MUSEUM of DITHERED POSTERS

12/03/2023: IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946)

The angels (?) are galaxies that talk to one another. When enough humans pray for the same person, in this case a man named George Bailey, they convene and send one of their number to Earth. The council of galaxies summons Clarence, a young star who’s been waiting to earn his wings for over 200 years. The old galaxies, in order to prepare Clarence, show some important moments from George Bailey’s life.

Author’s Note: At this point I, watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time, believed that Bailey’s backstory would be like an Act I, at the end of which Clarence would descend to Earth and the real fun would begin. It turns out the galaxies’ explanation is also all of what I’d normally call Act II, but frankly my favorite three-act framework isn’t particularly useful for this movie. My theory is that long-form cinema was still taking a lot of cues from stage plays - I recall reading something about playwrights flocking from New York to Hollywood in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and so the early screenwriting tradition was based heavily on the stage tradition. In any case, I was bamboozled. Good job Frank Capra.

Turning most of the movie into a flashback is a cute device, actually. It draws us in and makes us wonder why so many people needed to pray for George Bailey as an adult. In other words, we have a great prologue. This is not a drill, It's a Wonderful Life has a prologue the Picker-Aparter approves of.

The audience immediately falls in love with George Bailey. From at least age 12 he’s selfless, unafraid of confrontation or sacrifice, community-oriented, even poetic at times. And he’s so damned charming that even when a couple of bullies open up the dance floor and he falls into the swimming pool underneath, he just keeps on dancing. Everyone else at the ball just jumps in after him, including the bullies.

I can see why Guillermo Del Toro loves this movie. It’s already winning my heart.

I find it interesting that this film, released in 1946, depicts at length what life was like from 1919 to 1928. Naturally so - that span would have aligned with the childhoods of the filmmakers themselves. But filmmaking technology in 1919 simply couldn’t have portrayed slice-of-life scenes like this. I don’t know what I mean to say, really, except that prior to this there might not have been a better movie about real life in the 1920s. Anyone living today who lived through the ‘20s would most certainly have been an infant then and too old now to be making movies. It’s a Wonderful Life falls in a precious window where immortalization of a way of life was possible.

The writing is spectacular. And I don’t just mean the structural stuff I’m always fussing over. On a scene level the script is beautiful. I ought to be impatient to find out what happens with Clarence but I’m just invested in George Bailey’s life. Speaking of which, James Stewart is great as well. I’m ashamed to say that, until now, I associated black-and-white films with overacting. My mind has been opened. If you know any other good movies from this era, please point me in the right direction.

It was around this time I started to understand that I was not watching a long Act I - about halfway through the screentime (VHS, no easy way to verify) with no sign of Clarence. It dawned on me that I was watching this movie for the first time a whopping 77 years after its release. There is a small chance that storytelling conventions have evolved slightly since World War II.

The ongoing theme is that George wants to get the hell out of his hometown but he can’t make himself abandon it either. He can’t leave as long as they need him.

The big bad banker guy, Potter, offers to buy out the suburb that George Bailey built and hire him onto the Potter team for $20,000 a year. Depending on the exact year this scene takes place, that’s something like $400,000 in today’s money. He turns down the offer. That would give Potter a monopolistic dominance over the entire town, and someone like Potter can’t have absolute power while someone like George Bailey lives and breathes. Then he gets home to his drafty house and his four kids and wonders if he’s a fucking idiot. (He’s not, but hey we needed some themes)

World War II is covered in about 30 seconds of montage. I suppose it ended only three years before this movie came out, nobody needed the war explained to them. Funny, huh?

Life has been difficult for Bailey since the beginning, but this is where the shit really starts to hit the fan. Uncle Whats-his-face loses a bunch of money, by which I mean he literally misplaces it, and dooms George Bailey’s agency to bankruptcy and perhaps jail time for Bailey himself. It’s Christmas Eve.

Ha! Wow, here comes some great character consistency, everyone. Take notes:

Everything goes wrong for George. This is one of the most desperate Dark Nights of the Soul I’ve ever seen. His financial anxiety drives him to verbally abuse his own family, and the shame of that forces him out of the house into the cold. He’s about to jump off a bridge into icy waters - then he sees someone else fall in and call for help. George “needs-to-be-needed” Bailey takes off his coat and jumps in to save him. George is a multifaceted character but his compulsion to rise to any occasion is his deepest and most reliable trait.

The drowning man is, of course, Clarence the angel in human form. George wishes he were never born. Clarence says, “Sure thing, bud.” I’m sure you’re familiar with the “here’s what life would be like if you never existed” (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsAWonderfulPlot) trope that this movie popularized. Rugrats did a pretty good one.

How creepy would this movie be from the cab driver’s perspective? A guy gets in the cab and knows everything about the driver, only a bunch of the information is wrong. Then the stranger says he lives at 320 Sycamore. That house has been abandoned for twenty years or more.

They break into the old house together and the cops show up. When the cop pins the stranger to the ground… he vanishes.

Anyway, George wishes to be alive again when he realizes what a pit his hometown turns into without him. When the real-life townspeople hear that George is in trouble they fight for the chance to give him some of their cash. All the different plot threads resolve with George getting overwhelming support, including an advance of $25,000 from Sam Somebody that his wife used to date I think? The whole thing is very sweet and makes my heart all fuzzy wuzzy.

10/10. Not quite what I expected, even having absorbed so much of it through cultural osmosis. It takes quite a bit to surprise me, storywise, and this movie did it.