It's a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra's Timeless Classic is Timelier Than Ever

I flew back to New York from Florida on a packed flight earlier this week. I was seated in the middle of a youth baseball league and their weary coaches and chaperones. Sitting next to these kids could have made for a nightmare two and a half hours…but I enjoyed their energy. When we landed, even though the boys on this team had lost their tournament in Florida, the flight crew made an announcement welcoming them home as New York champions. The whole plane applauded. These rambunctious boys turned red. It was such a pure, wholesome moment. An American sort of moment…a Frank Capra moment.

Maybe it felt that way because I decided to spend the flight watching Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life, to get into the holiday spirit. I hadn’t seen it in a few years, and I was struck by something interesting: even though the climactic last stretch of the film, with the supernatural visitation of Clarence the angel to save the despondent George Bailey all happens on Christmas Eve…this is not really a Christmas movie. Yes, the film ends with Christmas themes of goodwill and charity and carol singing, leaving us in holiday spirits, but the majority of the film up to that point is a telling of a life story. It’s a story about a decent, ordinary guy who follows his heart and does the right thing, even when it nearly costs him everything. It’s a story about the choices we make and the choices that are made for us; the consequences of all of them, and our very human search for contentment and meaning in the life we’ve been handed.

There is a kind of profundity here, in the finding of meaning in the simple and universal passages of life, that I find reminiscent of the works of American playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder wrote several works in which a celestial or otherworldly being comes to earth in order to help one ordinary mortal, at the moment of their death, to realize the preciousness of a life they took for granted. In Our Town, Emily dies too young, in childbirth, and before she ascends to heaven, she’s guided back in time to a single day from her youth; a glimpse of her ordinary life with her ordinary family. A similar “heavenly friend” descends to redeem the soul of ne’er-do-well Billy Bigelow in Carousel, taking him forward into the future to grant him a last chance of being the father his child will never know. Clarence, the folksy old angel earning his wings for his assignment with George, grants him a vision of what the world would have been like had he never been born—a nightmare vision that proves as transformative to George as Scrooge’s glimpse of a desolate Christmas yet to come in A Christmas Carol. George and Ebenezer each are given another chance, and they return with a new sense of purpose and appreciation for life.

Frank Capra and James Stewart on the set of It’s a Wonderful Life

I’m a big fan of Capra. He wrote flawed people in trying circumstances fighting for things worth fighting for: he wrote Americans. I posted a piece earlier this year in praise of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, a Capra gem, with another great James Stewart performance. Capra defined the American ethos for an entire generation, especially through his influence as FDR’s propaganda minister during World War II, maintaining morale, lifting up wartime audiences with stories of American life, and celebrating patriotism, whilst rejecting cynicism and despair.

When one thinks of this film, or anything “Capra-esque,” nostalgia comes to mind. Nostalgia for what? There’s a small town America in It’s a Wonderful Life, but it’s a Hollywood idea of small town America, manufactured under the constriction of the Production Code, the morality straitjacket on the industry, which censored many realities of life, branding them taboo and off limits. Capra was better than most directors of the time at getting some serious themes into his films nonetheless, and he often pushed political buttons. There were F.B.I. investigations into Capra because of his negative depictions of the rich, powerful and political. Imagine, the F.B.I. being triggered because the character with the most wealth and power in It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter, is a grotesque—a caricature of the evil and crooked banker. Yeah. Bankers didn’t like that. Neither did the politicians who tried to get Mr. Smith Goes To Washington banned for its depiction of corrupt practices inside the Senate.

Capra mastered subliminal messaging, and was adept at the use of symbolism; he smuggled controversial but relevant topics into his films by giving them a strong moral framing in the story. For example, alcoholism is dealt with quite frankly and startlingly: early on, with the incident at the pharmacy, when young George’s boss, Mr. Gower, stricken with grief at the sudden news of his son’s death, gets dangerously drunk, nearly poisons one of his customers, and assaults George in his confusion. H. B. Warner’s performance here is brief, but stunning—Gower is a man in deep despair, and his drunkenness must have drawn some sympathy in 1946, from an audience full of people, many of whom had received their own devastating telegrams in the war. We see Mr. Gower reformed and sober in the end—one of George’s good deeds (and very pleasing to the Hays Office). We see the scatterbrained Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) as a sort of hapless buffoon, but it’s clear throughout that he’s a chronic tippler and even a fall down drunk. Drink’s the reason he makes the dreadful error of handing Mr. Potter the money that would keep the Building and Loan afloat, but Capra makes sure we still feel for Billy, even when our friend George unleashes his rage and frustration upon him for his careless and devastating blunder.

