Happiness is the state of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves — Jonathan Swift, The Tale of a Tub, 1704, alluded to in Magic in the Moonlight, 2014
Clarence: Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he? — screenplay for It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946
Colin Firth as Stanley Crawford and Emma Stone as Sophie Baker, soaked from rain, gaze out at the sky in an observatory (Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen film)
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey looking up at the sky from a town degraded by misery, with people debased from lack of economic opportunity his Building Company had given him, as the angel Clarence has changed the past so that he never existed (It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra film)
Dear friends and readers,
Surely sheer coincidence that I, for whom these topics have a direct personal anguish, should have watched in tandem two films which either assert (It’s a Wonderful Life) or debate (Magic in the Moonlight) if there is a God, if prayers are answered, if there is some meaning in existence, a pattern beautiful imposed by a supernatural realm beyond the natural. I knew a belief that this is so (however comically enacted by Henry Travers as the prosaic Angel looking for a promotion, Clarence) was the central assertion of Capra’s famous Christmas movie, but I had long ago forgotten how this was demonstrated and how George Bailey came to know such anguish as is seen on the mobile face of the great actor, Jimmy Stewart, and I neglected to read the reviews of Allen’s latest summer movie project so didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.
George dreaming over travel literature
As Joseph (an angel who appears as a twinkling star in the firmament) tells it to Clarence, George Bailey’s life is one where one enemy of promise after another takes away each of George’s ambitious dreams. He dreamed of leaving the dull small town, Bedford Falls, of taking a trip around the world. He couldn’t because his father’s business, a Building Association which loaned money to people, needed his expertise. Four years pass and he is now hoping to go to college. He can’t because his father dies, and that business will go to pieces if he doesn’t sustain it. Instead his brother uses the money he earned to become an engineer, meet a rich young woman and take a well-paying job in her father’s firm far away from Bedford Falls. At each turn in his life some promise, some ambition, some average expectation is thwarted. He marries his childhood sweetheart, Mary (Donna Reed) and hopes to take a luxurious cruise honeymoon, and there is a rush on the association so all their money must go to satisfy their customers’ demand for their money. He and his wife take over the ruin of a house and fix it.
Unlike real life though these enemies of promise turn out to be good things: each time George is led to do good — he fights Mr Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) the mean capitalist banker, the film’s villain, who seeks to make everyone else live poorly, work for little, have no decent place to live so they will be vulnerable, weak, serve him abjectly as he grows richer and richer. George Bailey on the surface looks the selfless man who has provided a beautiful village of small houses for the people of this town, seen his brother become a WW2 hero, but we are to see he feels his lack of a fancy car, beautiful home; he never goes to Europe (a dream of upper middle class fulfillment found in the last season of Breaking Bad too: Marie tells Hanjk Walt and Skylar are planning to go to Europe but this is thwarted when Walt is found out by Hank and his cancer returns).
Thomas Mitchell as Uncle Billy abject before his loss of the important money
Then on Christmas eve during some excitement either he or his faithful kind honest uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) puts a desperately needed $800 in an envelope which gets wrapped up in a newspaper and into the hands of the evil Mr Potter, who keeps it. George has been financing all he does on tenuous grounds and when the bank examiners come that night, there is no money in the till. He is bankrupt; Mr Potter as chief banker, is able to call in loans and demand a warrant for his arrest. George will be exposed as a failure, crook, shamed, and there wells up in him the years of personal sacrifice. He screams at his loving family (4 children who cost), his endlessly hard-working selfless wife (decorating the tree, making food for all), and for once tells those around them what underneath his kind exterior what he thinks of them. Fools, incompetent, irritating. He has given up his time to support others not as smart as he. He then sees how useless it is to them them these truths, apologizes, and rushes out into the street.
We next see him in a bar run by an Italian man who owes the happy physically comfortable existence of his family to George’s generous trust in him. George is getting very drunk. Heaven, though, is alerted to his suicidal thoughts because so many people in the town pray to God (we hear these prayers) and Clarence is sent down to help. Just as George is about to jump off a bridge, into teeming cold water, Clarence jumps. Naturally George jumps in also to save Clarence, and both are taken to a local station house to dry off. After some initial comic dressing by the angel (changing a heavenly gown for a suit), the two go walking, Clarence carrying a favorite book, Tom Sawyer.
