It's a wonderful replay for this Frank Capra classic

A few folks have e-mailed to ask that I reprise my analysis of It's a Wonderful Life (gif at left) - perhaps, like my "Highbrow Halloween" post, this will become a kind of Hub Review classic.  At any rate, I'm always glad to revisit this wonderful film, so here it is for those of you who missed it the first time -

I took last Saturday night "off," as it were, and let the performing arts fend for themselves - and instead curled up at home before the TV. And to my happy surprise, I found It's a Wonderful Life had begun its holiday rotation. It's by now a commonplace, of course, that Shakespeare seems to map to every age; and maybe great films do, too. For certainly Frank Capra's last masterpiece qualifies as great, and certainly in today's hard times it seems more resonant than ever.

 Of course to some, the movie's sentimental message makes it a tough sell - and I won't make any apologies for the angels and twinkly stars that overlay much of Life; Capra lays it on pretty thick in spots. But I've often noticed that the movie's skeptics always miss the hard core beneath the soft surface of what used to be called "Capra-corn."

For there's a worldly awareness at the bottom of Capra's vision that you won't find at the multiplex today - not even in the best from Spielberg or Pixar. Indeed, Capra regularly trades in situations we just wouldn't tolerate in family entertainment anymore. Consider that It's a Wonderful Life features (right off the top) a little boy who, playing with no supervision, almost drowns in a frozen pond - his brother saves him, but as a result loses his hearing in one ear. This is disturbing enough, but then a drunken (and heart-broken) druggist boxes that boy on his injured ear until it bleeds (as he wails in pain); in Spielberg, retribution would be swift: such a character would be eaten by a dinosaur or shark. Yet in Capra's movie, it's natural that innocents are left unprotected, and suffer as a result - and that people who under some circumstances can be terribly cruel are also redeemable, and even perhaps basically gentle and good (that druggist, Mr. Gower, becomes one of the hero's closest friends).

In fact throughout It's a Wonderful Life a highly un-sentimental view of existence prevails, beneath the sticky-sweet fairy tale of angels getting their wings. People cut ethical corners left and right (like hero George Bailey's handsome brother Harry, who leaves George stuck with the family building-and-loan), and are constantly tempted by the blandishments of money and sex (like Gloria Grahame's Violet, at top,who's always on the edge of slipping from "bad girl" status to something worse). Or they're simply weak, like George's Uncle Billy (the great Thomas Mitchell), who fumbles through life, making messes of things, then drinks to console himself. The seemingly bucolic Bedford Falls is really no kind of utopia - something serious is always at stake there, and someone or something is always hanging in the moral balance.

Of course the film constantly reminds us, too, that people can surprise you. The callow Harry becomes a war hero - just as Mr. Gower turns out to be a saint - and even Violet thinks better of her ways. The movie's conceit is that there's a kind of moral force field in town that keeps nudging people back on, or at least near to, the straight and narrow (and which draws its only real power from the sacrifices of people like George). Thus no one in It's a Wonderful Life is precisely, or only, what they seem to be; they're always capable of far better, and far worse.

The dark side of Life - George in crisis.

Even the idealistic George himself (Jimmy Stewart, at right) isn't really what he at first appears. The townsfolk always seem delighted with him, but every time I see It's a Wonderful Life, I'm struck by the angry frustration roiling around in Stewart's performance. All George wants to do is escape from Bedford Falls, and he's often furious when over and over again, his moral duties frustrate that desire. And yet in that very frustration, he eventually finds something - well, wonderful (and so do we).

Which leads me to something else intrinsic to the movie that you won't find at the multiplex: the admission that moral action demands sacrifice. The sentimental, consumerist bromides of our own age insist you can become rich by being virtuous - which easily bleeds into the sleazier insinuation that riches operate as their own moral validation. But Capra (pardon my French) calls bullshit on all that. Morality has its rewards, the director tells us - and great ones - but they're not physical or financial. George saves his brother only by losing half his hearing; and he and Mary only preserve the building and loan by giving up their honeymoon. Being good will cost you something. 

