It’s a good life
(Warning: plot and narrative twists discussed in close and explicit detail)
I do think Frank Capra’s best-known film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is some kind of masterpiece.
The director developed pacing and a gift for slapstick while making silent comedies; with It Happened One Night he showed a gift for swift-sketched romances; with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe, he revealed a vaguely libertarian idealism bordering on (some would say blundering past the point of) naivete.
Everything Capra learned was poured into this, not to mention considerable studio resources. Bedford Falls (fictional, though Seneca Falls, NY claims to be the original inspiration) was built in RKO’s Encino ranch, all 300 yards’ worth including bank, drugstore, emporium, tree-lined boulevard, and movie theater; the film’s most emblematic shot, of George Bailey (James Stewart) running up and down the street is repeated several times in several different kinds of weather, from bright summer to blustery fall to sleety winter to heavy Christmas snow.
Capra in effect constructs an entire world and populates it with a cast of distinct characters, from Irish cop to taxi driver to smart-aleck college graduate to semi-abusive druggist to flirtatious free spirit to malevolent financier. Each inhabitant has the effect of either confirming Bailey’s unrelenting sense of duty (he runs his father’s Building and Loan despite a long-held desire to go to college and then see the world) or mulish stubbornness (he never fails to speak up for the common folk against the greed of local banker Henry F. Potter [Lionel Barrymore]) — really two sides of the same coin.
Capra introduces this world to us in a relatively brief 70 minutes, the second hour devoted to making every detail pay off as a validation of Bailey’s sacrifice. Even the visual style changes midway, as if the film were directed by two filmmakers: the first half is more in Capra’s familiar self-effacing manner, with the camera in constant medium shots of longish length — the better to catch the actors’ comic performances and occasional pratfalls (there’s this perfect little bit of business I remember, of George stepping out of heavy rain into an improvised honeymoon suite — he’s just married longtime sweetheart Mary [Donna Reed] — and the doorman leans back against the door, stovepipe brim pushed up in greeting, palm turned up in anticipation; George looks down at the hand, and his fedora promptly tips the doorman with a hatful of rainwater).
The latter hour has the more interesting style, with a shadowy Gothic look and snow that might have swirled out of the little glass ball in the opening of Citizen Kane. Capra pushes the camera right up to George’s face to better capture the anguish (he’s about to be accused of embezzlement) and the close-ups are gigantic, even grainy (Capra liked one take of Stewart weeping so much he had the shot blown up, hence the coarseness), with harsh lighting and almost no music.
Note that in all of the film’s 130 minute running time, there’s almost no image of the world outside Bedford Falls; oh, a few glimpses of World War 2 perhaps, and of a plastics factory — but otherwise we’re every bit as trapped in town as George is, and possibly as frustrated. Only other film I can remember off the top of my head that realized such effectively stylized smalltown claustrophobia is Joe Dante’s
Gremlins 38 years later. Most folks adore the film; some don’t. Some of the more perceptive nonfans grudgingly appreciate Capra’s skill in weaving various elements and influences, everything from Charles Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (the Martini family’s rickety old Ford driving past the improvised “Bailey Park” sign — Capra’s answer to government resettlement camps) to the aforementioned Welles film. They note the film’s nimble-footed way of skittering across moods and genres: low slapstick, sexy rom-com, high drama, metaphysical fantasy, nightmare noir — this is a massive alcohol-drenched Christmas pastry stuffed full of candied fruits and cheese, not some paltry Lenten snack.
I’ve yet to find a skeptic though willing to defend the film’s ending; one is capable of ingesting only so much sweetness and light, I suppose, before terminal nausea takes over. See if I make any sense then. Remember that George spent his whole life trying to flee Bedford Falls; every time he’s on the verge of actually doing so some calamitous event (his father’s death) or momentous occurrence (his marriage to Mary) compels him to stay.
