That title, It’s a Wonderful Life challenges us; the very premise of the film provokes. In the weeks after my BFI Film Classics book on the movie was published, I posted copies to those of my friends and family who I thought would be interested to see it. However, in the case of one friend, I found myself hesitating to send the book. Her mother had recently died, just when my friend was at the airport flying out to see her for one last visit. One week after her mother’s funeral, one of her best friends also died, relatively young, from pancreatic cancer. She spent the last week by that friend’s bedside. Meanwhile on the news in these days in October 2023 were tales of wars, atrocities, reports of the remorseless ongoing catastrophe of our assault on the natural world. To give her at this time a book about a film titled It’s a Wonderful Life pulled me up sharply and made me pause. The title, the very idea of the film perhaps, tasted like a bad joke. For a moment I lost confidence in Capra’s vision. I saw how the optimism encapsulated in that title can ring mockingly hollow.
Frank Capra’s involvement with the film itself began in doubt. Reputedly, in October 1945 when he was first pitching the idea to Jimmy Stewart, he subsided into uncertainty, suddenly seeing this story about a man experiencing what it was like never to have been born as ‘the lousiest piece of shit’ he’d ever heard. Maybe my hesitancy in sending the book likewise echoed those critics who on the film’s release sneered over what they saw as its sugared sentimentality. They regretted too that in a post-war world where American (or British) audiences demanded realism, Capra had fallen back into whimsy and fantasy. One critic put it down as an ‘Orgy of Sweetness’; another condemned it as a ‘sermon in celluloid’.
Yet there’s little about the toughness of this world that It's a Wonderful Life does not already know. It was to be the first film produced by a new independent company, Liberty Films. All the directors involved with Liberty – William Wyler, George Stevens, and Capra himself – had just returned from service in the Second World War. The war’s horrors were raw in them, just as they lived still in the movie’s leading man, James Stewart, returning to acting after years as a pilot flying bombing missions over Germany for the US Air Force. For his first TV interview with Bill Moyers, Capra brought along images of the Nazis’ concentration camps, footage he had been given at the close of the war.
The movie knows the worst there is to know. It knows the world may be very far from wonderful. In showing the life of bewildered George Bailey, the film recounts too an American history marked by trauma. It begins with the deaths caused by the ‘Spanish Flu’, moves through the Great Depression’s privation and turmoil, and onto the terrors and losses of World War Two. On the film’s release, that troubled history was one shared by most in the cinema audience.
Capra’s film is fully aware of such extremities. It comes out of his experience of the war – his knowledge of devastated cities, the death camps, the Bomb. There’s a tough-mindedness alive there. And yet out of that desperation, it finds faith and hope. In a time when deaths had been measured by the thousands – the millions – Capra makes a plea for the worth of the individual life. He does not see the ‘masses’ of modern society, but rather focuses in on the person – a person who lives in and through community and connection, through family and friendship, through kinship and closeness.
George Bailey goes through suffering in order to discover the beauty and the value of the life he has lived. As a man miraculously given a glimpse of a world where he no longer exists, his case resembles those who have had ‘Near Death Experiences’, where a vision of order beyond leads to a reconciliation and revivification of life here.
We can trust It’s a Wonderful Life because, like George Bailey on that snowbound bridge on the edge of Bedford Falls, it too plunges into the darkness. If it comes back to acceptance, it only does so having taken a full look at the worst.
For some though there is no worst that does not include the perception that there is no good to which we can return. That the film does deny. Even as it faces the dark, it asks of us a childlike simplicity; as Shakespeare does in his own ‘winter’s tale’, it invites us to ‘awake our faith’.
Every Christmas when the film shows again, once again despite themselves even hardened critics find themselves weeping. This movie makes us cry, and does so most notably not in those sober moments when George Bailey utterly despairs, but in that time when he returns to life and joy, clutching once again Zuzu’s fallen petals that he had pocketed away.
When the film first came out, it was screened for inmates at San Quentin prison. They wrote to Capra – as other people would for years afterwards – telling him that the movie had shown them that their lives too possessed meaning and purpose. In one notable court judgement, an American judge sentenced an old man who had carried out a failed suicide-pact with his wife to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. There’s something whimsically laughable about that, and yet, after years of enjoying – and now writing about – this film, I understand what that judge meant. Just as George Bailey goes into the darkness and enters the nightmare of non-being, Capra’s film too makes that journey, but does so in order to lead us back to the everyday miracle of being here.
Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of It’s a Wonderful Life (2023) in the BFI Film Classics series, as well as Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020). He has also written Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children and Show People: A History of the Film Star.