All this, of course, speaks to a kind of moral scope (and sense of everyday moral danger) that's all but lost to us today. And it's hard not to feel that this moral dimension is tied to something else that's striking about It's a Wonderful Life: the fact that it offers the most sophisticated view of economic life ever committed to American film.  Indeed, the famous "bank run" scene (below) is so complex that - even though its developing situation is described quite accurately and explicitly as it unfolds - everyone I've ever spoken to about it essentially mis-remembers it (the Bailey Building and Loan isn't actually in any trouble, for instance, even though most people imagine that's the case - the crisis has been precipitated by a bank run down the street).

Some viewers have watched this scene and claimed the moral points it scores are false, assuming that the Bailey Building and Loan must have been involved in the kind of high-risk mortgages that contributed to the Great Recession of 2008. But nothing could be further from the truth. First, as I stated earlier, the Bailey Building and Loan is presented as solvent (Uncle Billy only locks its doors because a different bank, in full melt-down, has demanded its liquid assets on short notice, sparking a panic). And we understand that while the Bailey collection policy has involved flexibility in hard times, its customers aren't deadbeats. Indeed, George Bailey certainly hasn't off-loaded his debts in the derivatives market, because he knows his customers - whose character has sometimes operated as their collateral.



All of this is utterly alien to the economy of 2008, where there was no connection between the person who took out the loan and the person who "owned" it.  But wait, it gets "worse" (if you're a libertarian, that is): George Bailey bails out the Building and Loan (note the pun in his surname) by giving Ayn Rand the swift kick in the ass she deserves, and offering up his own assets - he and Mary's nest-egg for their honeymoon - to cover the day's cash demands. He also makes a slew of promises and statements to his customers that are perfectly illegal, and swings the entire deal without ever consulting his Board. The whole scene is a short course in how when the bottom falls out of a market, only personal commitment can assuage the panic. And thus George holds the building and loan together - but only by ignoring both his legal "responsibilities" and the mores of the free market.

Which is no surprise to anyone who has spent time in real life, as opposed to Second Life, and knows that the "invisible hand of the market" must always be guided from self-destruction by another invisible hand - that of the community. But if the people like George Bailey who gave that guidance were to vanish, then there would be no salvation possible - which is why we are living the film's final nightmare vision of the world as it would be without him. The new main street of casinos, honky-tonks and pawn shops that George faces there plays today as amusingly hysterical - but is it so far from the truth?  Indeed, isn't that precisely what Massachusetts is turning into even as we speak? To be blunt, to today's viewers, "Pottersville" is no hypothetical dystopia - indeed, it looks utterly familiar; it's a Las-Vegas vision many people promote every day with a straight face. Only look at the faces you find there - this is when It's a Wonderful Life becomes far more frightening than its ultimate source, A Christmas Carol. In the world as run by Ebeneezer Scrooge, Mr. Gower is humiliated and utterly abject - desperate and dazed, he even chuckles along with his own abuse; Ma Bailey runs her flophouse with a face like a hatchet and eyes like a vulture; and we see poor Violet, screaming at the top of her lungs, as she is thrown out into the street for lewd behavior.

Of course maybe all this seems more poignant now because we're so lost as a nation, so unable to even envision what we must do to prevail over our current crisis. When It's a Wonderful Life was first enshrined on cable, the Reagan Republicans had only just begun to tear at the social fabric - and the movie's liberal platitudes sounded amusingly quaint. Now, of course, free market theory is triumphant, and It's a Wonderful Life has quickly morphed from a corny Hallmark card to a sad memento of a paradise lost. For there are no George Baileys left to save us from Mr. Potter, and we all live in Pottersville now.

It's a Wonderful Life, but a lousy market economy

The brilliant "bank run" scene from Capra's classic.

