Not even meanings made with love can stop life's motion. The most common symbolic method used in recent American film criticism is a particular kind of allegorical reading that has come to be identified with cultural studies or ideological criticism. In this mode of interpretation, the characters, events, and images in a movie are metaphorically translated into a series of sociological generalizations. Because of their manifest engagement with so many of the social issues of their day, Capra's films have yielded an unusually rich harvest of generalizations to cultural studies critics. The problem these critics have failed to have grappled with, however, is that the most interesting and important aspects of the works they deal with drop out of their analysis.
Content is a very, very tiny part of a work of art.
Capra's films are no more reducible to the ideological positions they include than Sargent's paintings are reducible to fashion plates. The interest of both artists' work begins where such realms of understanding end. In fact, works of art aren't even very reliable sources for ideological generalizations. It would be like using Fidelio to study nineteenth-century penology, or Monet's paintings to study botany. The result would be bad history or science and worse criticism.