by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to watch last night’s NBC-TV presentation of Frank
Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life.
I hadn’t seen it in years but when I first caught it on a local TV station in
1972 I was blown away by its outfront sentimentality and its ineffably moving
parable of an ordinary man whose compulsive pursuit of the welfare of others
robs him of all his own ambitions, until at the end a life crisis forces him
into an awareness of himself and how much good he’d done for other people
staying just where he is. It’s a Wonderful Life actually began as a story by writer Philip Van Doren
Stern, who wrote it as a booklet called The Greatest Gift and had copies printed privately so he could send
them out to his friends as his Christmas card for 1943. RKO bought the movie
rights and put a number of writers on it, including Clifford Odets, Dalton
Trumbo, Marc Connelly, and Dorothy Parker (whose sensibility seems miles away
from the film that actually got made), but RKO head Charles Koerner (the one
who had fired Orson Welles after he took over from George Schaefer in 1942 and
announced that from then on RKO’s movies would be based on “Showmanship Instead
of Genius) didn’t like any of the scripts that crossed his desk and put the
project aside. Then in 1945, Frank Capra, William Wyler and George Stevens, all
just back from having directed for the U.S. war effort during World War II
(Stevens was the leader of the first camera crew to enter the concentration
camps, and it so deeply moved him as a human being it wrecked him as a
filmmaker; unwilling to do the kinds of quiet romantic comedies that had been
his best pre-war work, he insisted that every movie he worked on must project High Seriousness, and made a series of
films that got gloppier, more sentimental and less entertaining with each go: A
Place in the Sun, Shane, Giant, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Jesus biopic The Greatest Story
Ever Told), organized an independent
production company called Liberty Films. The logo for the company was an uncracked
mockup of the Liberty Bell that Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin had used
as the logo for their first independent production, Meet John Doe (1941), and looking for a partner among the major
studios they hit on RKO. RKO had already had distribution deals with Sam
Goldwyn and Walt Disney that were making them lots of money, and they eagerly
grabbed the right to co-finance and distribute Liberty’s product — only when
Capra arrived on the RKO lot he had no idea what he wanted to make.
Koerner tipped
him to The Greatest Gift,
figuring (rightly) that a man driven to the end of his wits who’s given a
chance to see what the world would have been like if he’d never been born was
right up Capra’s alley. He agreed to sell the story to Liberty for the price
he’d initially paid Van Doren Stern for the Christmas card, and threw in the
rejected scripts for free. (Odets later said he hated the film that got made,
and the only idea of his that got used was to have the hero, George Bailey, as
a child notice that the druggist Mr. Gower has inadvertently filled a
prescription with poison out of grief over the death of his son in the 1919
influenza epidemic.) Capra went into production and decided that the lead
character, George Bailey (called “George Pratt” in the original story), was “a
good Sam who doesn’t know he’s a good Sam,” and there was only one actor who
could play him: James Stewart. Stewart had just got out of the U.S. Army Air
Corps (it was only after World War II that the U.S. Air Force became a separate
branch of the military) where he’d flown bombing missions in combat, and he
wanted something appropriately “serious” for his first postwar film. He was
moved by the tale of a man driven to contemplate suicide and ultimately saved
by a guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers, presenting quite a different
appearance from the only other film of his I’d seen when I first watched It’s
a Wonderful Life: The Invisible
Man, in which he played the head of the
research lab that had previously employed John Griffin, the title character
played by Claude Rains) and agreed to make the film. Capra cast quite a few of
his “regulars” in the supporting roles and also put in a number of John Ford’s
“regulars” as well, including Thomas Mitchell as George’s alcoholic (but depicted
charmingly) uncle Billy; Beulah Bondi as George’s mother (according to imdb.com
she played James Stewart’s mother no fewer than five times, including one of
Capra’s previous films with him, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington); Ward Bond as Bert the cop, George’s lifetime
friend; Frank Faylen (just back from the chilling scene as the nurse at the
D.T. ward in Bellevue in The Lost Weekend) as taxi driver Ernie (there’s a widespread belief that Jim Henson
named two of the Muppets “Bert and Ernie” in tribute to this film, but
according to his daughter that’s not true); H. B. Warner as druggist Gower;
Todd Karns as George’s brother Harry; Samuel S. Hinds as their dad Peter,
founder of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in Bedford Falls, New York
around which most of the action revolves; Frank Albertson as George’s friend
Sam Wainwright; and Sheldon Leonard as Nick, bartender at the restaurant owned
by Martini (William Edmunds).