I took last Saturday night "off," as it were, and let the performing arts fend for themselves - and instead  curled up at home before the TV.  And to my happy surprise, I found It's a Wonderful Life had begun its holiday rotation.

It's by now a commonplace, of course, that Shakespeare seems to map to every age; and maybe great films do, too.  For certainly Frank Capra's last masterpiece qualifies as great, and certainly in today's hard times it seems more resonant than ever.

Of course to some, the movie's sentimental message makes it a tough sell - and I won't make any apologies for the angels and twinkly stars that overlay much of Life; Capra lays it on pretty thick in spots. But I've often noticed that the movie's skeptics always miss the hard center beneath the sweet surface of what used to be called "Capra-corn."

For there's a worldly awareness at the bottom of Capra's vision that you won't find at the multiplex today - not even in the best from Spielberg or Pixar.  Indeed, Capra regularly trades in situations we just wouldn't tolerate in family entertainment anymore.  Consider that It's a Wonderful Life features (right off the top) a little boy who, playing with no supervision, almost drowns in a frozen pond - his brother saves him, but as a result loses his hearing in one ear.  This is disturbing enough, but then a drunken (and heart-broken) druggist boxes that boy on his injured ear until it bleeds (as he wails in pain); in Spielberg, retribution would be swift: such a character would quickly be eaten by a dinosaur or shark.   Yet in Capra's movie, it's natural that innocents are left unprotected, and suffer as a result - and that people who under some circumstances can be terribly cruel are also redeemable, and even perhaps basically gentle and good (that druggist, Mr. Gower, becomes one of the hero's closest friends).

In fact throughout It's a Wonderful Life a highly un-sentimental view of existence prevails, beneath the sweet fairy tale of angels getting their wings.  People cut ethical corners left and right (like George Bailey's handsome brother Harry, who leaves George stuck with the family building-and-loan), and are constantly tempted by the blandishments of money and sex (like Gloria Grahame's Violet, who's always on the edge of slipping from "bad girl" status to something worse).  Or they're simply weak, like George's Uncle Billy (the great Thomas Mitchell), who fumbles through life, making messes of things, then drinks to console himself.  The seemingly bucolic Bedford Falls is really no kind of utopia - something serious is always at stake there, and someone or something is always hanging in the moral  balance.

Of course the film constantly reminds us, too, that people can surprise you.  The callow Harry becomes a war hero - just as Mr. Gower turns out to be a saint - and even Violet thinks better of her ways.  The movie's conceit is that there's a kind of moral force field in town that keeps nudging people back on, or at least near to, the straight and narrow (and which draws its only real power from the sacrifices of people like George).  Thus no one in It's a Wonderful Life is precisely, or only, what they seem to be; they're always capable of far better, and far worse.

The dark side of Life - George in crisis.

Even the idealistic hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, at left, in an iconic role), isn't really what he at first appears.  The townsfolk always seem delighted with him, but every time I see It's a Wonderful Life, I'm struck by how much anger and frustration are roiling around in Stewart's performance.  All George wants to do is escape from Bedford Falls, and he's often furious when over and over again, his moral duties and feelings frustrate that desire.

And yet in that very frustration, he nevertheless finds something - well, wonderful (and so do we).  Which leads me to something else intrinsic to the movie that you won't find at the multiplex: the admission that moral action demands sacrifice.  The sentimental, consumerist bromides of our own age insist you can become rich by being virtuous - which easily bleeds into the sleazier insinuation that riches operate as their own moral validation.  But Capra (pardon my French) calls bullshit on all that crap.  Morality has its rewards, the director tells us - and great ones - but they're not physical or financial.  George saves his brother only by losing half his hearing; and he and Mary only preserve the building and loan by giving up their honeymoon.  Being good will cost you something.