The struggle is handily encapsulated in one sequence: George is urged to visit Mary, who has just returned from college; on the way he’s approached by Violet Bick (Gloria Grahame) a childhood friend. “Don’t you get tired of just reading about things?” she asks provocatively; George scares her away with his answer (something about walking barefoot through a field and swimming in a moonlit pool — though to be fair the laughing audience probably didn’t help). Later he listens in on a long-distance call with Mary and you can tell — Stewart is a big help — that there’s considerable electric tension running between them. George ends up kissing Mary passionately; the wedding follows soon after.
Capra clearly stacks the odds against Violet; her bewildered response to George doesn’t make much sense (why wouldn’t she want to walk barefoot through a field with him?). Mary is also allowed more time with George; in fact George deliberately delays their eventual meeting because he knows the lure of wanting to see her is too strong. Capra ruthlessly shapes the scenes to build and literally climax with George smothering Mary with kisses because that’s the point and theme of the sequence, of in fact the entire film, with only one crucial problem: Grahame. Our lady of the baby cheeks and smoldering look fills out a dress so well (“This old thing? Why I only wear it when I don’t care how I look”) you can believe she causes traffic accidents every time she steps off the sidewalk.
On the surface the film is geared towards convincing George that he’s destined to stay home and be town patriarch, with only two compelling arguments otherwise: George’s clear frustration with his unwanted role, and Vicky. If she and George weren’t so clearly being manipulated by script and filmmaker he probably wouldn’t even make it to Mary’s phone — would probably be somewhere near the foot of Mount Bedford, skinny-dipping and worse with his other longtime friend.
As for that ending: George is driven to the brink of suicide, is brought back by guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) via the magical device of showing what life’s like without him. (A bit of a cheat on Clarence’s part come to think of it: George’s issue isn’t “is life worth living?” so much as it is “will I ever get out of here?”)
Few nightmares in cinema are more terrifying. George has Christmas Past Present and Future shoved down his throat in one all-encompassing vision, showing the value of staying put and sticking to your own grindstone, never once looking outside of established boundaries. The town has become a dark forbidding realm of familiar faces acting like total strangers — at one point shots are fired; later a cemetery is visited. By vision’s end George is reduced to a sniveling quivering mess, praying desperately to Clarence (Are angels liable for emotional abuse?) to be given a second chance.
Come snow, indicating that George is back in the real world (funny how no one notes that Capra is a manipulator of mood via weather in the league of Kurosawa; his rainy nights, eloquently falling snow work considerable emotional magic on-screen); George the blubbering hysteric has become George the exuberant maniac; you hear the cracked gratefulness in his voice as he runs for the umpteenth time down Bedford Falls’s main street, shrieking “Merry Christmas!” at each and every business establishment.
George barges into his own home and — isn’t it remarkable how Capra has so carefully introduced each and every character in Bedford Falls except the children? We never see them except as brief glimpses in transitional footage and then suddenly when daddy suffers a really bad day at work (he’s just been threatened with prison) all four are presented to us in all their bawling annoying glory. George is visibly having difficulty keeping it together as he deals with each child’s problem, one more ridiculous than the next; by the end of the scene when the finial comes off the banister in his hand you wonder why he doesn’t beat them all to death with the wooden knob.
Anyway, George barges back into his home and hugs each brat as if he hadn’t seen them all his life. Friends start pouring in; money too (so much for that embezzlement charge). George is surrounded by enough love and goodwill that you wonder why no one’s taken to singing “Auld Lang Syne” — and what do you know, little Janie starts playing the piano, and everyone joins in.
And you finally realize what you’re seeing: a perfectly executed Hallmark Holiday Card (remember the story this film was based on failed to find a publisher, so author Philip van Doren Stern was reduced to printing it out as greeting cards handed out at Christmas). And George — poor George, his dreams of college engineering and touring the world finally and irreparably quashed — finds himself trapped in the middle of all that relentless holiday cheer. He grins the idiot grin of a broken man, a man who has well and truly learned his lesson, who will never again dare dream of anything more than living his feeble thoroughly shackled life.
Merry Christmas one and all!