Henry Travers as Clarence listening to George
As Clarence listens to George’s immiseration, he comes up with a radical way to prove to George his life has not been wasted, worth nothing, achieved nothing: he puts a spell on the world so that George will see what would have happened to many in Bedford Falls had George not existed: George is deaf in one ear because he saved his brother from drowning in ice one winter; his brother would have died at age 8. The Building Association would have failed and the whole town resemble the impoverished huge population in the US today: dives for drunkenness, wretched food, oblivion sought, hopelessness, everyone biting at everyone else.
It’s a movie which denies Mrs Thatcher’s famous contention (today often repeated as a canny truth) that there is no such thing as society only individuals and families, each a unit apart from the other units. It demonstrates that people matter to each other. That we are all “in it” together. George’s Building Association is the New Deal, a genuinely pro-people gov’t as we’ve not seen in the US since FDR, only in fits and starts since then up to the 1970s, when an anti-people group of powerful associations began to turn the US back to the pre-WW1 era socially as far as is possible. And it does show the underside of poverty and despair: depression era places and dress abound when George’s existence is subtracted.
Stewart becomes hysterical as he sees what the town became. It’s a deeply sexist film so Mary is envisioned as a uptight virgin librarian who never married and is horrified when Stewart attempts to approach her.
What Donna Reed must’ve been had George not married her
A secondary sexually unchaste young woman Violet (Gloria Graham) who he helped escape the punished existence she had been living
Gloria Graham as all glistening gratitude to the kindly man who rescues her ..
is seen as just about a prostitute being beaten up and taken off to jail by cops. George is now seen as a danger to all, a crazy man, and (really sad this), the one place where what is happening in this 1946 film corresponds to US society today is when a cop pulls out a gun and starts to shoot to kill Stewart who flees back to the bridge where he had originally intended to jump. George stands there praying hard that Clarence will make it that he did exist, and the magic happens and suddenly the cop recognizes him. Meanwhile Mary has visited all the people George ever helped and they have all contributed what they could and the debt will be paid. What a contrast to Breaking Bad: no one in Breaking Bad gives anything to anyone without expecting something monetarily valuable back (it can be prestige, respectability). If Walter White wants to make enough money to afford effective chemotherapy for his cancer, he must turn to selling something that commands a big price: meths.
No American value is questioned. Mr Potter is a twisted evil man, not presented as representative of usual humanity. War is a good thing in It’s a Wonderful Life: George’s brother Henry’s heroism saving people by his airforce work is not seen to kill people at the same time. We see George help one seriously presented black man, but otherwise black people are represented as comical and contented — especially in the “colored” maid the Bailey family seems to be able to afford to keep. It is a fable controlled by the Hays Code.
Famously people cry over this film. I became hysterical as I watched — it seemed to give me a license to wild crying.
There is something indescribably touching in Stewart’s face as he is made to feel he had a valuable life
Yes if I had never existed this house which we bought would probably not be here (have been bought and pulled down by someone far richer), Jim would not have moved to the US, and would have died years earlier from the very unhealthy life he was living. No Laura, no Izzy. I suppose on some level the argument is silly, but its radically root-and-branch evacuation of an existence make a radical point. Maybe others when they watch Stewart travel the huge trajectory of extravagant emotions their losses or yearnings come out too. For me I thought about how I just don’t have the strength I once did any more, as all happiness is gone from life for me. I see myself as trying hard and then as repeatedly finding it’s no use, stomach ache, so exhausting this being alive without him, nothing I do gives me any surcease. I will never now have the dreams I hoped to fulfill: I can’t travel, am all anxiety, am excluded from real companionship as much as ever. He alone assuaged that, he was my friend, so now for me it’s deep loneliness and frustration, true silence. I surmise others who cry do not cry with delirious joy, but because they know the film’s fulfillment for George Bailey is a fairy tale they wish were true
Izzy has told me the fable is told in many forms in various places since 1946, and when in some films one is going to get a version, of here’s what the world would have been without you, the film turns black-and-white. I know there are other classic popular films and musicals where suddenly the audience is presented with characters in heaven looking down at and affecting the people “below.” Carousel for one. The egoistic outlook which imagines that a single person (“I”) inside the vast universe can control or interfere with complicated events across a big earth suddenly so they change to satisfy that person’s needs through wishing which reaches some super-power is apparently one many people still fantasize with. When I taught ghost stories to my students each term there would be a couple of students who’d during their talks assert a belief in ghosts. They did not go on to witches, werewolves or vampires, but ghosts are enough.
