The holiday season brings with it the usual flood of sentimental Christmas movies presumably meant to counter the flood of unrestrained consumerism.
Among them is that exceptional, odd Frank Capra film, "It's a Wonderful Life." Until I read Zachary D. Carter's excellent essay in The Huffington Post (2018), there were many things I didn't know about that film or the Sicilian immigrant who made it.
Hoping to revive a career that had been disrupted by the war, Capra produced the film in 1946, but when it was released just before Christmas it bombed, losing a half million dollars at the box office. Critics panned it and Capra lost the rights and control of the film’s negatives.
His personal fortunes then proceeded to nose-dive, accelerated by the anti-Communist furor of the early 1950s. (His crime — like that of many thoughtful people — was that he had briefly flirted with Marxism when he was younger.)
His decline was such that he eventually reached a hopeless state and attempted suicide on a number of occasions. Rather like George Bailey.
Later, when he looked back on making the film that had helped ruin his career, he said: “I can’t begin to describe my sense of loneliness in making (it), a loneliness that was laced by the fear of failure. I had no one to talk to, or argue with.”
As an aside, that probably describes what these holidays are like for many people, but for now let’s return to Capra’s story.
The Wonderful Life negatives lay forgotten and unvisited for almost three decades, by which time the film, considered worthless, had slipped into the public domain and was free for the taking. In the mid-1970s, the Public Broadcasting System did just that, becoming the first to air it since 1946. The commercial networks soon followed.
With that, a not-so-instant classic was (re)born. It’s now every bit as much a part of the season as Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”
Happily, Capra lived long enough to see this all come to pass before he joined the angels himself at the robust age of 94 in 1991. He had always maintained that “Wonderful Life" was the greatest film he ever made.
The main actors in the piece — James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore — are long since dead, of course. But recently, two surviving members among the children cast in the movie confirmed that Capra indeed controlled every detail of the filming down to the slightest detail of their expressions and movements.
The main point of the film — that each life matters — is always worth revisiting at this or any time of year when for so many, life feels considerably less than wonderful.
Depression is a widespread in our society. And suicidal thoughts are no stranger to one who is deeply depressed. But as in the story, there could be hidden value in holding on, perhaps helped by an angel or two.
Of course the inequalities of wealth displayed in the film are worse today than they were in the America of post-World-War-Two, and the only way out of that mess would be a radical redistribution of wealth, which certainly isn’t going to be happening around here anytime soon.
So for now this is roughly as wonderful a life as we can make of it, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. And in any event, it wouldn’t be what it is if we were no longer a part of it.
With that, bring on Christmas! And maybe listen for someone’s bell to ring out there somewhere along the way.
(This one I originally published two years ago.)
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