Stewart and Grahame

I’m always intrigued by Violet Bick’s storyline. Played winningly by the luscious Gloria Grahame, Violet is the town flirt, generally regarded as “fast,” and the object of the unclean thoughts of every man in Bedford Falls. Capra humanizes her, though. He lets us see her first as a child, already crushing on the boys—especially George, in competition with the lovestruck Mary. We learn that Violet grew up here too, and, though something of a scandal, she’s part of the community. Then comes the scene in which Violet visits George at his office in need. She’s at the end of her rope: she begs for money to get to New York. Why such urgency? I’ve always thought the rush to leave town might suggest an unplanned pregnancy (something that was verboten under the Code). There’s a gravity to that scene between Stewart and Grahame—we learn that George helping Violet stirs up unsavory speculation in town—which is later gleefully reported to George by the evil Potter. I always find the reappearance of Violet at the end a rather bold move of Capra’s—it redeems her. We believe she’ll stay and find a way to belong in her community. I also like to imagine, in my back story, that she finds the courage to have her baby there, too.

So, there’s more to this movie than gee-whiz American hokum and Christmas feels. Watching it this time, I realized that the nostalgia we feel from It’s a Wonderful Life was intended, at the time of its release, to be nostalgia for the generation of adults who had just fought and survived the Second World War. These people, like George Bailey, were small children during The Great War, and came of age in the roaring twenties, a youthful and energetic rejection of the dark era that passed before them. These modern men and women were conflicted: they felt the pull of a life just like their parent’s, but they were lured by the call to exploration and industry in the world beyond. In the story, as it had done in the real lives of the 1946 audience, World War II comes. George Bailey is unable to serve due to that bad ear of his, but everyone would have known and admired James Stewart for his brave service in the war.

James Stewart as George Bailey

Stewart came back from the front a deeper, more sensitive, infinitely more nuanced actor: we feel it, through this natural, intimate and emotional performance. It seems “Mr. Smith” grew up. Indeed, all the acting in this film is timeless; every bit as natural, realistic and compelling as anything seen on screen today. Donna Reed is the equally brilliant, but quieter hero of this film, bringing incredible presence and strength to her role—a master class in reacting. The chemistry between Stewart and Reed is so real, so full of love and tenderness, we feel it with them. The kissing scenes! And, that incredible telephone call scene? We see two actors, simmeringly alive in the moment and with each other; so tuned in and honest—it’s acting for the ages.

Donna Reed and James Stewart

This movie portrayed, for its post war audience, a version of their own shared experience: acknowledging, through its narrative, the common struggle they all faced as they picked up life again, a challenge to find meaning in simple things and tender feelings after so much horror, loss and brutality. I found, watching it tearfully on a plane in 2024, that it still has the same power to inspire.

We need to wake up from a culture where each of us indulges in “main character” syndrome: our cameras forever in selfie mode, projecting out at the world a reality show of a life—a semi-reality in which we endlessly observe ourselves being observed…yet never truly connect with each other. Using up the minutes of our lives on screens and keyboards; buying our own delusion that these avatar selves of ours are actually making something in the world of any real value or substance. This mirage (arising from a denial of reality) echoes George Bailey’s obsessive, unrealized ambition to get out of his small town, to see the world, to build cities and to be someone. The discontent keeps him not only from truly seeing the goodness and love around him, but from recognizing his own deserving. George spends his life putting other people first, but his journey is to move past his conviction that all those acts of self sacrifice had resulted only in the destruction of his dreams. Always fixated on the horizon, he didn’t see that his actions, in the now, were of inestimable value. One can only be mired in a state of disappointment and regret like that for so long—one more hardship, one more obstacle, one more fire to put out—and you snap. You ask: What about me??? George despairs because he’s at rock bottom, but also because he has developed no inner reserves to draw on, nothing is ever good enough; he’s living a half life by only seeing it as a series of compromises and losses. George can’t see himself as someone deserving of help, acknowledgement and support.

The final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life is one of the greatest explosions of joy and human goodness ever captured on film. As everyone George has touched in his life comes forward, adding their gifts, large and small, to the collection before him, we see each individual anew: the self-centeredness, the thoughtlessness, the weakness—all wiped away as they do for George what he did for them. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Experience is the worst kind of teacher: it gives you the test first, and the lesson after.” We can’t all be like George. He could have sworn off doing the right thing after having his ears boxed by Mr. Gower. Most of us would, but he didn’t. It just didn’t feel right to him. His instincts spoke to him loud and clear, and to deny them—to sell out, to give up, to refuse the love in his heart—it was too big a price to pay. We can’t all be heroes like George, a man certainly worthy of saving via divine intervention, but we can be like those folks throwing their contributions on that table, and raising a glass to say: We take care of our own here. We’re all in this together.

Let’s all be as much in the moment this holiday season—whatever the moment is—as we can. It goes as fast as it came, whether it was good or bad. Let’s not waste it. In Our Town, Emily asks, “Does anyone realize life while they live it, every, every minute?” No, Emily, we don’t. We can’t, really. But why not this Christmas…let’s acknowledge and appreciate the gift of life. It’s a wonderful thing.