For the other main principals Capra selected
Donna Reed to play Mary Hatch Bailey, the local girl George marries; Gloria
Grahame (who’d been languishing under contract at MGM, of all unlikely studios
for her, when Capra borrowed her on the basis of some MGM screen tests one of
their producers showed him) as the town’s “fast” girl, Violet Bick; and as the
villain of the piece, Henry Potter, Lionel Barrymore. Capra had previously used
Barrymore in his 1938 film You Can’t Take It With You but had cast him sympathetically, as the head of an
eccentric family that attracts the ire of multimillionaire Edward Arnold
because Arnold’s son (played by James Stewart in the first of his three Capra
films) has fallen in love with Barrymore’s daughter (Jean Arthur, who was
Capra’s first choice for the Donna Reed role in It’s a Wonderful Life but turned it down because she was rehearsing for
the Broadway production of Born Yesterday — only the temperamental Arthur walked out on the show in its
out-of-town tryouts and it was the then-unknown Judy Holliday who acted it on
Broadway and became a star therefrom). This time around Capra cast Barrymore as
the villain, an embittered rich man who owned virtually every business in
Bedford Falls except the Bailey
Bros. Building and Loan, and who’s positively Scrooge-like not only in his
greed but also his lack of any family connections. Apparently Capra cast
Barrymore because of his long history of playing Scrooge on radio — Barrymore
had been set to do the film version in 1938 but at the last minute his chronic
arthritis became so advanced he needed a wheelchair, so Reginald Owen replaced
him but Barrymore remained so identified with the part he appeared in the
film’s trailer — and in this film, as in many others he made around this time,
Barrymore used his real-life disability to add bitterness and gall to his
characterization.
Just about everybody knows the story of It’s a
Wonderful Life by now — George Bailey is
seen at the opening contemplating suicide, while an unseen voice from heaven
(called “Franklin” in the original Van Doren Stern story after President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, but unnamed in the movie — Capra, a lifelong Republican
who voted against FDR all four times, would hardly have been likely to pay him
tribute in a movie even though he was often referred to in the 1930’s as
“cinema’s propagandist for the New Deal”) notes that quite a few people on
Earth are praying for him. Accordingly Franklin assigns his case to Clarence,
an “angel second class” because he hasn’t earned his wings yet, and Henry
Travers’ rather befuddled, milquetoast playing is absolutely right for the
part. Franklin briefs Clarence on Bailey’s life history — giving us the
flashbacks that make up most of the film — and the impression he and we get is
that time and time again George has put his own dreams aside in service to
others. The result is that when all George’s woes come together at
Christmastime — his brother loses $8,000 at the Building and Loan (he borrowed
a newspaper from Potter to read the story of Harry Bailey being given the
Congressional Medal of Honor for his war heroism, and when he returned it
inadvertently folded the envelope with the money into it) just when bank
examiner Carter (Charles Halton), who goes into his work with a grim
determination that makes Javert seem open-minded by comparison (typically, the
only time we get an indication that Carter has any normal human feelings is
when he says he wants to wrap up Bailey’s case before nightfall so he can go
home and spend Christmas with his own family); Potter sees the money, is
briefly tempted to return it but then realizes that this is his chance to put
the Bailey Building and Loan out of business once and for all (and,
surprisingly for a 1946 film, there isn’t a worm-turning scene in which Potter turns decent and returns the
money); George takes out his frustrations on his kids, his kids’ teachers, his
friends and just about anyone in earshot — and he’s about to throw himself off
the Bedford Falls bridge when Clarence shows up and jumps into the water
himself, realizing that George’s good-Samaritan instincts would immediately
switch him from offing himself to saving someone else from that fate. George
Bailey says he never did himself or anybody else any good and he wishes he’d
never been born — and Clarence decides that the way to save George’s soul and
earn his wings is to grant his wish.
