Tag: It’s a Wonderful Life

Commentary: The Best Christmas Movies Ever

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Critic, schmitic. How can you pretend to be engaged in objective aesthetic appraisal when you’re talking about movies that you first watched decades ago in your childhood living room, while your late mother was trimming the tree and your long-dead dad was setting up the Nativity scene? The feeling that washes over you the moment the opening credits begin has relatively little to do with these movies’ actual merits, if any. Of course they get to you: They’re part of what shaped you; they’re artifacts of the long-vanished era in which you grew up; like Proust’s bite of madeleine, they trigger tsunamis of precious memory; like attending a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve or a Yuletide performance of the Messiah, watching them is a cherished ritual, carrying meaning through time and underscoring the irretrievable nature of the past even as they make the past feel, briefly, just a bit less irretrievable.

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Commentary: Great American Stories Such as ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

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Bert and Ernie

This week in 1946, “It’s a Wonderful Life” was screened for the first time at the Globe Theatre in New York City. Audiences weren’t quite sure what to make of the film, even though it starred Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed and was directed by Frank Capra. Perhaps the economic jeopardy of life in Depression-era small towns was still all too real. Or maybe the specter of sons and husbands returning from the front reminded audiences of how many American fighting men had not come back from Europe or the Pacific.

Stewart, the leading man who portrayed small-town savings-and-loan owner George Bailey in Capra’s movie, was such a charismatic leading man that when studio executive Jack Warner heard in 1965 about Ronald Reagan’s plans to run for governor of California, he quipped, “No, no! Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for best friend.”

But casting in movies, as in life, can be deceiving. It was something of an in-joke, for instance, to have Jimmy Stewart play the older brother who flunks his Army physical in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and can’t go to war. In real life, Stewart and Frank Capra both enlisted in the military after making “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” together in 1939. The Italian-born Capra, then in his 40s, produced an evocative series of films for the military called “Why We Fight.” Stewart did his part, too, and then some. After winning Best Actor for his role in 1940’s “The Philadelphia Story,” Stewart had become the most bankable star in Hollywood. Nonetheless, by the time Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was already in uniform, pulling duty at Moffett Field, south of San Francisco, in the Army Air Corps. By the end of World War II, Stewart had flown 20 combat missions in a B-24, become a squadron leader, been awarded a chest full of medals, and risen in rank from corporal to colonel.

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The Hero of ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ Isn’t George Bailey

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by Eric Teachout   I think I’m not the only person that cries every time I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The movie pulls our heart strings because we can all relate to George Bailey: man has dreams to see the world and do big things, but is instead given a meager life of service. Many reduce the film’s central message to a dichotomy of  selfishness vs. selflessness, for good or ill. However, it’s not the greedy capitalists or the needs of others that George is struggling against, but something much deeper. Ultimately, George is wrestling with his own destiny, and often in the midst of life’s frustrations, so are we. I try to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” every Christmas, and after watching it this year with a friend, we noticed something new. It wasn’t the dramatic change in the protagonist, but the steadiness of his wife: the ever faithful Mary Hatch Bailey. Now we’ve all been taught—by middle school English teachers and film critics alike—that morally perfect characters are flat and boring. If this is true, then Mary Bailey should hold no sway over our hearts. Throughout the plot, Mary is seemingly flawless; about the only crime she…

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