Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Social media campaign snowballs
Mercy hospitals continue to serve
The SnowBall Effect social media charity campaign to benefit the Mercy Health Foundation kicked off Dec. 4. In lieu of the nonprofit organization’s traditional holiday-time charity galas, canceled due to covid-19 concerns, organizers say the campaign “is an opportunity for businesses and individuals to provide support for Mercy services that greatly impact local residents.”
According to a news release, the foundation supports community members at every stage of life, from providing life-saving equipment for the tiniest patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to helping low-income seniors maintain their independence through medical alert technology. The mission states: “As the Sisters of Mercy before us, we bring to life the healing ministry of Jesus through our compassionate care and exceptional service.”
This year, proceeds from the SnowBall Effect campaign will benefit four service areas at Mercy Fort Smith: neurosurgery, cardiology, behavioral health and neonatal air transport. In Northwest Arkansas, proceeds will benefit cardiology, urology, robotics and orthopedic surgery, the pharmacy residency program and women’s and children’s programs. In addition, donors may choose to make a contribution to the area of greatest need.
All proceeds stay in the areas served by Mercy Northwest Arkansas and Mercy Fort Smith to help provide care for local residents.
Supporters are invited to participate in the campaign by visiting mercyhealthfoundation.net/ FTSM-SnowBall in Fort Smith or mercyhealthfoundation.net/ NWA-SnowBall in Northwest Arkansas. The Northwest Arkansas
campaign continues through Dec. 18, while the Fort Smith campaign concludes Jan. 23.
“This pandemic hasn’t changed what Mercy does. We have a longstanding commitment to our community and continue to show up to do the important health care work, day in and day out,” said Mercy Health Foundation Board Chairman Sara Goodwin with Goodwin & Goodwin Inc. of Fort Smith. “If anything, our current circumstances have only made it more clear just how important that work is.”
Latreice Watkins, executive vice president of consumables for Walmart, agreed, saying, “We are fortunate to have Mercy to rely on in good times and in times of need. Partnering together to serve the health care needs of Northwest Arkansas helps to advance the quality of life in the region.”
At previous charity galas, the foundation has traditionally honored philanthropic families who have helped fulfill its mission. This week’s photos include some of those families.
On Dec. 17, beginning at 6 p.m. and lasting until 9 p.m., the Arkansas Arts Center, in conjunction with the Arkansas Cinema Society, is presenting an online screening and discussion of Frank Capra’s 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The screening is limited to 250, and the cost is $8 for AAC members and $10 for others. You can find more information and buy tickets for the virtual event by going to arkansasartscenter.org or by calling (501) 372-4000.
I’m hosting the live discussion, which is scheduled to begin at 8:15 p.m. If technology allows it — and Zoom generally does — I’ll also be posting comments about the film in real-time. If that’s not possible, then I’ll live-tweet during the film. (My Twitter handle is @borkdog.)
I had some input into choosing the film, but it is not one of my favorites. But, for the purposes of this screening, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is better than one of my favorites.
It is a seasonal perennial, one of those movies that a lot of people ritually watch every holiday season. It also has an interesting history — it wasn’t exactly a box office smash upon release. Over the years, this has evolved into the myth that “It’s a Wonderful Life” was largely ignored by the public and ravaged by critics upon its release.
This isn’t the case. Though its box office receipts were disappointing, “It’s a Wonderful Life” was nominated for five Oscars and ranked as the 26th highest-grossing film of 1947, one spot ahead of another Christmas perennial, “Miracle on 34th Street.”
Reviews were mixed, not uniformly bad — Time said it was “a pretty wonderful movie … Director Capra’s inventiveness, humor and affection for human beings keep it glowing with life and excitement.”
But it wasn’t an instant phenomenon, and Bosley Crowther’s review in The New York Times seemed to sum up the general attitude of professional moviegoers: “The weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it — its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile.
But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes, rather than average realities.”
In an alternate timeline, “It’s a Wonderful Life” might have taken its place among the rota of nostalgia-inducing family movies like “A Christmas Story,” “Miracle on 34th Street” and “White Christmas.” It would not have been forgotten, for Capra is an important American filmmaker — maybe the most important American political filmmaker — and “It’s a Wonderful Life” is one of his signal movies. There’s no way it would be an obscure film.
But had it not been for a legal quirk, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would never have achieved the classic status it has and deserves. “It’s a Wonderful Life” only exists in the popular imagination today because of a clerical error. It only took its place as one of the essential Christmas movies after it was allowed to drift into the public domain in the ’70s.
For nearly 20 years “It’s a Wonderful Life” was free content for anyone who wanted to show it. So television stations showed it a lot. PBS stations were the first to understand its usefulness, as they counterprogrammed it against flashy network holiday specials.
Some television stations took to running nonstop marathons of the film during the holiday season. Sometimes you could find it playing on several different (pre-cable) channels in the same market. There were dozens of videocassette versions of it available, including budget versions selling for $2.99 or less.
This is why, if you are of a certain age, the movie is forever imprinted on your brain. It’s why, even if you’ve never actually watched the film, you probably know about it. You know about good-hearted schlub George Bailey (Stewart) and how angel Clarence Odbody gets his wings. You know about Bedford Falls and its alternate-reality twin Pottersville (which looks like a lot more fun).
