This
is director Frank Capra's classic bittersweet comedy/drama about George
Bailey (James Stewart), the eternally-in-debt guiding force of a bank
in the typical American small town of Bedford Falls. As the film opens,
it's Christmas Eve, 1946, and George, who has long considered himself
a failure, faces financial ruin and arrest and is seriously contemplating
suicide. High above Bedford Falls, two celestial voices discuss Bailey's
dilemma and decide to send down eternally bumbling angel Clarence Oddbody
(Henry Travers), who after 200 years has yet to earn his wings, to help
George out. But first, Clarence is given a crash course on George's
life, and the multitude of selfless acts he has performed: rescuing
his younger brother from drowning, losing the hearing in his left ear
in the process; enduring a beating rather than allow a grieving druggist
(H.B. Warner) to deliver poison by mistake to an ailing child; foregoing
college and a long-planned trip to Europe to keep the Bailey Building
and Loan from letting its Depression-era customers down; and, most important,
preventing town despot Potter (Lionel Barrymore) from taking over Bedford
Mills and reducing its inhabitants to penury. Along the way, George
has married his childhood sweetheart Mary (Donna Reed), who has stuck
by him through thick and thin. But even the love of Mary and his children
are insufficient when George, faced with an $8000 shortage in his books,
becomes a likely candidate for prison thanks to the vengeful Potter.
Bitterly, George declares that he wishes that he had never been born,
and Clarence, hoping to teach George a lesson, shows him how different
life would have been had he in fact never been born. After a nightmarish
odyssey through a George Bailey-less Bedford Falls (now a glorified
slum called Potterville), wherein none of his friends or family recognize
him, George is made to realize how many lives he has touched, and helped,
through his existence; and, just as Clarence had planned, George awakens
to the fact that, despite all its deprivations, he has truly had a wonderful
life. The movie captures a surprising amount of regret and dissatisfaction
about the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American life of an average
family guy, even if, in the end, it recognizes that malaise as the very
nature of "a wonderful life." Capra's first production through his newly-formed
Liberty Films, It's a Wonderful Life lost money in its original run,
when it was (perhaps correctly) recognized as a fairly downbeat view
of small-town life. Only after it lapsed into the public domain in 1973
and became a Christmastime TV perennial did it don the mantle of a holiday
classic.
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