by Marc Eliot
Charles Koerner, RKO’s studio chief, suggested Capra look at a short story, “The Greatest Gift,” based on a Christmas card that Philip Van Doren Stern had used as a private holiday mailing to his friends. RKO had purchased it for a relatively small amount, $10,000, with Cary Grant in mind for the leading role.7 Trying to develop the story into a comedy, the studio had gone through several writers, including Dalton Trumbo, Marc Connelly, and Clifford Odets, before Grant moved on and the film’s development came to an end.
When Capra read it, he flipped. “It was the story I had been looking for all my life,” he said later on. “Small town. A man. A good man, ambitious. But so busy helping others, life seems to pass him by. Despondent. He wishes he’d never been born. He gets his wish. Through the eyes of a guardian angel he sees the world as it would have been had he not been born. Wow!”
Capra paid RKO $50,000 for the rights to the story and made it Liberty Films Corporation’s first official production. He then tried to sign Robert Riskin to write the script, but Riskin turned him down. He, too, had gone into business for himself and formed his own independent company. Capra’s next choice was Sidney Buchman, who had written Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but he was irrevocably tied to Columbia and Cohn would not allow him to work for Liberty. Capra eventually hired the writing team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich and, with them in place, turned his attention to casting.
There was only one man he would even consider for the lead, and that, of course, was J.S.—“Jefferson Smith.” Capra placed a phone call to Lew Wasserman, an agent at Stein’s newly formed MCA-Universal. Wasserman, thus far unable to find any takers for Jimmy since the actor had gone freelance, told Capra that Jimmy, on Wasserman’s advice, wouldn’t even hear the story, because it sounded too confusing to him (Wasserman). Capra insisted he tell Jimmy about the movie in person, his own way. Wasserman finally agreed, if only to get rid of Capra, and set up the meeting.
Jimmy, however, was looking forward to working in movies again. While he’d been out flying kites with Fonda (until Fonda finally landed in Ford’s My Darling Clementine), he felt more isolated and apart from the industry than ever. Indeed, several of the other “old-timers” who had returned to Hollywood and tried without success to go freelance had quietly re-signed with their former studios, churning out standard-issue contract-player pictures. Gable and Robert Taylor were the big two whom Mayer had successfully pressured into signing seven-year contracts.
Capra’s enthusiasm about pitching directly to Jimmy was not the only reason he wanted a face-to-face. Rumors of the actor’s wartime breakdown were everywhere, as was speculation that his absence from the movies was simply due to his not being ready to return to work. Capra didn’t believe it, but with his own company on the line, he wanted to see for himself that Jimmy was all right.
It was a shaky meeting, during which Capra stumbled his way through a story that made no sense and Jimmy said little, but after, he agreed to do the film. With Jimmy in tow as the hero, George Bailey, Capra now went after Jean Arthur to play Mary, George’s high school sweetheart and eventual wife. Arthur, however, was in rehearsal for the Broadway show Born Yesterday and turned Capra down.8 In retrospect, the failure to get Arthur was probably a good thing. The postwar James Stewart was no longer that same little boy with the cinematic (and real-life) adolescent needs as he was in Mr. Smith. The lack of chemistry between them would have likely ruined the film.
Capra then turned to Ginger Rogers, who said no, then de Havilland, who said no, then Ann Dvorak, who said no, then Martha Scott, who said no. He finally cast a relatively unknown twenty-four-year-old Donna Reed to play opposite the thirty-eight-year-old Stewart, after seeing her in John Ford’s They Were Expendable, in which she played a wartime nurse. Prior to Expendable, she had appeared without much fanfare in nearly two dozen MGM films, including a couple of Dr. Gillespies, and an Andy Hardy.9 What caught Capra’s eye about Reed was her ability to project an intelligence that enhanced her slim body and wispy, wide-eyed face, with its beautiful dark eyes and hair. Despite her loveliness, there was a notable lack of heat about Reed, which had thus far prevented her from becoming a star. But it was just that coolness that Capra was looking for, as a contrast to Violet, the other woman in the film (and in George’s life), the town “flirt,” Hollywood cast-speak for slut. To find the right Violet, Capra turned to Bill Grady, who, when asked by the director if he knew of any actresses who could play that kind of a role, replied, “For crissake I’m up to here in blonde pussies!” The one who Capra chose was Gloria Grahame, an unknown who, like Reed, would emerge a star from It’s a Wonderful Life.
Filling out the principal cast was Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter, the skinflint and evil banker (borrowed from MGM), and Todd Karns as George’s brother, Harry. For the rest of the townspeople, with few exceptions, Capra went to his regular “stock company” of players, including Thomas Mitchell, H. B. Warner, Beulah Bondi (again playing Stewart’s mother), Frank Faylen, Sam Hinds, Mary Treen, and Frank Hagney. For the small but important role of the bartender, Capra used Sheldon Leonard, a newcomer to film who had made his reputation on Broadway as a “tough guy.” And finally, for the key role of Clarence, George’s guardian angel, Capra chose the lovably cartoonish Henry Travers.
