It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Header Photo: Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life (1947)
© Paramount
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It's a Wonderful Life (Promo Poster)
© Paramount
It's a Wonderful Life ~ Movie Quote
"Now Jimmy, it starts in Heaven.
It's all about this small town family man
who's in serious financial difficulty and think's
he's a failure. As he's getting to jump
in the river on Christmas Eve,
an angel named Clarence who wants to
earn his wings jumps in first.
Since Clarence can't swim, our hero has to save him.
Then Clarence shows the man what a wonderful lifehe's had...
Gee, Jimmy, it doesn't sound so good when I tell it, does it?."
- Frank Capra to Jimmy Stewart
It's a Wonderful Life ~ All the Facts
It's a Wonderful Life (Colour/B&W) [UK 2 Dvd Set]
Source: Extract from Donald Dewey's seminal book James Stewart
As Stewart has recounted it on numerous occasions, that attempt by Capra to outline the plot of It's a Wonderful Life was his first encounterwith the character of George Bailey; it wasn't an especially productiveone, either. No sooner had the director mulled over what he had beensaying during a meeting at his home in the late fall of 1945 than he threwup his arms in exasperation, deciding that, instead of a legitimate storyfor a picture, he had "the lousiest piece of shit I've ever heard." Capra then thanked the actor for coming over to listen to him and sent him onhis way with the advice to "forget the whole thing."
But Stewart didn't forget about it. He telephoned the director acouple of weeks later and, breaking his procrastination about resuminghis film career, announced that he definitely wanted to do the picture. Itwas the kind of push that Capra needed; within only a few weeks, he wasready to begin production.
As both a story and a production, It's a Wonderful Life had a tortuoushistory. It started life in February 1938 as a two-page outline for a shortstory by Philip Van Doren Stern. But the writer couldn't make thematerial work to his satisfaction, so he put it on the shelf for five years. In1943, he made another try under the title The Greatest Gift, butcollected nothing but rejection letters from magazines for his efforts. As alast resort, he printed it himself and enclosed it with Christmas cards torelatives and friends. One of those receiving it was his agent, whopromptly sold it to RKO for $10,000. There followed several months whenthe studio sought to tailor it as a vehicle for Cary Grant, first hiring Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter, then bringing in both MarcConnelly and Clifford Odets to rework Trumbo's labors. In September1945, RKO finally gave up and sold the property to Capra.
At the time, Capra would have been the last one in Hollywood toclaim that there was anything wonderful about life. In even more of afunk about his career than Stewart was about his, the maker of Mr. DeedsGoes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was shocked to discoverin the waning months of the war that his absence from Hollywood tomake Army documentaries had not been particularly lamented by Columbia's Harry Cohn or any other studio boss. Although there werecumulative reasons for this attitude, two of the largest were theincreasingly extravagant shooting schedules of his pre-war films and anequally swelling ego (Edward Bernds: "Capra really started getting caught up in himself as the great artist dedicated only to making the Ultimate Masterpiece"). The hostility of the traditional studios prompted him to form a partnership with producer Samuel Briskin and, later,directors William Wyler and George Stevens in an independent venture they called Liberty Films. After discarding a number of other projectsviewed as sure legitimizing moneymakers, including a western with Gary Cooper, Liberty announced It's a Wonderful Life as its first feature.
As Capra told Stewart at their first meeting about the film, It's aWonderful Life is narrated from the point of view of an angel (HenryTravers) as he is given the background on his assignment to go toBedford Falls and save the desperate George Bailey, who is on the vergeof suicide. Lengthy flashbacks inform both Clarence and the audiencethat Bailey has always been a generous, industrious man who has put hissense of responsibility ahead of what were once ardent dreams of leavinghis town to make his way as a world-famous architect. Every time he hasbeen about to leave, some disaster—the death of his father, a threatenedtakeover of his savings and loan operation by the evil banker Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), and a bank run, most prominently—has insteadcommitted him more deeply to preserving his savings and loan, which islooked upon by the poor of Bedford Falls as their only hope of risingabove misery. He has been further rooted to his home by a marriage to Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) and the birth of their four children. For hispart, Bailey tries to act philosophical about his fate, rejecting the ideathat he is envious of the business success of a schoolmate (Frank Albertson) or the war heroics of his younger brother (Todd Karnes)—accomplishments that might have been his.