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Simon McBurney is the jealous magician who with Sophie deludes Firth as Stanley into believing in her medium powers; there they are, all complacent with Eileen Atkins as rich pampered loving and loved aunt
First, let me not be misunderstood. It’s a Wonderful Life is a great film fable; Magic in the Moonlight is often tiresome, exasperating (to me especially when I had to watch the half-embarrassed actor, Colin Firth fold his hands, look up piously and pray for his aunt’s life), and self-indulgent. Lazy. At the end of the movie after lengthy discussion, finally Sophie is found to be hiding in Aunt Vanessa (Eileen Atkins)’s house, ready to kiss and marry Stanley. The young woman-older man couple is too close to Allen’s own marriage to his young step-daughter for comfort. Firth is not the first male matinee idol type actor to stand in for Allen too closely in these last years as Allen faced the reality he is even too old looking to be the heroine’s father; he needs to play the grandfather at least. As with other of Allen’s last films (not last year’s Blue Jasmine), this film occurs in a never-land of luxury, idleness and gorgeous landscapes and ceaseless effortless vacations:
no one has any hard work to do: jobs are all of the art-y type (including being a magician); clothes are lavish (especially Atkins’s wardrobe which seems tactlessly over-designed to hide her aging body and face). The laziness is in having the actors tell one another at the opening of the film what they have been doing these last years, what they are now planning to do (go off to a rich estate and expose a fake medium), fill us in repeatedly (like Prospero in the first act of The Tempest). And everyone praises Firth’s art and Aunt Vanessa’s existence to the extent I thought of the characters in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison’s excruciating open praise of him and later Harriet. And Emma Stone is lifeless; she looks like a Woody Allen heroine, but she can’t act.
Sophie and Stanley discuss nature of existence
Yet if you are intrigued by an ironic debate on the issues presented in It’s a Wonderful Life, interested in Allen’s films (as the New York Times critic immediately noted) which present and debate the problem of the existence of the paranormal, superstition (as in fortune-tellers — often found in Allen films), doubt and faith, whether life is worth living given how cruel are the fates of so many people, how unfeeling people are to one another, rampant injustice everywhere (not seen in this film), desperate poverty (which we are told Sophie and her mother experienced until they took up their fake trade) — the film has the suspense of whether we will end up in preferring the fatuous contentment of the deluded (go to the fortuneteller and hold to what she says) or the desperate bleakness of recognizing death as meaningless annihilation after a life of mostly failure and distress with performative lies as one way to get through knowingly. Some of the talk is absorbing with Firth playing the disillusioned misanthrope.
Conor Langton liked it, thought that Firth’s performance carried it.
The haughty reserve, the perfectly phrased disdain, the deeply romantic nature hidden beneath the chill: Firth does this sort of thing better than anyone. But this time the character’s name is Stanley Crawford … At times, the movie sounds like an overwritten drawing-room comedy from eighty years ago, or like Shaw without the irony … The renowned cinematographer Darius Khondji, shooting on 35-mm. film, with old CinemaScope lenses, achieves a soft, lemon-tinted light .. the swank is held in place by Allen’s instinctive classicism: the camera that gently recedes as the actors walk toward it; the long-lasting immovable shots as people talk and talk. It’s an accomplished, stately movie—unimpassioned but pleasing.
The movie stands up to intellectual scrutiny and aesthetically is intelligent. When Firth finally figures out how the delusion is achieved, he’s not keen to return to his arid hopelessness. The film connects to It’s Wonderful Life because Allen and Firth both want to long to believe in faery and understand it is not so, but in understanding it’s not so realize something else has to be substituted: love, kindness, toleration of those who need illusions, recognizing you do have illusions of your own in other areas, need some reassurance there is some enjoyment and at least some comradeship to be hoped for.
The final problem with Allen’s new film is it lacks of sense of humor, Allen is taking himself so seriously. Now Capra in It’s a Wonderful Life does the same thing: takes the issues and American icons of family life seriously. For myself I bothered to write this because I wanted to recognize people’s serious involvement. Yet our public visions of can’t accept more than fleeting moments
To please today’s public, Allen needed more of the spirit of his 1972 New Yorker piece called “Examining Psychic Phenomena, “There is no question that there is an unseen world … The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?” And Capra needed to let the dark side of his movie — what we are shown is the reality with no George Baileys about — come out more dominantly had he not had the Hays Code to contend with.
I neglected to mention the elderly very rich widow in Allen’s film who is paying huge sums to be made to believe she is getting in touch with her dead husband’s spirit. She is not quite made merciless fun of.
