We have just been to a movie matinee put on by some friends of ours. The movie was Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’1, which I haven’t seen for a few decades. While the movie was made in 1946, it has many resonances with the modern world.
It is set in small-town America (of course), and the brief blurb on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) encapsulates it as follows: “An angel is sent from Heaven to help a desperately frustrated businessman see the value of his own life”1.
The story starts off with George Bailey (James Stewart) who is planning a world tour before starting university. However, before he could get out of town, his father (Samuel Hinds) dies from a stroke. George stays to continue the family building and loan business his father established in the town of Bedford Falls. However, avaricious board member Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), who owns much of the town seeks to dissolve the company, but after an impassioned speech by George, the rest of the board votes to keep the business open if George agrees to run it. The plan is for George to run it until his brother Harry (Todd Karns) graduates from university. However, Harry returns from university with a wife and a job offer from his father-in-law. So, George resigns himself to running the business. He marries his childhood sweetheart, Mary (Donna Reed), and as they are about to go on their honeymoon, the Great Depression hits and there is a run on the local bank and on George’s building and loan business. The money set aside for their honeymoon is used to keep the company solvent2.
Under George, the company establishes Bailey Park, a housing development surpassing Potter’s overpriced slums. Potter entices George with a high-paying job, but George rebuffs him when he realises that Potter’s true intention is to close the building and loan business2.
When going to the bank to make an $8,000 deposit, George’s uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) runs into Potter. He taunts Potter with a newspaper headline about Harry who has been awarded the Medal of Honor for his exploits in the Pacific war. Billy absentmindedly wraps the envelope of cash in the copy of the newspaper that he gives to Potter2.
Potter keeps the money, while Billy cannot recall how he misplaced it. With a bank examiner arriving to review the company’s records, George fruitlessly attempts to retrace Billy’s steps. Billy’s blunder may lead to scandal and gaol for George, so he appeals to Potter for a loan, offering his meagre life insurance policy as collateral. Potter scoffs that George, saying that he is worth more dead than alive and phones the police.
George flees Potter’s office, gets drunk at a bar, and contemplating suicide, he goes to a bridge. Before George can jump, Clarence (Henry Travers), an angel, dives into the river and George rescues him. When talking after the bridge rescue, George wishes he had never been born, so Clarence takes him into an alternative universe in which he never existed. George finds that Bedford Falls is now Pottersville, an unsavory town occupied by sleazy entertainment venues and callous people, and many of the people in the town have had very different, unpleasant lives. George realises that his life has been wonderful. He goes back to his real life and expects to be arrested, but Mary and Billy have rallied the townspeople and the latter donate more than enough to cover the missing money2.
At the beginning of the movie, two voices in heaven are trying to work out who to send to earth to save George, and the person they agree to send is an angel (Clarence) assessed as having the IQ of a rabbit and the faith of a child. While I did wonder if Capra was either having a go at the religious as being of limited IQ and gullible, or stating that such characteristics are to be desired. It is difficult to be certain one way or the other. That resonates very much with the modern world where, in the US, many of the religious have thrown their lot in with Trump in taking over the Republican Party3, seemingly thinking that Trump is some sort of messenger from god. That would indeed require both the IQ of a rabbit and the gullibility of a child. A similar thing has happened in Australia, with most state branches of the Liberal Party having been taken over by the religious4. Like many wealthy avaricious bastards in the modern world, in the movie, Potter escaped any punishment for keeping the cash he found in the newspaper handed to him by Billy. These days, if you have enough money, you can get away with theft or, in many cases, murder.
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