But Bailey loses his tranquil demeanor when his absentminded uncle(Thomas Mitchell) misplaces $8,000, exposing his loan company to ruinand himself to fraud charges. What he doesn't know is that Potter hasfound the money and, rather than return it, sees it as his opportunity fordestroying his competitor. The berserk Bailey snaps at his family, goes into a meaningless tirade against the teacher of one of his children, getsdrunk, and gets slugged by the husband of the offended teacher. As snowflutters down on Bedford Falls on Christmas Eve, he stands on the townbridge, chewing over Potter's cutting remark that his $15,000 insurancepolicy makes him "worth more dead than alive" to his family.
Before Bailey can go through with his intention of jumping into theriver under the bridge and killing himself, Clarence arrives on the sceneas a drowning man. Bailey saves him, but dismisses the man's claim thathe is an angel who has to perform a good deed to earn his wings. Bailey sees the light only when Clarence takes up his muttered wish that henever had been born. Bailey is then forced to see Bedford Falls (or,Potterville) as it would have been if indeed he had not been born.Nightmare leads into nightmare. Not only do the local people (includinghis wife) not know him, but Potterville is something of an extended jukejoint catering mostly to hookers and boozers; even the thousands of liveshis war hero brother saved have been lost because he himself had notbeen around to save his brothers life after a childhood accident on afrozen pond. Persuaded that life is worth living, Bailey returns to his realsurroundings in joyful gratitude. His final surprise comes with the overwhelming generosity of all the townspeople he has helped and madesacrifices for along the way: alerted by Mary of the crisis at the savingsand loan company, they pool thousands of dollars to make up for the lost$8,000 and then some, underlining the film's explicitly stated theme thata man with friends can never be considered poor. Bailey's redemptionearns Clarence his wings.
It's a Wonderful Life (60th Anniversary Edition)
Although Stewart has made it sound as if he were being totallywhimsical in accepting It's a Wonderful Life on the basis of Capra'smeandering talk about the angel, the plot was actually not all thatradical for the 1940s, when the military uncertainties of the war and thesocial uncertainties of its aftermath honed Hollywood's taste for kindergarten religiosity. Among the pictures made during the decade in whichsupernatural creatures (evil as well as good), ghosts, or the dead figuredprominently were Here Comes Mr. Jordan, I Married a Witch, I Married anAngel, The Remarkable Andrew, Happy Land, That's the Spirit, The HornBlows at Midnight, The Human Comedy, Heaven Can Wait, The CockeyedMiracle, Angel on My Shoulder, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Bishop's Wife,Down to Earth, and Portrait of Jennie.
Stewart's decades-long consistency in naming It's a Wonderful Life ashis favorite film has also tended to create the impression that theproduction resembled the final scene under the Bailey Christmas tree,when in fact the atmosphere was much closer to that of George Bailey discovering that Bedford Falls had been replaced by Potterville. Alreadysomething of an outcast because of his problems with the major studios, Capra froze his relations for good with Hedda Hopper when he opted for Reed in the role of the wife, instead of Ginger Rogers, as proposed by thecolumnist; Hopper thereafter called Stewart's performance in It's aWonderful Life the worst of his career (Rogers herself disclaimed any keen interest in the part, describing the character of thewife as "too bland" for her taste). Counting Trumbo, Connelly, and Odets from the earlier RKO attempts to fashion a screenplay, eightwriters took a swipe at the script at one stage or another, precipitating a Screen Writers Guild arbitration hearing to determine who had donewhat. The writers who emerged with the major credit—FrancesGoodrich and her husband Albert Hackett—refused to see thecompleted picture because of what they described as a "horrid" experience with Capra, who also received screenwriting acknowledgment. During production, the director and cinematographer Victor Milner crossed swords continually, until the cameraman was replaced and manyof his scenes had to be reshot by Joseph Walker. Even at the post-production stage, Capra got into hair pulling with Dimitri Tiomkin,charging that the composer was so absorbed with another musical score,for the western Duel in the Sun, that he had been giving It's a WonderfulLife only the leavings of his energies.