Capra then went to work on the script, having seen during his pitch to Jimmy its many holes. Although it remains difficult to parse exactly who contributed what to the final shooting script, the film hardly resembles the original story. By the time Capra had finished with it, the film had turned into a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, as if written by playwright Tom Stoppard, in the style of his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which audiences view Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters in the plays-within-a-play. In It’s a Wonderful Life, Potter is the Scrooge-like character, but the story is told from the point of view of the Bob Cratchit figure, George Bailey, who, rather than Scrooge, is the one visited by “ghosts,” in this case Clarence, and the one taken on the magic carpet ride to just-in-time redemption.
The story is a familiar one today, as the film has become a Christmas perennial on television. Only two other movies in Hollywood’s history have remained as regularly revived, via annual TV playoffs—Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956).10
The film opens at the gates of heaven, or so we are to presume from the shot of the diamond-and-black sky, where unearthly voices are in the midst of discussing the politics of how angels earn their wings. Clarence is then given the assignment of trying to save one George Bailey, who is about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, rather than face going to jail for embezzlement of funds from the family-owned Bailey Savings and Loan, a crime of which he is innocent and, through a series of unfortunate events, framed by his evil enemy, Potter. We learn via flashbacks and freeze-frames that George has a free spirit, and, while born and raised (and trapped) in the small town of Bedford Falls, he longs to see the world and take his place among the big-city boys as a professional architect. However, every time he is about to leave Bedford Falls, some disaster happens that keeps him from making his departure. It is as if some unearthly force has imprisoned him from which he cannot escape.
We follow George through his teens, his courtship and marriage to Mary (Donna Reed), and his restoration of an old house he dearly loves—itself a representation of the small-town life of Bedford Falls that is forever in danger of collapsing from the weight of economic development and profiteering under the greedy and illegal control of banker Potter (Barrymore). When George’s simple-minded uncle (Mitchell) loses $8,000 in cash, which quickly falls into the hands of Potter (a crime that, by the way, goes unpunished), George is framed by Potter as an embezzler. With his arrest imminent, George becomes bitter and mean-spirited, gets into a fistfight with the husband of one of his daughters’ teachers, and finally, alone and frightened on Christmas Eve, believing his life insurance
policy will take care of the $8,000 shortfall with enough left over for his family, he decides he is worth more dead than alive. He staggers to the edge of town, stands on the bridge that he has never been able to cross over, the one that leads out of town, and jumps. Clarence then “saves” George and, to teach him a lesson, grants him his wish that he had never been born.
Clarence then takes George on a journey that revisits all the key events and the people involved in them whose lives he has, without realizing it, affected in so many ways. The lesson George (and the audience) learns is that his life was far more valuable to the townspeople, and therefore to himself, than he could ever have imagined. These scenes end with George at little Harry Bailey’s grave, begging Clarence to give him back his life.
Having accomplished his mission, Clarence grants that wish. Snow begins to fall once more and Stewart retrieves from his pocket Zuzu Bailey’s petals, which his daughter (Karolyn Grimes) had given him to hold for safekeeping, and which had disappeared when he no longer existed. Now they represent his return to life in the most dramatic and touching of ways. A triumphant George returns home, reunites with his family, and laughs at the prospect of going to jail. Just as things appear at their darkest, the entire town turns out with donations to save him. Finally, as George is holding Zuzu in his arms, surrounded by his friends and family, she tells him, “Every time a bell rings, it means an angel’s got his wings.” A book is found under the tree signed by Clarence with the inscription “No man who has friends is poor.” A shot of bells ringing on the tree dissolve into the peal of the Liberty Pictures’ logo of the Liberty Bell as the film ends.
It’s a Wonderful Life opened in theaters on December 21 (at the Globe in New York City, and three days later at the Pantages in Los Angeles. The day after Christmas it went into nationwide release).11 Reviews were mixed. The New York Times began its review with tongue firmly in too sugary a cheek when it said, “The late and beloved Dexter Fellows, who was a circus press agent for many years, had an interesting theory…that the final curtain of every drama, no matter what, should benignly fall upon the whole cast sitting down to a turkey dinner and feeling fine. Mr. Fellows should be among us to see Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life… He would find it very much to his taste…the weakness of the film is the sentimentality of it…a little too sticky for our taste…” The reviewer, the always pedestrian Bosley Crowther, did however, single out Jimmy for doing a “warmly appealing job, indicating that he has grown in spiritual stature as well as in talent during the years he was in the war.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “just a wonderful picture.” United Press’s reporter wrote, “Never in all my years of covering Hollywood have I been so moved by a movie as by It’s a Wonderful Life. The Capra film is the season’s climax.” The New York Sun called it movie-goers’ “finest Christmas present.” Time magazine declared, “Producer-Director Frank Capra and Actor James Stewart stage a triumphant Hollywood homecoming!”