Here’s the thing — “It’s a Wonderful Life” is one of very few movies that gets better with repeated viewings. My opinion of it changes every time I see it. It has some remarkable qualities. It also seems profoundly sad. It is a deeply American movie, full of shadows and light.
What might be most remarkable about the film is how well it holds up after nearly three-quarters of a century. There are some movies — Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” comes to mind — that have an immediate power that is diminished with every viewing as we begin to understand how the director is leading and focusing our attention.
The little girl in the red coat is startling on first viewing. The next time around, we understand what the director is up to. Liam Neeson’s late speech about how more lives might have been saved is heartbreaking in the moment but feels more artificial with each viewing.
There’s nothing wrong with that; a movie is a date with an arrangement of light and sound. None of us ever see the same movie twice, for we are always changed from the last time we’d seen the movie. It’s not the movie’s fault that we have become wise to its tricks and bent on deconstructing its
wonder.
But “It’s a Wonderful Life” is not a movie we can parse so easily. We can look around the sides of the frame — it’s interesting to know it may have been the first major motion picture to use soap suds instead of cornflakes to simulate snow. (Which meant that, since the actors weren’t crunching around on breakfast cereal, they could record dialogue on the set and not have to loop it later.)
There are many ways into “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which film critic Andrew Sarris called “one of the most profoundly pessimistic tales of human existence ever to achieve a lasting popularity.” You don’t have to strain to see that Capra’s famous happy endings are more a release from despair than any sort of triumphal overcoming. The moral of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is: it could be worse. So suck it up and keep breathing, lest the devil you don’t know shows up.
This preoccupation with suicide is a theme that runs through Capra’s films: “It’s a Wonderful Life” can be read as a film about the causes and consequences of suicide. Capra’s 1941 film “Meet John Doe” is about a newspaper columnist who invents a character who threatens to commit public suicide on Christmas Eve in protest of societal ills.
In 1939’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Claude Rains’ covertly corrupt senator attempts suicide by shotgun but is stopped by his colleagues. (Sidney Buchman, the credited screenwriter on “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” alleges Capra insisted on the scene, which Buchman hated.)
Suicide attempts feature prominently in Capra’s 1933 film “Lady for a Day” and its 1961 remake “Pocketful of Miracles.”
And there are successful suicides in his “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1932), “State of the Union” (1948) and the comedy “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938).
Still, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is undeniably life-affirming; It’s the story of George, who decides not to commit suicide, after the supernatural intervention of an angel — a second-class, second-rate, not-ready-for-prime-time angel — shows him how much worse the world would be had he never lived.
At the end of the movie, George is happy (or maybe just relieved), embraced by friends and family, with presumably his financial problems erased, but he will never be the important architect his child self dreamed of being (he will never be Gary Cooper in “The Fountainhead”). He will never shake the dust of the “crummy little town” of Bedford Falls off his shoes.
He’s one of those people who will fail to achieve what Charles Portis called “escape velocity.” Just when he thought he was out, just when he thought he could drop off that bridge and into oblivion, Bedford Falls — and its decidedly ordinary people — pulls him back in.
Capra deserves better than the popular perception of him as a cockeyed optimist with full faith invested in the principles of American democracy. And while he is often misconstrued as a raging populist, a great proponent of the common wisdom of the common man, his movies often show the common man as part of an ugly churning mob.
Not everyone saw Capra’s films as the embodiment of the best of Americana. In 1939, for instance, Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to England and father of a future president, offered Columbia Pictures $2 million to not release “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” The senior Kennedy feared that its depiction of U.S. politicians as venal and weak would give aid and comfort to the Nazi cause.
Capra’s tone is often dark and somber, his lighting often noir-stark. His interiors are often cramped and claustrophobic, the exception being the expansive “Mr. Smith” (1939), which famously features a fullscale reproduction of the U.S. Senate chamber. And his dialogue is frequently terse and borderline hard-boiled.
Even considering the national temper of the time, it is somewhat alarming to hear Capra, when narrating one of the series of “Why We Fight” training films he made for the Army during World War II, refer to the “sawed-off, bucktoothed Jap.”
Capra is one of the few old-time Hollywood directors about whom moviegoers are likely to have an opinion. Skeptics perceive him as a purveyor of feel-good endings, a patron saint of small-town values and unabashed sentimentality. Some critics don’t much care for Capra’s films. They call his work “Capra corn” and reflexively resort to adjectives like “smarmy” and “cloying” to describe it.
In the other corner are his defenders. Capra is especially popular these days among selfstyled cultural conservatives who, partly for political reasons, deplore all forms of modernism and tend to denounce all difficult, nonrepresentational or experimental forms as fraudulent and pretentious.
For these folks, Frank Capra is a martyr and an emblem of the “Good Hollywood” that existed before the movies became decadent.
Capra himself grew cranky and disillusioned; in his 1971 autobiography, he explained why he essentially quit making Hollywood pictures:
“The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters …. The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophiliac bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: ‘Shake ’em! Rattle ’em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!’…. Kill for thrill — shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil — shock! Shock!”
(OK, Boomer.)
It’s ironic that we mostly know him for one picture, for Capra always decried that the public could only hold one idea about an artist in their mind at a time. Capra is not as simple as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” is counter-intuitively a dense and problematic examination of one good man’s thwarted — but still good, still good — life.