond the horizon and yet at each step he is kept from reaching out for it.  George has spent years saving his money to leave Bedford Falls to go abroad and then attend college. However, in the first of many moments of sacrificing his desires for the greater good, his father passes away just as George quite literally has his suitcase in his hand, ready to depart. The villain in the movie, Mr. Potter, the town’s quintessential scrooge (played by a seasoned Lionel Barry who, among his other big roles, had for many years played Dickens’ villain on an annual Christmas radio performance) is set to take over the elder Bailey’s company. Before departing on his trip, George gives a rousing defense of decency and what would happen to Bedford Falls should Mr. Potter buy the company. As George Bailey is about to step out the door forever, the board votes that the only way to keep it out of Mr. Potter’s hands would be to have George Bailey take over. George sets down his suitcase of dreams and relents. 

He is ready to defer his plans until his younger brother Henry returns from college and takes over. But that future is also quickly dispatched – Henry arrives in town announcing his new bride and a new job with her father. George must now stay on, perhaps forever. We see how he has taken up the mantel with energy and goodwill, underwriting the mortgages of everyone in town, including many who had been scrimping and saving meager wages and would never be able to buy a home otherwise. Their only path to this America. George Bailey does so with his loving wife Mary at his side. She is adoring and equally indomitable in her optimism and agency, seeing the romance and beauty in everything she touches. She creates a life for them that is bursting with warmth and purpose. And their chemistry is delightful and convincing – Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed bring to life some scenes that feel surprisingly sexy and charged for those Code years. 

However, we watch the cumulative effect of all of George Bailey’s dashed dreams and feel the weight of it.  Even their honeymoon is sacrificed when there is a Depression-era bank run on the Bailey Building & Loan and George ends up using their trip money to keep the towns’ folks at bay. To paraphrase one of my favorite critics, Amy Nicholson, fate is a far more relentless villain than Mr. Potter in this movie. In several scenes we see that despite his beautiful family, and the love of an entire town, George Bailey returns home each evening weary and depleted. 

However, he only comes to the brink when Mr. Potter steals the equivalent of $100,000 from the Bailey Building & Loan on Christmas Eve. When a bank auditor makes an unannounced visit and the money cannot be accounted for, George is sure he will have to go to prison. He feels ruined and perhaps like the only attributes he did have control over in his life– strength, security, reliability, an endless ability to help others – are now also gone. Either a last straw or a total devastation, it also ultimately brings him salvation. 

Many things about the movie defied my expectations not least of which was just how dark and moody George Bailey would turn out to be, even his charm and warmth feel world weary – sincere and often lighthearted, but this man has seen a lot, even if George Bailey had never actually left upstate New York. He is not an antihero by any means, but he is a three-dimensional person, even if his story is allegorical. Jimmy Stewart, just back from the front and still very much reeling, hadn’t initially wanted to do this role, did not feel ready to be in the world again. However, that may have been exactly why Frank Capra’s pitch worked on Stewart. According to Mark Harris’ book, Five Came Back, after hearing Capra’s description, Stewart, probably with a sly grin, said: “Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I’m your boy.”

The psychic wounds that Jimmy Stewart carried from the war gave his performance such a charged depth and visceral reality that I’m not sure the movie would have resonated without it. One of the many surprises for me was that Capra stayed in the movie’s darker moments as long as he did – he harnessed the raw energy Stewart brought to this quaint movie set. One of the most emotionally affecting scenes I’ve seen in a long time was when George Bailey returns home after finding out about the missing money. He stops by Martini’s bar en route, and when he arrives at his house, he is completely unhinged and distraught, berating and demeaning each individual member of his family, including his four sweet children – it’s as uncomfortable and jarring as any Lars von Trier suffering porn and far more organic. It lasts a very long time and it’s brutal. He is utterly abusive, this most decent man.

When Bailey then stands at the bridge and regrets his very life, Clarence decides to make literal George’s lament of wishing he had never been born. He shows George a world where he and his actions have had no imprint. Capra adapted this screenplay from a 1939 short story that was inspired by A Christmas Carol, and the device of showing George Bailey an alternate world has clear echoes. One of the film’s first treatments actually cultivated one such world where George Bailey had been born, but was not a particularly great guy. I’d actually like to see that, as what one of my issues with the film is the seeming message that only people who had literally saved lives and are the most extraordinary amongst us are worthy of salvation.  What if you’re not a heroic protagonist, what if you sometimes don’t tip well, didn’t stand up to your teacher when they were humiliating another student, or just are not provided with so many opportunities to test your mettle. I’m sure I’d jump into a frozen pond to save my brother, or really anyone, but it just hasn’t come up. 

