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Once a staple of the Christmas TV scheduling, its absence over Christmas 2009 means that it’s time to bring this film to the attention to a whole new audience. It’s a Wonderful Life runs the gamut of human emotion, from laughter and joy to frustration, despair and back to happiness. Star Jimmy Stewart is at his finest, and director Frank Capra said it was his favourite of all his films. But it didn’t get off to the best start...
Despite the collection of uplifting films that were released during the Second World War, in 1947 audiences were no longer as ready to stomach films that were less realistic. The war had disillusioned a whole generation of people, and ruined the lives of many more, so the concept of an angel being sent from heaven to save one man wasn’t the kind of film audiences wanted.
It’s a Wonderful Life is not as fluffy as everyone assumes, however. It is surprisingly bleak in parts, especially when its protagonist considers resorting to suicide to get out of the situation in which he finds himself. It is in these moments that Jimmy Stewart broke away from his pre-war roles as an innocent, naive young idealist and started to exhibit the qualities that Alfred Hitchcock was to later exploit in films such as Rear Window and Vertigo.
Lest this gives you the impression that it’s all doom and gloom, however, It’s a Wonderful Life really is an uplifting film. The comedy comes thick and fast in the earlier sequences as George Bailey (Stewart) grows up and negotiates the path of his first love. We watch his story as it is told to Clarence, an angel who has been commissioned by St. Joseph to help George in his time of need; so when George’s absent-minded Uncle Billy loses $8,000 of the family business’s money, Clarence appears to prevent George from throwing his life away because he believes he is “worth more dead than alive”.
The real strength of the film is in the scenes when Clarence, an angel still to earn his wings, shows George what his town of Bedford Falls would have been like if George had never been born (something that we probably all wish we could see). The realisation that George has touched so many lives and made a difference is what brings George back from the brink of despair. Since this doesn’t come until near the end of the film, we have been given plenty of time to fall in love with George and his family and friends, so when the end scene comes we feel we are a part of it. After all, who doesn’t love Jimmy Stewart?
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