All this, of course, speaks of a kind of moral scope (and sense of everyday moral danger) that's all but lost to us today. And it's hard not to feel that this moral dimension is tied to something else that's more striking than ever about It's a Wonderful Life: the fact that it offers the most sophisticated view of economic life ever committed to American film.  Indeed, the famous "bank run" scene (at top) is so financially complex that - even though its developing situation is described quite accurately and explicitly as it unfolds - everyone I've ever spoken to about it essentially mis-remembers it (the Bailey Building & Loan isn't actually in any trouble, for instance, even though most people imagine that's the case - the crisis has been precipitated by a run on a bank down the street).

Some viewers have watched this scene and claimed that the moral points it scores are false, assuming that the Bailey Building and Loan must have been involved in the kind of high-risk mortgages that contributed to the Great Recession of 2008.  But of course nothing could be further from the truth.  First, as I stated earlier, the Bailey Building and Loan is presented as quite solvent (Uncle Billy only locks its doors because the local bank, in full melt-down, has demanded its liquid assets on short notice, so there's no cash in the till).  And we understand that while the Bailey collection policy has involved flexibility in hard times, its customers aren't deadbeats.  Indeed, George Bailey certainly hasn't off-loaded his debts in the derivatives market, because he knows his customers - and in hard times, their character has sometimes operated as their collateral.

All of this is alien to the economy of 2008, but wait - it gets "worse" (if you're a libertarian, that is): George Bailey bails out the Building and Loan (note that pun in his surname) by giving Ayn Rand the swift kick in the ass she deserves, and offering up his own assets - he and Mary's nest-egg for their honeymoon - to cover the day's cash demands.  He also makes a slew of promises and statements to his customers that are perfectly illegal, and he swings the entire deal without ever consulting his Board. The whole scene is a short course in how when the bottom falls out of a market, no amount of economic tinkering can fix it; only personal commitment can assuage the panic.  And thus George holds the building and loan together - but only by ignoring both his legal "responsibilities" and the mores of the free market.

Which is no surprise to anyone who has spent time in Real Life, as opposed to Second Life, and knows that the "invisible hand of the market" must always be guided from self-destruction by another invisible hand - that of the community.  But if the people like George Bailey who gave that guidance were to vanish, then there would be no salvation possible - and thus the film's final nightmare vision of the world as it would be without him.  The new main street of casinos, honky-tonks and pawn shops that George faces there plays today as amusingly hysterical - but is it so far from the truth?  Indeed, isn't that precisely what Massachusetts is turning into even as we speak?  To be blunt, to today's viewers, "Pottersville" is no hypothetical dystopia - indeed, it looks utterly familiar; it's a Las-Vegas vision many people promote every day with a straight face.  Only look at the faces you find there - this is when It's a Wonderful Life becomes far more frightening than its ultimate source, A Christmas Carol.  In the world as run by Ebeneezer Scrooge, Mr. Gower is humiliated and utterly abject - desperate and dazed, he even chuckles along with his own abuse; Ma Bailey runs her flophouse with a face like a hatchet and eyes like a vulture; and we see poor Violet, screaming at the top of her lungs, as she is thrown out into the street for lewd behavior.

Of course maybe all this seems more poignant now because we're so lost as a nation, so unable to even envision what we must do to prevail over our current crisis.  When It's a Wonderful Life was first enshrined on the nation's cable channels, the Reagan Republicans had only just begun to tear at the social fabric - and the movie's liberal platitudes had begun to sound quaint.  Now, of course, free market theory is triumphant, and so It's a Wonderful Life has quickly morphed from a corny Hallmark card to a sad memento of a paradise lost.  For there are no George Baileys left to save us from Mr. Potter, and we all live in Pottersville now.

Second Life

This fall many Boston theatregoers unexpectedly found themselves at the movies: the Huntington hosted the pre-Broadway run of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, while the ART produced a stage version of cult fave Donnie Darko. Both companies stumbled in the process; Steps merely ridiculed its source, while the ART, by all accounts (no, I didn't bother) mounted an oddly literal physicalization of Darko. But the third time seems to have been the charm: the Lyric successfully makes the jump from screen to stage with a smart, modestly scaled version of It's a Wonderful Life (with local hero Neil A. Casey, above, playing every part) that manages, for the most part, to evoke its source without getting either too meta or too maudlin.

