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James Stewart as George Bailey, the happily married family man in It’s A Wonderful Life |
It’s a wonderful confection of everything that spells Christmas
Philip French celebrates the story of a beloved classic film, set for a special screening at the Everyman next weekend
PROBABLY the first movie made with an eye to the Christmas market, in Britain at least, was a 1903 comedy called The Christmas Waits or High Life Below Stairs, and that was the beginning of what in recent years has been an important corner of Hollywood production aimed at what might be called a mass niche audience for cinematic Christmas fare.
Every December nowadays sees a flurry of pictures directed at the yuletide market (with a mass release into 3,000 cinemas a picture can cover its costs in a few weeks), and they fall into two basic categories. One is the troubled family reunion comedy where everything comes right by the morning of the 25th; the other centres on Santa Claus, usually a fantasy about his domestic and work life at the North Pole.
Some of these films make a lot of money, and all set out to become classics to be revived annually on TV and now on DVD.
There are six essential elements a great Christmas movie needs. First, it must be about Christmas and the Christmas message of peace and goodwill. Second, it must be set entirely at Christmas. Third, it must feature snow, which pretty well rules out the southern hemisphere. Fourth, it has to have a quality of the magical and numinous. Fifth, it must be affirmative and uncynical. Sixth, it must be capable of being seen throughout the year.
There is probably only one film that meets all these requirement in spades, or in snow shovels, and that is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which opened in the United States in December 1946 and in Britain four months later.
It’s a straightforward enough story about George Bailey, a decent, happily married family man, and the honest manager of the family’s savings and loan bank. He’s a pillar of the community in Bedford Falls, the small town which he’s never been able to leave for the adventurous life of travel he’d dreamt of in his childhood.
Then, as Christmas approaches and for no fault of his own, his bank faces ruin and he could be jailed. As George contemplates suicide, an Angel Second Class in the form of the bumbling, lovable Clarence is sent from heaven to help him, and George is shown both what he has done for his fellow man, and what life would have been like had he never lived.
The latter is a nightmare vision of Bedford Falls becoming Pottersville (named after a rapacious local tycoon who despises Bailey), a corrupt hellhole of uncontrolled commerce, sleazy bars, prostitution and broken lives.
Of course all ends well, but only at the last minute in one of the greatest final sequences which gives sentimentality a good name.
It’s A Wonderful Life is one of many reworkings of the greatest of all Christmas stories, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But in this version Bob Cratchit is at the centre and given the opportunity to review his past and future, while Scrooge is marginalised as the exploitative plutocrat Potter who here remains unrepentant and, at least in this world, goes unpunished.
The movie wasn’t immediately popular, and indeed it wasn’t until the 1970s that it achieved its present status of beloved classic, a part of our lives, an expression of our hopes and dreams. But it was the time during which the film was in production that helped make it so perfect.
In 1945 the great populist director Frank Capra and that embodiment of small-town middle-class decency, James Stewart (star of two major pre-war Capra pictures), both emerged from the army as colonels, one having made influential training films, the other having been a bomber pilot. Neither had made a picture since America entered the war and this was the ideal project for them to work on together again. The axis powers were defeated, democracy had triumphed, and now was the time to look to the future, to assert humane values and the sacred worth of individual citizens in what proved to be a brief window of hope and goodwill between the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War.
The authors of the screenplay, the husband and wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were witty, sophisticated writers with a particular feeling for Americana as evidenced in such other pictures as Summer Holiday, Father of the Bride and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Having secured Stewart, his first choice to play George, Capra drew up a list of the greatest talents in Hollywood, and miraculously ended up with a cast that could not be improved.
The movie is now a legend. There are episodes of Cheers and Friends built around the characters watching it. There are numerous references to it in that other Christmas movie, Gremlins, and it’s seen in television. In Home Alone it’s on TV in a Paris hotel room dubbed into French, as the extended family, who’ve accidentally left a child in Chicago, spends Christmas there.
Capra never made another major film and during the McCarthy era his patriotism was questioned both for his mild liberal statements and for the alleged attacks on capitalism made in his pictures, It’s a Wonderful Life among them.
The Pottersville nightmare sequence unquestionably reflected his fears about the nation’s future just as Bedford Falls was his ideal community.
James Stewart, however, tapped into a darker, neurotic side of his regular guy persona while playing George Bailey. This led to a more complex persona that Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann were able to exploit in the series of masterly films they both made with him.
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