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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Everything you need to know about the great yuletide standards, from "It's a Wonderful Life" to "A Christmas Story."
Dec 14, 2000 | Last weekend, the high point of Val Kilmer's first guest-host appearance on "Saturday Night Live" came right at the beginning, when his intro turned into a parody of "It's a Wonderful Life." No film has led a more charmed afterlife than Frank Capra's holiday perennial. Over the past 55 years it has become America's celluloid yule log. A critical and box-office disappointment in 1946, it was treated as Capra's masterpiece when he died in 1991, overshadowing his true masterpiece, the miraculously airy "It Happened One Night," as well as his official classics, "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and his daring early works, including "Miracle Woman" and "The Bitter Tea of General Yen."
Although for decades "It's a Wonderful Life" popped up promiscuously on local stations across the country, the NBC network now owns broadcast rights and presents it annually during prime time -- this year, from 8 to 11 p.m. EST on Saturday. Of course, carping at a film that compels this much allegiance is tantamount to burning the flag. "It's a Wonderful Life" probably is the most affecting Christmas movie ever made. But the Christmas movie genre comprises some tricky, drippy pictures -- and the influence of "It's a Wonderful Life" has helped keep it that way. Since nostalgia and renewal are keynotes of the season, here's a reevaluation of yuletide's movie mainstays -- the "Wonderful," the "Miracles," the "Carols" and the "Story" -- all presented with faith, hope and even a dab of charity.
For a Christmas film, the plot of "It's a Wonderful Life" -- a guardian angel named Clarence saves a bankrupt building-and-loan company president from suicide -- is de rigueur. After all, Christmas is the movie season when three spirits and a ghost transform a skinflint businessman into the best Christian in London ("A Christmas Carol"), or Santa Claus teaches a rationalistic New York mother and daughter the importance of faith and imagination ("Miracle on 34th Street"), or two hot young entertainers, motivated by residual World War II patriotism, stage a show at their retired general's Vermont inn to put him back on his financial feet ("White Christmas").
James Agee, as usual, got "It's a Wonderful Life" down right when he wrote, "Often, in its pile-driving emotional exuberance, it outrages, insults, or at least accosts without introduction, the cooler and more responsible parts of the mind; it is nevertheless recommended."
How you react may depend on how you approach seeing it. I first watched it 35 years ago on late-night TV -- during the summer, not the Christmas season. I felt appreciative of its virtues, generous toward its faults and protective of the film as a whole. But soon after, the reputation of Capra's lovable little movie began to snowball, thanks to the devotion of Steven Spielberg and his fellow movie brats. As an American institution, it became tiresome. Back in the mid-'60s, when Pauline Kael put together a nifty list of films for children, "It's a Wonderful Life" held the spot between "Ivanhoe" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man." But when Kael compiled "5001 Nights at the Movies" two decades later, the best she had to say was that "in its own slurpy, bittersweet way, the picture is well done."
For me, "It's a Wonderful Life" is a wholesome analogue to those tacky exploitation comedies that make me feel guilty in the morning -- though in this case, I don't feel guilty until after New Year's. The film is Capra's attempt to do a Dickensian fable in mid-20th century America, and his theme is the same one George Orwell found in Charles Dickens: "If men would behave decently, the world would be decent." James Stewart gives a signature performance as George Bailey, the small-town good guy who can't rise in the world because he's too busy giving a shoulder up to everyone else. This lenient, generous home financier galls the town Scrooge, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), who hates Bailey not only because Bailey's low-cost suburban developments threaten the value of his own tenement holdings but also because the Bailey family has the two things Potter lacks: humanity and friends.
When Bailey's drunken uncle inadvertently drops a crucial sum of money into Potter's lap, the villain immediately moves to destroy the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Arriving on Christmas Eve and right before the homecoming of Bailey's war-hero brother, the crisis precipitates Bailey's attempt at suicide -- which Clarence, his guardian angel, halts.
The angel's entrance would come as a shock if the film weren't framed with a discussion -- among God, St. Joseph and the seraph -- of Bailey's earthly life. Capra etches Bailey's frustrations in a hepped-up, occasionally cute, but realistic style; when Clarence appears, it's as if Mother Goose had come to finish a novel started by Midwestern bard Booth Tarkington. In an influential 1962 essay, the movie's brilliant champion, critic William Pechter, suggested that this angel ex machina and the incessant spunk and thump of the moviemaking reveal the despair beneath Capra's belief in goodwill.
But I think Capra the showman simply wanted to push his story's conflicts to their most dramatic extremes. Bedford Falls, at the start of the film, is an ode to a small-town America that no longer is and possibly never was. When Clarence shows George Bailey what Bedford Falls would be like if he'd never been born (for starters, it would be renamed Pottersville), it's a nightmare of crassness and cynicism. Bailey learns that his continued existence will preserve the virtue of an entire town.
Bailey begins as a victim and ends up a hero; he attracts sympathy the way golf courses do lightning. Without the energy and veracity of the film's first third, "It's a Wonderful Life" would drown in mawkishness and preaching. But there's extraordinary stuff in that first 45 minutes. Bailey's boyhood scenes are the best in the movie -- they arouse the empathy of even the most hard-boiled viewer. He loses the use of an ear because he dives into an icy pond to save his kid brother's life. Later, a drunken employer slaps him hard on his bad ear. All of us probably remember our first encounters with misfortune and injustice. Capra captures the agony of those incidents with honesty and acuteness.
Luckily, thanks to Stewart, the adult Bailey is richly, unassertively humane, and less of a drag than he is as written. The star streaks his warmth and enthusiasm with anger, ambition and temperament. What Stewart projects from his core is that Bailey is a reluctant rube; his fury at being provincial puts an unexpected edge on Capra's corniness. There's genuine emotion in the coyly avid courtship between Bailey and the girl who idolizes him (played with sexiness and strength by Donna Reed).
For a film that places a premium on simplicity, the technique is exceedingly busy. When Capra stages a prom, there isn't a slow moment on the high school dance floor. Though the director always wanted to celebrate down-home virtues, he couldn't have felt them in his bones. If you slog through his celebratory autobiography, "The Name Above the Title," what sticks in your mind is not any particular code of behavior but Capra's mechanical curiosity and drive. The suggestions of depth in "It's a Wonderful Life" remain suggestions; Capra's cleverness lubricates a conventional morality play, balancing the sentiment with fun. The simpler style of a John Ford might have allowed more stubborn arbitrariness to seep into the characters, more accidents into the incidents.
Ultimately, Capra's moralism beats you down. His Scrooge -- Potter -- doesn't have a change of heart. And that shift in perspective doesn't just signal a variation on Dickens' theme, but alters its comic-dramatic scope and moral dimension. Dickens' stroke of genius was to dramatize the resurrection possible in the least wonderful life.