George Bailey steps out into what one
critic called the closest Capra ever came to directing a film noir: in this alternate version of its history Potter not
only took over all the businesses in Bedford Falls but even had it renamed
“Pottersville.” Martini’s nice little homey Italian restaurant is a dive bar
owned by Nick, who instead of the rather decent guy he is in the main story is
playing his part with all Sheldon Leonard’s gangster inflections. We know it’s
a dive when we see a Black piano player pounding away with ragtime (as usual in
1930’s and 1940’s movies there’s a contrast between “nice” Blacks, represented
by the Bailey family maid Annie [Lillian Randolph], and not-so-nice Blacks like
the piano player in Nick’s) and Nick throws both George and Clarence out of the
bar (and Clarence, in a nice touch, feels he has to reassure his handlers back
in heaven that he didn’t actually drink alcohol). George finds that his dad’s
building and loan went out of business when dad died; his brother Harry died at
age eight when he was sledding on a shovel and crashed through the ice (in the
main story George saved his brother’s life by pulling him out of the ice,
though at the cost of his hearing in his left ear); the working-class housing
development the Bailey Building and Loan funded is a local cemetery (the usual
colloquial meaning of “potter’s field” as a place where people whose families
couldn’t pay for funerals were just dumped — though even in the alternate
“Pottersville” reality the Baileys were well off enough they bought an
elaborate tombstone for their eight-year-old son); Bailey’s Uncle Pete is in an
insane asylum (probably due to his chronic alcoholism — the Irish-American
Thomas Mitchell was often cast as
a character who drank); Gower the druggist is an alcoholic street person who
served 20 years in prison for manslaughter (since George wasn’t there to stop
him from giving out the poisoned prescription); all the men in the troop
transport Harry Bailey saved by shooting down the kamikaze that was about to attack them (for which he won the
Medal of Honor) died because George hadn’t been around to save Harry; and in
what for the alternate George is the final straw that makes him want to live
after all even though he’s being threatened with exposure and arrest, his wife
Mary is an old maid (wearing glasses, which she doesn’t in the main action)
who’s just about to close up the library. (This has been criticized as clichéd,
but at least Capra and the final writers he ended up with — the husband-and-wife
team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, with Capra’s former colleague Jo
Swerling credited with additional dialogue — “planted” it with a line of
dialogue establishing that Mary was working as a librarian before she married
George.)
It’s a Wonderful Life
was Capra’s (and James Stewart’s) favorite among his films, though if nothing
else it shows how increasingly desperate he was becoming at giving his movies
happy endings: the breakdown of Claude Rains’ character on the Senate floor in Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington is singularly
unbelievable; for his next film, Meet John Doe, Capra shot five different endings trying to work out
a resolution; and in It’s a Wonderful Life, in order to end the story happily he literally had to resort to supernatural intervention. The life
of It’s a Wonderful Life after
its release is almost as bizarre as the process by which it got made; it was a
box-office disappointment on its initial release (it grossed $3.3 million on an
investment of $3.7 million, though it did well enough that the next year RKO
greenlighted a similar film, Magic Town, also starring James Stewart, directed by William Wellman and produced
and written by former Capra collaborator Robert Riskin — which was an even
bigger flop) and was little known until 1972, when the copyright expired and
there was a clerical error on the renewal application. The film thus fell into
the public domain and for the next 20 years became a staple on local TV
stations looking for something Christmas-themed for the holiday season — until
the early 1990’s, when Republic Pictures reacquired the rights to Philip Van
Doren Stern’s original story and bought the copyrights to Dimitri Tiomkin’s
music, thereby successfully taking It’s a Wonderful Life out of the public domain: an unhealthy signal of how
crazy and ludicrously overprotected “intellectual property” would become in the
era of increasing corporate control over everything.
And one odd lapse in this film is it’s one of the
few Capra made with scenes set in sub-zero temperatures in which you don’t see the actors’ breaths steam as if they were really
out in the cold. For his 1930 film Flight Capra had tried putting pellets of dry ice in cages he put in the
actors’ mouths — which would have worked O.K. in a silent film but made it
impossible for the actors to utter dialogue intelligibly — and for Lost
Horizon (1937) and Meet John Doe (1941) he had rented space in a Los Angeles
icehouse, usually used for storing frozen meats, so he could shoot inside and
not only have the actors’ breaths steam but use the icehouse’s artificial-snow
machines (generally used to cut up large ice blocks and spray the results onto
the meat and fish to keep them frozen) to blow snow at them. For some reason
Capra didn’t do that in It’s a Wonderful Life; instead he shot the December scenes outdoors in the
big Bedford Falls set he built on the RKO backlot (though the exterior of the
house George and Mary Bailey live in is clearly our old friend, the recycled
set from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons) in the middle of a July heat wave. RKO’s engineers
invented a new type of artificial snow made out of foam (for which they got a
technical Oscar) instead of the previous substitute — ground-up cornflakes —
which were too noisy for scenes that involved snow but not blizzards. But that
still left the actors having to perform difficult action scenes dressed for a
New York winter in the 102° heat of a California summer, and at one point Capra
gave his cast and crew a day off just to recover.
