My favorite Christmas movie . . .

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 2014)

Not perfectly understood at the time, It's a Wonderful Life was nearly a forgotten relic until something magical happened – it fell out of copyright and into public domain. In the early 70s, the film began cropping up on every two-bit UHF station in the country. That gave the film access to a wide audience and the film eventually became an annual Christmas tradition.
It became a tradition for me too, not just at Christmas, but anytime that I need a lift. It tells the story of a genial, high-spirited Average Joe named George Bailey who struggles his whole life to get out into the world and make a name for himself. He dreams of becoming an architect, but responsibilities at home in Bedford Falls keep pulling him back.
Far up in the heavens, George's life story is laid out by the guardians above to the angel who will step in to keep him from committing suicide. We see that, as a kid, he saved two lives; he saved his brother from drowning and later his pharmacist boss from accidentally poisoning a patient's pills. As an adult, he makes a name for himself in town and continually puts his dreams on hold so others can have theirs. He holds off on going to college so his brother can go. Then, when he finally gets a chance to go to school, his father dies and he has to take over the family building and loan. Then he survives the depression by using the money from the company to build houses for the poor folks. All the while he still has stars in his eyes, dreaming of making a foothold on the world, even after he marries his sweetheart Mary and they start raising a family together. Then his uncle foolishly loses the company's $8,000 bank deposit that could send one or both of them to jail. Deep in dispair, George briefly considers killing himself.
That is the moment that Heaven sends an angel named Clarence his way and he shows George the world of Bedford Falls had he never existed. Those he loved are either dead or in great dispair. The town is now owned by the mean Mr. Potter, whom George spent his life trying to keep from buying the town and molding it in his own image. His wife has never married and his war hero brother Harry drowned as a kid. These scenes are the polar opposite of what has come before and the polar opposite of the tone that Frank Capra always used. Where Capra puts every emotion on screen in the lighter scenes, he allows the alternate universe to have the opposite effect, not just dark but a complete hell on earth.
Yet, Capra's great achievement is in creating a film that contains multitudes of comedy, of drama, of humanity, of the composition of a life and not just the plot points. The closing passages of the despair are so strong that we forget the reason they are so strong is because we have such an emotional investment in what has come before. Scenes like the joy of the high school reunion which turns into a pool party; the immortal scene in which Mary loses her bathrobe and hides in a bush while George teases her with it; George's handling of the bank crises and how he keeps the building and loan from being swallowed up by Mr. Potter; the scene in which George tells Potter to take a flying leap after the man offers him a job so he can liquidate the building and loan and the later scene in which he has to crawl back to Potter to ask for help when Uncle Billy loses the bank deposit.
Then, of course, there is the tearful reunion when everyone in town brings him money to help refurbish the bank deposit (which turns out to quadruple the lost money). The brilliance is Capra's nerve to put all these elements into one film in a coherent, sentimental mixture. He allows the great tapestry of George's life to play out long before we get to the nightmare. When that nightmare comes, Clarence explains it beautifully: "Don't you see, George, you really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to throw it all away?" It is difficult to put It's a Wonderful Life into words. What can you say about it that hasn't already been said? This a beautiful film about the value of a single life and its positive effect on so many others. This is one of the most quoted films in history but I think the line that sums it up best comes from Clarence, and it plays to our feelings: "Strange isn't it? One man's life touches so many other lives, and when he isn't there it leaves an awful hole."