Interestingly, one of the reasons Capra may have gone with the final iteration of the story, where George Bailey is almost impossibly heroic and beloved, has to do with his own travails in post-war Hollywood.  According to Harris, “Capra stayed true to his desire to make a movie about ‘the individual’s belief in himself’ but he connected the issue that was then troubling him the most – his intense need to be appreciated by others.” This last part is clearly projected in the movie and may be what leads me to feel confused about the lesson of why exactly George Bailey shouldn’t kill himself. It shouldn’t be because everyone loves him and he changed so many lives and has all that any human needs to be happy. If he is truly God’s creature, his life has worth just by being on this earth. I would be so curious to see a version of this story where George Bailey was just kind of mediocre, or even a homeless curmudgeon, or anything in-between. 

Capra’s own life also shaped these heroes and tropes. As Joseph McBride recounts in his masterful biography of the director, The Catastrophe of Success, Capra was a bit of an outcast in Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles in the early 20^th Century – one of the only working-class immigrants. One of the only people who befriended him, Jimmy Doolittle:

“Represented a beau ideal to the despised Sicilian immigrant, a Steerforth to Capra’s David Copperfield. With his all-American WASP good looks, ready smile, rugged physique and reckless courage, Jimmy Doolittle had what later would be called star quality…through some process of osmosis he could only vaguely understand at the time, (Capra) could project himself to the world through his connection with a charismatic figure like Jimmy Doolittle. That process would eventually reveal itself to Capra as the ability to create heroic surrogates on the motion picture screen — heroes who unlike himself, were handsome WASPs, but through whom he could project his feelings and ideals. Jimmy Doolittle was a real-life prototype of the characters later played for Capra by Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart. 

Clarence takes George through a Bedford Falls that he never inhabited, now called Pottersville. Not unlike Back To The Future II, clearly inspired by Wonderful Life, this town is run amok with gambling, crime, drunks, prostitutes, and various other vices meant to evoke some kind of midcentury American dystopia (it’s actually quite remarkable just how many dens of iniquity inhabit this tiny main street – like a snowy and quaint Las Vegas). It is the complete inversion of Bedford Falls. 

After George sees the absence of all the good he has done, the missing beauty of his family and people whose lives he has touched, he realizes how wonderful his life truly is, how precious it is, and how blessed he is. He has been made to appreciate what he has. After seeing this, he of course reorients his priorities, and is also ready to face the possibility of prison, since he cannot suddenly come up with the missing money. George is ready for whatever fate awaits him, after all, he has all a man can ask for. In the final Christmas miracle and another moral of the movie, — the entire town pitches in to cover the missing money– George has been there for them all these years, and they come to his rescue with glee. 

Much of the brilliance of the movie lies, ironically, in Frank Capra’s famously muddled politics (he was a populist who loved Mussolini; he extolled the virtues of the common man while also fearing mob rule; he hated cities and portrayed small towns as their virtuous counterpoints; he had a vague notion of hating the elitists in power). One can map their own ethics onto the movie, or zero in on what they think is the most important moral the movie wishes to impart. One can, for instance, focus on the communitarian spirit that no one man cannot do it alone, it takes a village, etc. One can also see it as extolling the virtues of capitalism – one can be a man of the people, have their welfare at the ultimate goal while running a bank. It actually seems to explicitly do so which makes the FBI’s misgivings about the movie’s possible Communist messaging quite funny. 

Of course, the main sentiments that at least Capra seems to want to communicate is that life is a precious gift from God (Capra was obsessed with the scourge of atheism) and one need only have a change of attitude to see that what they’ve been after is right in front of them all along. Whether Christian or Buddhist, this is not an unworthy moral, though I feel unsatisfied that we are not meant to have sympathy or feel the pain of thwarted expectations for George’s sacrifices and continuously foiled plans (is he Job? Is he Christ? Is he the ideal midcentury postwar man that embodies the virtues of stability, sacrifice, reliability and modest desires?).  

There doesn’t seem to be room for the argument or discussion of the seemingly simple question – when is it healthy to want something and to change, and when is it healthy to accept one’s lot. George is made to surrender wanting more so many times, and while he has built a beautiful life with Mary, it was after he had resigned to having to stay in Bedford Falls and give up very specific and well-planned goals. Mary on the other hand, had tried life in the big city, decided it wasn’t for her and returned to Bedford Falls to court and marry the man she had been in love with since she was a child. She had the opportunity to test life and choose.

