Slightly overrated, but only slightly

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 1999)

I love this movie. I did get a bit sick of it a few years ago when it played on just about every channel at just about every hour just about every day from Thanksgiving to Christmas. But I never quite got to the point where I hated the movie.
This movie, like a lot of Frank Capra's, is sometimes thought of as sentimental almost to the point of schmaltz. It is true that a first glance this seems like a "feel-good movie" to use the present-day parlance. But, again like a lot of Capra's movies, it has a dark side lurking under its sunny exterior. It's usually not patently obvious, but rather subtle. In this case, James Stewart's dark hard-edged side is most notably seen in the scene where he goes home and abuses his family before going out to get plastered. It's only a small part of the movie, but it's there, nicely complementing the sweet, nice, aw-shucks good-guy character he portrays throughout the rest of the movie. It also shows what an actor of range Stewart was.