Jacki Weaver as Brice’s (Hamish Linklater) mother (he is the super-rich young man about to marry Sophie)
Other widows: George Bailey’s mother who with George having lived is presented as mostly worrying about money; without George she would have ended childless, a bleak lonely woman who takes in boarders; Sophie Baker’s career is dependent on the efforts of her widowed mother to secure clients and keep the sceptical at bay. We never learn whether Aunt Vanessa ever married.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
A friend: I found moving the blog moving – It’s a Wonderful Life is a film that endlessly fascinates me and yet I struggle to say what I feel about it, as you have done. James Stewart is so good in the lead and does bring out the fact that the character is trapped, just as much as Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I think both those stories are in a way reworkings of A Christmas Carol, which also has that element of the world changing when Scrooge changes (I’m not sure if there is a film of the Carol where the picture fades to black and white for the ghost sequences, but I feel there might be.)
An overdone reply, Judy — upon rewatching the film with a couple of modern informative features in a re-digitalized version (the film left blessedly in black-and-white):
On the literal level, the stories are utterly disparate: on first grounds, George Bailey has spent his life giving to others while Scrooge spent his life taking and never doing anything for anyone once his early manhood’s bitter disappointments set in. But in other ways there are resemblances: serious gothic rarely has benign ghosts. Most ghost stories present strangely malicious or malevolent or mischievous spirits who punish someone severely. There is the important retrieval motif in both of them. The central character seems to retrieve some joy and manifests intense hope after in the film experiencing much anguish. Let’s admit both are Christian stories: God’s in Heaven, quite explicitly (comically to undercut so as to make it more acceptable) in the 1946 film.
Yet is the latter a recreation of the former story? to my mind the latter falls down this way. All Dickens claims at the end of his parable novella is that Scrooge knew how to keep Christmas ever after and Tiny Tim lived because Scrooge began genuinely to support the Cratchet family. We may infer he visits his nephew and is welcomed into the home as th years go on. But no more.
Capra claims that family life can be, often is fantastically satisfying — that by giving all to this paradigm and others that makes up for not fulfilling your own gifts such as you might have wanted to. I don’t think Family Life can seriously bare that kind of weight and the depiction of the Donna Reed as Mary Hatch almost unacceptable in its utter self-sacrifice. the stereotype becomes ludicrous when it’s imagined that w/o George she must have ended a librarian and then we get this repressed mouse of a women who cannot bear to have anyone touch her — virgin neuroticism could go no further. Capra in the feature says that Mary was responsible for George’s happy life. But Mary is unreal — so the antifeminism of the film or lack of any interest in real women’s aspirations outside the love of man and children is responsible for the reprieve? It’s Mary who goes round to borrow the money from others George has helped to pay his debt. Dickens has his heroine reject Scrooge and we last see her also as a non-married self-sacrificing woman spending her time in workhouses caring for the impoverished – -so the lack of interest in the woman’s life is in Dickens too
You could not make A Wonderful Life today — are there parodies and remakes others know of?
The feature says at first A Wonderful LIfe was not seen as anything extraordinary. It was liked, nominated for awards, but did not win. It left the theaters quickly and was called “a depressed movie” at the time. How far we’ve come. It was only in the 1950s when it fell out of copyright and was put on TV that it began its life as this beloved Christmas movie.
Oh yes it defied the Hays Code by not punishing the wicked villain of the piece, Mr Potter who steals in effect George’s money and never returns it and is never found out. Capra says in the feature that he did get mail for years after complaining that Mr Potter was not punished. The film does at least not have poetic justice all round.
Any thoughts anyone?
Good points, Ellen.
I myself have always thought that It’s a Wonderful Life, far from being a fluffy or ‘happy’ film (it’s often derided as “Capra-Corn”) is actually one of the bleakest and most despairing American movies of all time. As you point out, not only does the villain Potter go unpunished, but he and the other bad guys prosper and grow rich throughout the film. In contrast the hero, George Bailey, who always tries to do the morally right thing, ends up not only broke but driven to the point of suicide. It is only the intervention of an angel that saves him. And what of those who go over the bridge and find no angel waiting for them? The movie may have a happy ending, but it isn’t a very cheerful or pretty picture of American society circa 1945. In some ways it belongs in the category of Film Noir.
Gene
What an interesting way to see it, Gene. Thank you.