Casey pulls off the trick by serving as his own narrator - in between dipping into one role after another - and in the process largely rehabilitates the Frank Capra classic from its corny reputation. True, the film hinges on a device so sappy it could rot your teeth - a dotty angel-in-waiting saves a human soul to earn his wings - but what's shocking about It's a Wonderful Life is how tough-minded and dark it gets before it starts groping for your heartstrings. Next to, say, Steven Spielberg, Capra is defiantly clear-eyed about life, wonderful or not, and he sends his hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, above right) through a graduate course in the School of Hard Knocks before finally finding redemption via that angelus ex machina. Over the course of the movie, children are abused, loved ones die, dreams are crushed, and the hero is repeatedly disappointed or frustrated; still, scene after scene is either buoyant, sexy, or lyrical; life is obviously worth living despite everything. Indeed, it's hard to count how many memorable moments (and hairpin turns in tone) Capra packs into his sprawling canvas: there's the giddy dance over (and into) the swimming pool; the dreamy, moonlit walk home to the tune of "Buffalo Gals" (at left), the tense run on the Bailey Savings and Loan; the "honeymoon" in the abandoned house; and of course, the Dickensian supernatural interlude with its rising hysteria and film noir shadows.

It helps the Lyric, of course, that the set design of Life has become so iconic; designer Jenna McFarland Lord has only to simulate the famous truss from which George nearly leaps, along with the welcome sign from Bedford Falls (both built in glorious black-and-white) to conjure the film's mise en scène. And once the show begins, the dialogue reminds us how closely, and how beneficially, classic films once emulated the theatre. Casablanca is obviously a barely-opened-out melodrama; The Wizard of Oz is deeply indebted to vaudeville; even Citizen Kane's deep-focus essentially squeezes "upstage" and "downstage" onto celluloid (Welles was first and foremost a great stage ham). And like most of these, It's a Wonderful Life is built of long, dialogue-heavy "acts," usually performed within a single set, that don't seem out of place on a stage proper.

Neil Casey does face one daunting challenge in bringing Life back to life: its cast is relentlessly superb. Capra had worked with almost all the movie's actors before, and the one newcomer, Donna Reed, delivered a performance at least as mature as those proferred by the old hands around her. Casey, alas, doesn't even try to do justice to Reed; he does his patented funny, superficial feminine schtick when channeling Capra's actresses (and thus one of the film's great moments, the passionate joint phone call between Stewart and Reed, is here played merely for laughs). He's much subtler, oddly, when chewing the scenery (or at least his wheelchair) as Lionel Barrymore, and even better as Jimmy Stewart; he nails Stewart's stuttering delivery from the start, then settles into an increasingly complex and gripping characterization; by the finale, we realize he's earned that perilous spot on the bridge over Bedford Falls.

It's too bad, however, that adapter Steve Murray has left much of the political edge of the movie on the cutting-room floor, so some of Casey's performance seems to be happening in a vacuum. This even though the economic message of Life - that capitalism must be balanced with humanity - is today more relevant than ever (bank runs are once again in style, and of course our looming subprime crisis dwarfs the mortgage meltdown in the movie). The edits, of course, are probably due to the fact that today the "free market" occupies something of the same cultural space "virginity" once filled for the Victorians. Still, you'd think if people can handle Capra's unapologetic populism on TV, they can handle it onstage - a thought which does raise the question, Why see the stage version of It's a Wonderful Life at all, when sometime before Christmas it will inevitably pop up on cable? Perhaps the answer lies in what's lost in the isolation of home viewing: the sense of community that even moviehouses (where Life was designed to be seen) once offered. And without that, Capra tells us, life is a whole lot less wonderful.