It’s A Wonderful Life and the vagaries of the cultural canon

I’m probably a fairly unusual representative of my generation in that until last night I had never seen It’s A Wonderful Life. Some notes:

(1) The film was something of a flop at the box office when it was released, failing to make back its production and distribution costs. It did get nominated for all the top Oscars — it was given a limited release at the end of 1946 to make it eligible for that year’s awards — but it didn’t win any of them, losing out mostly to The Best Years of Our Lives. Critical reception was somewhat mixed, and the film was largely forgotten, which of course is what happened to almost all Hollywood films that weren’t big hits in the pre-VCR/pre-Internet era.

The story of how it became a holiday classic is very interesting from an intellectual property perspective: The owner of the copyright in the film itself — the rights had been transferred a couple of times from the original studio — overlooked the need to renew the copyright under the then-existing law in the mid-1970s, so the film (sort of) went into the public domain. This led to hundreds of TV stations broadcasting it during the Christmas season, which transformed it into the holiday classic it is today. The actual legal situation was pretty complicated, as the film was a derivative work from a short story that was still under copyright, so IAWL was not fully in the public domain, and the legal rights took a couple of big lawsuits to eventually sort out.

(2) The story on which the film is based is itself obviously and consciously derivative of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” The writer, Philip Van Doren Stern, a prominent NYC editor who also wrote some well regarded Civil War histories, was unable to sell the story, so he printed up a few hundred copies as a kind of elaborate Christmas Card. which he distributed to friends and acquaintances. One of these ended up in the hands of a Hollywood producer, who showed it to Cary Grant, who was interested enough that Grant’s studio bought the film rights for $10,000, which is about $175,000 in 2024 money.

(3) The film actually has a reference to the Spanish flu. At the time of the Covid pandemic we noted at LGM how few references to that pandemic had survived in popular culture, so here’s another one (The druggist’s son died of influenza in 1919, which is why he mistakenly puts poison in medicine in his distress over the telegram that informs him of this).

(4) Mr. Potter, the villain banker, refers to George Bailey’s Italian-American customers derisively as “garlic eaters.” This reminded me that in the 1940s garlic was still considered an exotic and vaguely disgusting substance by the WASP hegemony (Stories about Joe DiMaggio and his San Francisco clan regularly mentioned garlic to emphasize the exotic nature of the Yankee Clipper’s background). Frank Capra, the director and producer, was born in Bisacquino Italy in 1897.

(5) The FBI had a file on the film, which notes that an anonymous source informed the Bureau of the dangerous levels of disrespect the film displayed toward the hardworking capitalists holding back the Red Tide:

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 observed as “curious” that “the censors never noticed that the villainous Mr. Potter gets away with robbery without being caught or punished in any way”

(6) The scene in which the distraught and drunk druggist hits 12-year-old George Bailey features what appears to be blood coming out of the child actor’s ear. It turns out this actually is real blood, as the kid was hit so hard by the adult actor that he started bleeding, and Capra kept the shot. Relatedly, for somebody who is supposed to be something of a paragon, George Bailey engages in some pretty extreme verbal abuse of his wife and kids when he’s in mental distress after it looks like he’s going to lose his job and maybe even go to jail. It’s interesting that the film seems to present this as understandable and no big deal, while Mary Bailey (Donna Reed) plays the part of what the audience is to understand, I suppose, as the ideal wife, in that she never criticizes even her husband’s most outrageous behavior (she does almost suggest that he take a walk).

ETA: MrPug and a couple of other commenters object to this, and I think they’re right:

1. George was clearly not a generally abusive husband/father,
2. He quickly regrets the abuse he was dishing out at his kids and apologizes,
3. Mary, instead of being the “ideal” wife (assuming you mean a woman who just accepts abuse from her husband – that point really isn’t clear in the post), is the good wife who understands that her good husband to be acting like that must be in real trouble and immediately seeks to find ways to help him.

That the movie shows George’s frustration at not being able to live his dreams as others around did, which can be dark at times, makes the character far more interesting than if he was just a purely good guy.

(7) It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jimmy Stewart in the lead role. He brings an intensity to the performance that carries the film, and is in some ways disconcerting. In fact the film as a whole has a pretty dark subtext, despite the pleasant bath of Dickensian sentimentality with which it ends. George Bailey has spent his whole life deferring all of his dreams for the sake of other people, and this adds a kind of grim undertone to the film’s superficial cheerfulness. As does, of course, the very pointed populist critique of Henry Potter’s post-Gilded Age rapaciousness — the politics of the film in this regard are sharp enough that I can imagine President Musk trying to censor it, or at least require that it be accompanied by some sort of warning about the subversive content within.

(8) I was struck by the high quality of the special effects in those distant pre-CGI days, in regard to the snow that blankets “Bedford Falls,” which is supposed to be in upstate New York in December, but is actually a Southern California movie set in the summer.

(9) Here’s an interesting story about the woman who played the little girl Zuzu, who utters the film’s famous final line. Her life has been less than wonderful in various ways — in a terrible bit of irony, she lost a son to suicide before he had ever seen the film — but she has found a lot of comfort in the film’s revival, decades after it and she had been all but forgotten.

All this makes me think about the arbitrariness of fame, and relatedly, how the cultural canon comes to be what it is at any particular time, which I’ll save for another post.