Although it was not the complete box-office failure that today everyone believes it to have been, compared with Capra’s earlier films, it was a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the kind of populist features that made his films the must-see money-making events they once were.12 Moreover, the final budget of the film, originally set at $1.5 million, had ballooned to nearly $3 million (2.8), most of which came out of Capra’s pocket. By the end of its initial 1946–1947 run, it had grossed a total of $3,300,000, a net loss of nearly $3 million.13
Nevertheless, the qualities of the film remain diamond bright. The entire structure may be seen as a recap of American movies itself, via a sentimental revisiting by Capra to his own career. In the first part of the movie, there is a high school dance in which the floor of the gymnasium opens wide and everyone falls into a hidden swimming pool. Shot on location at Beverly Hills High School, the entire sequence is reminiscent of Capra’s (and Hollywood’s) early silent comedies. The story then moves to an idealistic view of hope, as George prepares to enter “the real world.” Here Capra recalls the populism of the thirties, followed by the run on the bank that takes the film to the far side of the Depression. The outbreak of World War Two becomes a reminder of Capra’s (and Hollywood’s) own experiences in making films about the war, and finally, George’s descent into despair and darkness evokes the darker side of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and forties film noir, with a climax that is, as critic Andrew Sarris noted, a “wildly melodramatic parable of near crucifixion and redemption in the patented mode of Mr. Smith and Meet John Doe.” Traces of Capra’s cinematic brand of religiosity are scattered throughout the film, from the appearance of a guardian angel to the redemption of Violet, a rather transparent Mary Magdalene figure.
Without question, however, the single most remarkable aspect of the film remains Jimmy’s performance, coaxed out of him by Capra, who, early on, became aware of the postwar differences in his favorite screen actor. “Jimmy didn’t feel quite right being back in pictures. In the middle of It’s a Wonderful Life, his first film after the war, he told me he thought maybe being an actor was not for decent people. That acting had become silly, unimportant next to what he’d seen [in the war]. He said he thought he’d do this picture and then quit.”
A reporter on the set saw it differently. “Both Capra and Stewart are needlessly worried they might have lost the know-how during their military service. In consequence, the set of It’s a Wonderful Life has hardly been a restful place. They worry about each other. ‘There are two million dollars invested in this picture,’ says Stewart. ‘I just can’t let Frank Capra down.’ Capra, for his part, has been driving the not-unwilling ex-colonel without mercy, wringing the utmost out of him by methods that range from trickery to endless rehearsals. At times he has tossed Jimmy into scenes cold, saying, ‘Make up your own dialogue as you go along. Just say whatever seems natural, the first thing that comes into your head.’ In one of the longest, heaviest scenes in the picture, Jimmy, who plays the frustrated owner of a small-town building and loan company, is beating off with vigorous oratory the assault of depositors making a run on his company. To lend added realism, Capra, without warning, set off a fire siren in the midst of Stewart’s speech. The startled cast abandoned Jimmy to rush to the windows to see the blaze, leaving him waving his long arms at their backs. Stewart gulped, matched the siren, roar for roar, and actually won his audience back while the camera ground on. Tactics like this have left Jimmy bushed, but they give him tremendous satisfaction…. Hismain regret is that he has to waste Sundays on relaxation.”
The film spans George Bailey’s life from a teenager to a middle-aged suicidal depressive. Approaching forty, Jimmy was able to effectively play a teenager, without spoof or farce, and make the transition to populist hero as a middle-aged man filled with despair. Sarris described this most remarkable performance as expressive of “the pain and sorrow so eloquently expressed. Stewart’s angry, exasperated, anguished [marriage] ‘proposal’ to Reed is one of the most sublimely histrionic expressions of passion mingled with the painful knowledge that one’s dreams of seeing the world outside one’s small town were vanishing before one’s eyes.”
Despite its richly textured and thematic complexities, the film did not capture the imagination of the public and, despite its respectable numbers, was considered a failure at the time. Frank Capra Jr. offered this explanation as to what went wrong: “The film was released very late in the year, understanding that it was never intended as a ‘Christmas or holiday picture.’ RKO apparently had another film they had wanted for its big Christmas release that had run into technical problems.14 It’s a Wonderful Life was originally intended as a 1947 release, probably for the early spring. As a result, the film was rush-released, in time for Christmas, but actually missed getting wide release before the holiday. By then it had gotten the reputation of being a ‘holiday’ picture, and once January hits, they’re as relevant as Christmas trees. So it didn’t have very much time
to find and build an audience, despite some pretty good reviews and an o.k. public response. I think coming out of the war, the audiences weren’t expecting, or wanting this kind of a movie.”
Even with the commercial and artistic success of the other picture Liberty had a financial interest in, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, the failure of It’s a Wonderful Life put Liberty into bankruptcy and effectively ended Capra’s film career. Into the fifties, he would be dogged by accusations of Communist sympathies by HUAC, and for the most part shunned by the paranoid heads of the crumbling Studio system for having led at one point or another the pro-union movement that, as they saw it, helped destroy Hollywood as they knew it.
As for Jimmy, he was both disappointed and disillusioned by the film’s failure. He feared what one critic eventually wrote was true, that “it was when Stewart became too old to be fashionable he became too good to be appreciated.”
14
Alexander Stewart: They had him out in Hollywood ten years, and none of the girls seem to like him, so I’m going to bring him home to marry a country girl. I can dig up a girl for him.