‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ caught eye of the FBI
J. Edgar Hoover’s Communist-hunting agents thought the classic 1946 film was an “attempt to discredit bankers.”
Every holiday season, millions of people cozy up near a warm fireplace or at least a warm television to watch a familiar black-andwhite tale, the 1946 classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The film, which director Frank Capra considered his best, follows the down-onhis-luck George Bailey.
He’s a businessman in the fictional town of Bedford Falls, who is about to lose his loan company to the rich, evil banker Mr. Potter. Bailey considers committing suicide on Christmas Eve, deciding his family and the townspeople would be better off without him. But a guardian angel appears.
The angel presents Bailey an alternative timeline in which he doesn’t exist, showing the suicidal man how much he’s helped those around him.
With stars Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, the movie was a commercial and critical success, earning five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture.
The FBI didn’t see it that way.
Instead, J. Edgar Hoover’s Communist-hunting agents thought it was a Trojan horse sneaking antiAmerican propaganda to the masses.
This argument was compiled in a memo written by an unnamed special agent in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office about “communist infiltration” of the motion picture industry.
From 1942 to 1958, the Los Angeles field office looked into films connected to personalities associated with the Communist Party, which is what drew them to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The FBI claimed that two of its screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, “were very close to known Communists and on one occasion in the recent past ... practically lived with known Communists.”
So an agent watched the movie and wrote a report claiming it “represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.”
For example, the report said, the film cast Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter, the “‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.”
On its face, that’s true: the plot wouldn’t work if the crowd were cheering for Potter to repossess Bailey’s business.
The report claimed the movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”