And then there was Stewart.
The actor discovered soon enough that his initial enthusiasm for theproject was not the same thing as being able to pull off a convincingportrayal of George Bailey. As he admitted to Elliot Norton of the BostonPost shortly after the film's release:
- "I felt when I got back to pictures thatI had lost all sense of judgment. I couldn't tell if I was good or bad. I meanin a given scene. Usually, you can tell what is the right thing to do whenyoure acting. But I couldn't. I was uncertain."
According to one version of a frequently repeated story, Stewart behaved in such a discombobulated fashion at the start of shooting thathe found in his insecurity another reason for quitting acting, and Capra sought out Lionel Barrymore for help before the entire production wascompromised. The veteran actor then reportedly took Stewart aside for alecture about how "acting is the greatest profession ever invented" andabout how no other vocation had a similar power to "move millions ofpeople, shape their lives, give them a sense of exaltation." In case thatdidn't sink in, at least as Capra remembered the conversation, Barrymore also went after Stewart's expressed doubt about acting being a "decent"profession, asking the war ace if he "thought it more 'decent' to dropbombs on people than to bring rays of sunshine into their lives with [his]acting talent." By the director's telling, the Barrymore allusion to the war"knocked [Stewart] flat on his ass."
Stewart always denied that version of the talk, especially theassumption that he was so depressed that he was ready to quit acting or Barrymore's alleged references to his war record. He told The Movies in 1983:
- "I swear I don't knowwhere that got started. I never consideredgiving it up. What Lionel did was encourage me. I was feeling around andevery once in a while he'd come up and say something. It was hisencouragement that was a tremendous help to me."
For sure, there were few roles, even if cobbled together by a platoon ofwriters, that could have offered an uncertain Stewart more personaldoors of entry than that of George Bailey. The small-town setting in aneastern area, the shopkeeper ambiance, a young man whose first dreamsof escape and success center around making it as an architect, the self-intoxicated spieler, the deft dancer, the immaculate politeness to elders(even while being slapped by one, as with the drunken pharmacist playedby H. B. Warner, and being slugged by another, as with the offendedhusband portrayed by Stanley Andrews)—none of this was exactlyforeign territory to him. The same was true of the production, beginningwith Capra, running through a slew of actors with whom he hadperformed before (Barrymore, Warner, Samuel Hinds, Charles Halton,Ward Bond, Frank Faylen), and ending with Beulah Bondi again playinghis mother. In the end, as he was to admit, he needed every one of thosefamiliar signposts for what turned into some seventy consecutive days ofshooting.
If there is one major note to Stewart's performance in It's a WonderfulLife, its intensity—physical as much as emotional. Throughout the film,his George Bailey is constantly running, yelling, pacing, screaming, andthrowing off other kinds of kinetic energy. The most ostensibly relaxedconversational scenes—at the supper table with his father, with the copand the cab driver on a street corner, with the good-time Violet (GloriaGrahame) in his office, with his wife on their improvised honeymoon ina decrepit abandoned house—all take place within a swirl of rival claimsfor his attention. All of this makes his raucous surrender to despair, justbefore the entrance of Clarence, not so much a departure from hisprevious behavior as a paring down of it—George Bailey finally alone inhis peripateticism. In fact, about the only moment in the entire picturewhen the character reflects quietly, even barring the usual noises of hisown ambitions and exasperations, is when he stands on the bridge withhis insurance policy, tasting the truth of Potter's jibe. Given thosecontours, the part represented a far more exhausting challenge to Stewart than any previous role, not merely because of the need to be oncamera practically every minute from start to finish, but to be there as aman who always had his ears keened to what was going on around himeven as he denied the exposure of his own nerve ends.