I know what I was most deeply stirred by was Stewart’s open performance, nothing guarded about his anguish: a couple of shots in the film were parallels to the best moments in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. It may be a step too far to call it Film Noir, but I know that I feared colorization (if that’s what it’s called) because the black-and-white and greyness of the scenes were filled with shadows and many ruins and projected loss. What people seem to ignore is that George after all did give up enormously, turn after turn in the film is about how he didn’t get to do what he wanted and then about how others are rising and he not at all. This enemies of promise theme is not overt in Dickens; you can try to read it back: Scrooge’s enemies were his cruel parents, but then he becomes a Mr Potter himself; anguish is much more fleeting and superficial in the film until near the end when Scrooge is presented with his death, and in Dickens’s novella there a different kind of sentimentalization than we see in the 1946 film.
Both do have the idea of the non-existence and a “recalled to life” for the protagonist as crucial to the final orgasm of emotion. I should amend that: not just the non-existence but then a “recalled to life” for the protagonist, just what Dickens starts with in A Tale of Two Cities.
Capra is attacked for sentimentalization, but maybe we need more sentimentalization — more empathy not only felt but praised and talked about as important — in our world today.
I heard James Chandler speak on Capra’s It’s a Wonderful life (a film I have always enjoyed immensely). He brought out it’s relationship to 18th century theory, esp Adam Smith. It was a terrific talk. Here’s his book:
An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema
by James Chandler
In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people’s very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein’s influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra’s It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.(less)
Elaine
Ellen,
I see the parallels you are aiming at. The big difference I find, however, and what redeems It’s a Wonderful Life for me, is the politics. Life is about creating a world where, in the words of Dorothy Day, it’s easier to be good. It portrays a politics that, while driven by Stewart, transcends individual acts of charity. Scrooge gives to who he deems worthy, while the Stewart character sets up structures that anyone can plug into. It’s extraordinarily telling to me that it’s an Italian family that buys one of the houses made possible through the institutional mortgage structure Stewart sets up. Very clearly Capra wanted to show that what Stewart was doing transcended clan or tribe. Scrooge might be likened to the tyranny of formlessness: he essentially gives to his clique. The bank allows everyone equal access, especially if you see the Italians as stand-ins in 1946 for blacks. (Obviously in real life blacks wouldn’t have access, but that inclusive impulse is in the film.) This is a subtle thing, or not so subtle, but a vitally important distinction.
I agree on the politics of the movie. I fear it would not be made today because of its political vision. On a face-book page I’ve been briefly discussing the 1967 film adaptation of the Forsyte Saga with the 2002: the 2002 omitted all mention (startling how they managed it) of the political vision of the novels which includes a hard-head exposure of capitalism’s exploitations — it’s central to their depiction of marital rape: women are regarded as property just as much as a man’s money and land.
Elaine I like the argument very much. I’ve had students argue in papers to me that we should not listen to our sympathies in deciding how to judge something. They have had that inculcated. The famous legal expert Blackstone began with sympathy as one of the foundations of justice. The film has empathy as central to George Bailey’s life. Thank you for the citation of that study: another one to take out of the library (or see if I can find it on the Net for a very small sum — probably not). When people speak of novels to films, they often try to found their subject on literal adaptation, but it’s larger concerns that films also take over.
Hi Ellen,
I know that back in I think the 1980s or 1990s there was a TV remake of It’s a Wonderful Life with the main role being played by a woman – I guess we’d call it a revised version since obviously some characters needed to be changed.
I think it’s a beautiful film, but I agree with you about Mary in terms of the librarian aspect. She doubtless would have married the man her mother would have wanted her to marry and maybe not have been happy, but the repressed librarian is going a bit far. I also always thought the most realistic moment in the film is when George comes home and snaps at the kids. Those kids were being annoying in that scene. Honestly, I know children are blessings, but not having any myself, I don’t know how people put up with them all day. I love my friend’s kids but have always been glad when I can hand them back to their parents after a couple of hours. There should have been a sequel about the kids all grown up and what their lives were like.
Tyler
Perhaps the the title is meant to be ironic maybe it should have a question mark Its a Wonderful Life?
The reality is of course life is neither always wonderful or fair
Andrew
The first time I saw It’s A Wonderful Life, I wondered at why such a dark movie has become a beloved American favourite. The concepts in it astonished me. I guess the sense of selflessness, family, and community coming together won hearts. But as I watched it I was also caught by the emotion and sentimentality of the story; it moved me to tears. So I can see the appeal. I never thought of it in terms of ACC before, Ellen. Thanks for the insight.
Malvina