page_title: It's a Wonderful Life
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: It's a Wonderful Life / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: It's a Wonderful Life (film) 1946 Frank Capra, director. Donna Reed Liberty Films/RKO
context_page_description: It's a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas fantasy drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story and booklet The Greatest Gift, which Philip Van Doren Stern began to write in 1939 and published privately in 1943.
  The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody. Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched, and how different life would be for his wife Mary and his community of Bedford Falls if he had never been born.
  Despite it initially getting mixed reviews and being considered a box office flop, the film has become a classic and is a staple of Christmas television around the world. The change in reception was helped in part due to a clerical error which put the film into the public domain, allowing it to be freely shown anywhere without licensing or royalty fees.
  Theatrically, the film's break-even point was $6.3 million, about twice the production cost, a figure it did not come close to achieving on its initial release.
context_section_description: According to a 2006 book, "A spate of movies appeared just after the ending of the Second World War, including It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Stairway to Heaven (1946), perhaps tapping into so many people's experience of loss of loved ones and offering a kind of consolation." It's a Wonderful Life premiered at the Globe Theatre in New York on December 20, 1946, to mixed reviews. While Capra thought the contemporary critical reviews were either universally negative, or at best dismissive, Time said, "It's a Wonderful Life is a pretty wonderful movie. It has only one formidable rival (Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives) as Hollywood's best picture of the year. Director Capra's inventiveness, humor, and affection for human beings keep it glowing with life and excitement."
  Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, complimented some of the actors, including Stewart and Reed, but concluded, "the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer's point of view, is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra's nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow, they all resemble theatrical attitudes, rather than average realities."
  The film, which went into general release on January 7, 1947, placed 26th ($3.3 million) in box-office revenues for 1947 (out of more than 400 features released), one place ahead of another Christmas film, Miracle on 34th Street. The film was supposed to be released in January 1947, but was moved up to December 1946 to make it eligible for the 1946 Academy Awards. This move was seen as worse for the film, as 1947 did not have quite the stiff competition as 1946. If it had entered the 1947 awards, its biggest competition would have been Miracle on 34th Street. The number-one grossing movie of 1947, The Best Years of Our Lives, made $11.5 million.
  The film recorded a loss of $525,000 at the box office for RKO.
  On May 26, 1947, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a memo stating, "With regard to the picture 'It's a Wonderful Life', [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a 'scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters." Film historian Andrew Sarris points out as "curious" that "the censors never noticed that the villainous Mr. Potter gets away with robbery without being caught or punished in any way".
  In 1990, It's a Wonderful Life was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.
  In 2002, Britain's Channel 4 ranked It's a Wonderful Life as the seventh-greatest film ever made in its poll "The 100 Greatest Films".
  In June 2008, AFI revealed its 10 Top 10, the best 10 films in 10 "classic" American film genres, after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. It's a Wonderful Life was acknowledged as the third-best film in the fantasy genre.
  Somewhat more iconoclastic views of the film and its contents are occasionally expressed. In his review for The New Republic in 1947, film critic Manny Farber wrote, "To make his points, [Capra] always takes an easy, simple-minded path that doesn't give much credit to the intelligence of the audience", and adds that it has only a "few unsentimental moments here and there". Wendell Jamieson, in a 2008 article for The New York Times which was generally positive in its analysis of the film, noted that far from being simply a sweetly sentimental tale, it "is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It 
caption: Mary Hatch (Donna Reed), spinster librarian, in the world where George Bailey was never born.
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