For decades, the exuberant comedy and affecting drama of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life" has propelled audiences past its mawkishness and message-mongering. It's an ode to...
For decades, the exuberant comedy and affecting drama of Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” has propelled audiences past its mawkishness and message-mongering. It’s an ode to a small-town American life that no longer is and possibly never was. It gives James Stewart the role of his career as George Bailey, the village good guy who never rises in the world because he’s too busy giving a shoulder-up to everyone else he knows. Stewart has lightness as well as warmth, as much gentle restraint as enthusiasm. One can’t conceive of another actor — not even Henry Fonda — carrying the role and the movie. He’s on screen almost constantly. Capra builds the entire film on his character’s honesty, and Stewart never hits a false note.
By now, everyone thinks they know everything about “It’s A Wonderful Life” because it’s become a holiday institution. Capra saturated the film with Yuletide sentiment — but it was not intended as a Christmas release.
That’s one of 12 things you may not know about “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Thanks to Joseph McBride’s 1992 biography, “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,” and to Gary Fishgall’s 1997 “Pieces of Time: The Life of James Stewart,” here’s a dozen factual nuggets beneath the “Wonderful Life” myth:
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1. Stewart’s stay-at-home George Bailey
welcomes back his Navy-flier brother Harry, who’s just been awarded the Medal of Honor. In reality, it was the first movie Stewart made after his four-year, two-month stint as a genuine World War II hero. He left Army Air Forces active duty as a colonel. Biographer Fishgall states, “Among the first to answer the call to arms, he sustained a record of achievement that few of his peers had equaled and none could better.” Although Stewart never made a public display of his valor, he flew 20 bombing missions over Europe and was so affected by the experience that he felt “he had lost all sense of judgment.”
2. Capra called on veteran character actor Lionel Barrymore
— who ironically played George Bailey’s nemesis — to calm Stewart after nearly a half-decade away from acting. “Forget about being away for five years,” Barrymore said. “Don’t you realize you’re moving millions of people, shaping their lives? What other profession has that kind of power? Acting, young fella, is a noble profession. Now just do what you’re doing.”
3. Capra belittled the film’s source story,
“The Greatest Gift,” as “a Christmas card.” But according to McBride, the author of “The Greatest Gift,” biographer and historical novelist Philip Van Doren Stern, put together the three crucial plot elements, including a suicidal small-town American, his guardian angel and a Christmas setting. It was printed not in a Christmas card but in 200 24-page pamphlets.
4. If not for Cary Grant,
the film might not have been made. The actor exhorted the RKO studio to purchase film rights.
5. A handful of mostly left-wing writers toiled over the script.
Dalton Trumbo, the most prolific member of the Hollywood Ten (and later renowned for “Spartacus”), did the initial draft; Marc Connelly (“The Green Pastures”) and Clifford Odets (“Golden Boy”) rewrote it.
After Capra bought the property from RKO, he hired the solid husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett to take a new approach. But before Capra was through, Michael Wilson polished it. (The screenwriter, who was blacklisted shortly after, is best known for “A Place in the Sun” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”) That famous wit Dorothy Parker spruced up the dialogue, and Jo Swerling tinkered with some scenes.
Although Capra’s reluctance to credit some of them has been pegged to his growing fear of liberal-radical politics, the film’s most essential statement is the same one George Orwell got from Charles Dickens: “If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.”
6. Jean Arthur was Capra’s first choice for Mrs. George Bailey,
but she turned the director down. “I wouldn’t have liked to have been that girl, I didn’t think she had anything to do. It was colorless.” Donna Reed ended up playing her with sexiness and strength; there’s more genuine emotion in this movie’s high-school graduation dance and the Baileys’ coyly avid courtship than there is in Mr. Deeds’ blowing a tuba or Mr. Smith’s mooning over the Lincoln Memorial.
7.The film began shooting
on the same day as William Wyler’s masterpiece “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Wyler and Capra were partners (along with George Stevens) in the short-lived independent company Liberty Pictures, though Wyler was making “The Best Years of Our Lives” for Samuel Goldwyn. Wyler wired Capra, “Last one in is a rotten egg.”
8. The movie was never meant to be a Christmas release.
RKO, the film’s distributor, slated it for Jan. 30, 1947. It was rushed out for a Dec. 21, 1946, New York opening because, writes McBride, “Technicolor couldn’t make enough prints of ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ which the studio had planned as its holiday film.”
9. The film won no Academy Awards,
though it was nominated for five. Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” won seven, including best picture, director and actor (Fredric March).
10. The movie was a box-office failure.
It took in $3.3 million; it needed to make $480,000 more just to match the production and distribution costs.
11. The film was a critical disappointment.
The New Yorker’s John McCarten unjustly accused Capra of requiring “all the actors involved” to “behave as cutely as pixies.”
12. The highbrow defense of the film
is that Capra proves life in postwar America is not so wonderful. Critics have suggested that Capra’s introduction of an angelus ex machina to demonstrate George Bailey’s importance in the scheme of things proves how desperate Capra’s belief in good will is. But I think Capra, the irrepressible showman, simply wanted to push his story’s conflicts to their extremes.
The angel’s presence actually softens the harsher points about American life that Capra consciously wants to make: When the angel shows George Bailey what the town of Bedford Falls would be like if he’d never been born, it’s a nightmare of crassness and cynicism, named for Lionel Barrymore’s vicious banker.
Barrymore’s commercialism has turned Main Street into a red-light district. The demoralized residents of the banker’s tenements fill the hamlet with despair, and the few unspoiled good guys look reserved and mistrustful.
George learns that his existence helps preserve an entire village’s good will — which is proved in the final scene, when all his friends and family gather to save his business and his life and declare him “the richest man in town.”