In his book, Harris writes about Capra and the other 4 big Hollywood directors who helped the American effort by making propaganda films (the others were John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler). All returned with a more jaundiced view of the escapist fare they produced before the war, and the newsreels that captured its brutality. During this postwar period, In Europe, the neo-realists, living in the still-smoldering ruins, forged an entirely new visual vocabulary and narrative style – Vittorio di Sicca, Robert Rossellini and others felt compelled to draw on life’s experiences in this new way. 

Most of the American 5 did as well and even Capra felt that Hollywood could no longer return to its more innocent days.  Yet, the social realism that audiences craved after the war was not a road that Capra could seem to take. As Harris writes, “He had spent too many years trying to convince Americans and himself that there were no problems that could not be solved by hard work, good cheer, and a burst of spirited rhetoric.”

Despite its very real depth, It’s A Wonderful Life is ultimately too allegorical and feel-good. When the movie came out, the critical and popular reception was cool. The War had changed everyone, and most no longer responded to Capra’s sentimentality and homespun wisdom.  In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, “the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow, they all resemble theatrical attitudes, rather than average realities.” It was only in the late 70s that the movie emerged as a Christmas staple and a classic, by partially entering the public domain, and it was only in 1994 (actually the year I first had Mr. O’Neill) that NBC bought the full rights to the movie and began its perennial showcasing of it. 

During this latter-day renaissance, divorced from the context of the post-war zeitgeist, It’s A Wonderful Life’s more raw, post-war realism becomes clearer. There is a lot of unflinching darkness in the film, such as the relentless scene described above when George Bailey returns home drunk and distraught. And despite the explicit moral lessons of the movie, one does walk away slightly shaken, interrogating their own life and choices, and also marveling at how Jimmy Stewart’s range elevated that movie to a place it maybe it had no business reaching. But maybe I’m not giving Capra enough credit. Despite disavowing films that had “messages” after the war (more overtly political ones), Capra was scarred and changed in his owns ways and was a brilliant director even if not a sophisticated man in other ways.  

It was impossible for me to watch and think about this movie without trying to intuit what Mr. O’Neill’s main purpose was for us in assigning it. Because I knew this was part of his plan to create patriotic Christian citizens (I mean Christian as synonymous with virtue and charity but also at least for Mr. O’Neill, with God and certain conservative values), amongst this diverse group of first-generation Americans and others in this teeming urban school, so unlike Bedford Falls. It’s not hard to see and that it opens with St. Joseph in the literal heavens was almost too much.  It unnerves me to think what Mr. O’Neill sees when he watches this film and what he perceives as the gaps between the clear morals of George Bailey and Bedford Falls and everything Mr. O’Neill thinks is wrong today, and what I am sure he construes as the Pottersville that surrounds him (he lives in Staten Island, no doubt to escape Pottersville). I am sure his idea of family values and self-sacrifice cuts against anything remotely progressive – and I can almost hear him counting a litany of liberal sins that have ruined America, as they might sound since he was my teacher in 1994. I can feel the contempt he would have in his voice and I shudder to think of the nostalgia he and probably many others feel for the 40s and 50s that they think the film represents.

It’s hard to imagine a world without It’s A Wonderful Life, ironically enough (even before seeing it at IFC, it was of course always playing somewhere in the background – on TV or influencing so many tropes and conventions). Its outsized role in American culture is surprisingly recent, considering it was only revived in 1976. Through some informal recently polling I’ve discovered that many people I know have seen it but have mostly vague memories, often confusing it with Miracle on 34^th Street, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or other Capra or Christmas fare. But those that have watched it recently, are struck by its depth, realism and its elasticity in foregrounding good and bad and utopia and dystopia as one might see them.

In a 2010 essay for Salon, Richard Cohen described It’s a Wonderful Life as “the most terrifying Hollywood film ever made”. In the “Pottersville” sequence, he wrote, George Bailey is not seeing the world that would exist had he never been born, but rather “the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own”. Nine years earlier, another Salon writer, Gary Kamiya, had expressed the opposing view that “Pottersville rocks!“, adding: “The gauzy, Currier-and-Ives veil Capra drapes over Bedford Falls has prevented viewers from grasping what a tiresome and, frankly, toxic environment it is … We all live in Pottersville now.”