Directed by Frank Capra. Starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Henry Travers G cert, Queen’s, Belfast; IFI/Light House, Dublin; Movies@Gorey, Wexford, 130 min
FRANK CAPRA, according to folk song and legend, was a cornball merchant par excellence who reigned at the US box-office throughout the 1930s and 1940s. For decades his major works ( It Happened One Night, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, You Can't Take it With You) were out of favour and out of sight.
Capra was rediscovered during the 1980s, not long after It's a Wonderful Lifelapsed from copyright, making it a cheap and cheerful seasonal choice for TV programmers. The film's reappearance at a time when Capra's fellow-Communist scourge Ronald Reagan was in the White House would prove significant; the 1980s marked a bright new dawn for smaltzy parables about the American Dream; take a bow, Working Girl.
Beneath this superficial understanding of the Sicilian-born director, however, lurks a darker, more complicated Frank Capra. There is something quietly (if not loudly) disillusioned about Capra's brand of feel-good cinema. Mr Smithand Meet John Doecreate all-American heroes, only to mercilessly poke at the process and the very notion.
In this spirit, It's a Wonderful Life, that traditional Christmas crowd-pleaser, pivots around a death wish and something even worse. George Bailey (James Stewart), a man who has been continually frustrated by familial bonds and responsibilities, wants nothing less than a complete obliteration from history, and he's prepared to rage at his family in the interim. Cornball? Hardly.
There are moments of cutsey- pie genius for sure: the mom-and- pop business model triumphs over the capitalist Goliath; the bad guy relents as the caroling begins; the angel almost certainly gets his wings. But watching Stewart tear around in panic, a shadow trapped in a parallel universe, remains an unnerving spectacle.
This new complex variation on the Capra hero could not have existed before the second World War had brought Europe to the verge of an apocalypse. It takes nothing less than cinema’s greatest Christmas miracle to sugarcoat George’s bitterness and resentment.
Depression-era audiences who had flocked to Capra’s earlier fairytales hated It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946. They also smoked for the health benefits. Fools.
