It's a Socialist Life

Rating: 2/10 (1 December 2006)

Let me be no doubt a lone negative voice regarding this film, for which the best thing I can say is that it is an excellent piece of propaganda.
The movie appeals to the socialist nature of one's sense of life, and was an anti-capitalist propaganda film on the virtue of altruism. For instance, people who wanted their money at the beginning of the "run" on the savings and loan were negatively painted selfish. Old Man Potter was painted as the evil banker, when in fact a much more interesting and accurate spin would be to look at the lives positively affected because Potter managed his bank so well (he had the liquidity to handle his depositor's claims). Good ol' George, presented as the epitome of the virtuous man, possesses in fact an ethics of self sacrifice. Incompetent Uncle Billy, having "lost" the banks capital in a brown paper bag, is nevertheless sympathetically presented as Potter's victim, when in fact he is merely the price of George's immoral (and anti-capitalist) practice of sacrificial nepotism.
The nonsense goes on and on until towards the end we are struck over the head with what a "lucky man" George Baily is, as he mooches upon his friends and neighbors. The audience, especially women, tear up pondering the alleged "romance" portrayed, all the while the movie advances the philosophical principles of socialism farther than Karl Marx could have ever dreamed. Capra was essentially the Dickens of film.