The never-admiring Jean Arthur once asserted that the role of George Bailey was so rich that anyone could have played him as convincingly as Stewart. That is doubtful. Whoever the anyone was, hewould have been unlikely to bring to the role Stewart's innate hostility tothe incessant emotional physicality of George Bailey, and the intelligence to rationalize that hostility as an additional charge from asometimes humorous, sometimes rancorous expression of small-townrespectability, and the technical mastery for bringing about the fusion.Having had more difficulty than Stewart with such a process, anotheractor—while capable of going off in some other creative direction—would have been next to helpless in suggesting, from just below thesurface, the resultant petulance that runs through the character of thefilmed George Bailey. This is particularly important since Bailey's petulance is hard to distinguish from Capra's.
In his later years (the director died in 1991), Capra turned what originally had been intended asa critical needle into a protective halberd by referring to the main body ofhis work as "Capracorn"—in his eyes, at least, a brew of the comic, thesentimental, the rhetorical, the idealistic, and the melodramatic in whichthe values of the man on the street were raised above those of officialauthority and in which, even at the cost of gliding over specific plotpoints, there was inevitably a happy ending. More than once, he cited It's a Wonderful Life as a perfect example of Capracorn, arguing in particularhow its theme of Friends Represent the Greatest Wealth (spelled out in the final seconds in a message to Bailey from Clarence) was a basic strength of the common man and a quintessential democratic message.
But comparable to the images offered by Stewart's two previousmovies with Capra, the directors "common man" in It's a Wonderful Life is, at best, an annoying rash. Just as he figured most conspicuously in YouCant Take It With You in a jail sequence when his threatening movesagainst munitions-maker Edward Arnold seemed to emanate from alynch mob of hoboes, and just as the generic citizenry depicted by Mr.Smith Goes to Washington was either stupid or powerless, Wonderful Life'sman on the street is most in action (before the finale) when he is makinga panicky run on George Bailey's savings and loan. The citizens ofBedford Falls aren't bad people, we are left to understand, but they areeasily frightened, they are ungrateful for all that George has done forthem, and they are even crass for accepting the offer of his honeymoontrip savings for calming their fears.
Thanks to such sequences, not to mention the flashback deviceguiding the film from the start, Capra has to labor less than usual toestablish his trademark inevitability about what occurs. It is in fact owingonly to Stewart's elasticity as an actor that the disappointments andfrustrations suffered by his George Bailey day after day and year after yeardon't make his explosion and breakdown seem even more unavoidable.The performer's humor was never more necessary, nor more in concertwith his equally long line in the lightly cranky, to disguise for so long acharacter who is just waiting to give in to his resentments about thehand dealt him by fate. (How wrong is Barrymore's Potter when heobserves that Bailey hates everything about his life and the peoplepopulating it?) If Bailey is an American Everyman, a notion that both Capra and Stewart came around to endorsing, then America is a glib butprofoundly petulant benefactor waiting for its generosity to be repaid—and the sooner the better.
Stewart's ability to convey these interior cancerous rages whilemaintaining the exterior of the town healer provides It's a Wonderful Life with a conflict far more suspenseful than his confrontations with thearchly Satanic Potter or the awakenings generated by the archly celestial Clarence. Ultimately, the performance hangs out of the collection basketin the last sequence like the news that George Bailey's successfulbusinessman schoolmate is sending $25,000 to cover his financialproblems—reducing the urgency, if not the relevance, of all the othergesturing.
After lengthy post production work that inflated the film's budgetbeyond Liberty's expectations. It's a Wonderful Life was hopped into New York and Los Angeles theaters at the end of December 1946 to qualify for Oscar consideration that year, then released nationally in January. RKO made the distribution decision mainly because Sinbadthe Sailor, its originally planned holiday release, ran into Technicolorprocessing problems in the lab. Initial critical reception was all over thelot. Time called it "a pretty wonderful movie," while Newsweek backedup a cover story with the verdict that the picture was "sentimental, butso expertly written, directed, and acted that you want to believe it." James Agee was even more backhanded in his compliments in TheNation than Newsweek, saying that it was "one of the most efficientsentimental pieces since A Christmas Carol." Some of the other criticswere more direct. For Bosley Crowther of The New York Times:
- "theweakness of the picture ... is its illusory concept of life. Mr Capra'snice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place, andhis pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. Butsomehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes, rather than averagerealities"
New Yorker critic John McCarten found the treatment ot thestory "so mincing as to border on baby talk" and voiced particularsolidarity with Henry Travers for "God help him, [having] the job ofportraying Mr. Stewart's guardian angel."
When it slipped It's a Wonderful Life into theaters for Oscar consideration, RKO appeared to be supporting the film which garneredfive nominations-including one each for the picture, for Capra, and for Stewart. Once down to budgetary decisions, however, the studio threwall its promotional weight behind another heavily nominated production, The Best Years of Our Lives, leaving the inhabitants of Bedford Fallsin snows over their heads. The failure of the Capra picture to win in any of its five categories at the Academy Award ceremonies in March 1947 was the last straw for Liberty: stunned by the mediocre box-officereception accorded Wonderful Life, Capra decided that being an independent producer-director wasn't so marvelous at that, and companyassets were sold off to Paramount before Wyler and Stevens got around tomaking their scheduled pictures.
Capra's bitter explanation for the tepid responses to the picture wasthat:
- "perhaps [I] had too much faith in the human race.... People calledme a kind of movie Pollyanna and I guess maybe I was"
Stewart has usually blamed it on the times:
- "The only thing I've been able to come upwith is that people had just been through a war and that this was notquite what they were looking for. The picture, even though there was acomedy side to it and everything, was really a very serious picture. Therewas a dark side to it. I think movie audiences wanted Red Skelton,slapstick comedy, westerns, escapism. We were finished with the war.Maybe it was just the wrong time to make the picture."
One consequence of the dissolution of Liberty Films was the lapsingof copyright control over It's a Wonderful Life, allowing it to resurface ontelevision in the 1970s in the public domain. The Christmas ritualizationof its programming since then (NBC acquired the copyright in the early 1990s, announcing a policy of one showing a year around the Christmas season) has forced it to play to even greatersentimental expectations than those designed originally by Capra. What Capra saw as "serious" and "dark" on the big screen has, even without theaddition of colorization, gained the wine sheen of a seasonal bauble onthe small one.
Links
It's a Wonderful Life: All the Facts >> Cast & Credits >> Making of >> It's a Wonderful Life [UK 2 Dvd Set B/W + Col. with Art Cards] 2014 Release >> It's a Wonderful Life [UK 2 Dvd Set B/W + Col. with Art Cards] 2014 Release >> UK Colour/B&W 2 Dvd Set >> UK Colour/B&W 2 Dvd Set + Poster + Postcards >> Canvas Print >> >> Screen Legend 4 Dvd UK Boxset >> Frank Capra 4 Dvd UK Boxset >> Repro. Movie Promo Poster Gallery >> Search Site
James Stewart: Biog. >> Key Dates >> Filmography >> Interred >> Glenn Miller Story UK Dvd >> Rear Window >> Vertigo >> Advertise >> James Stewart Books and Dvds available @ amazon.com
It's a Wonderful Life: All the Facts >> Cast & Credits >> Making of >> UK Colour/B&W 2 Dvd Set - Dec. 14: Special Offer >> UK Colour/B&W 2 Dvd Set + Poster + Postcards - All Scanned >> Canvas Print >> >> Screen Legend 4 Dvd UK Boxset >> Frank Capra 4 Dvd UK Boxset
