Two events - the fiftieth anniversary of the film being made and the death of Jimmy Stewart during 1997 - prompted the re-release, in a new print, of 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
This seasonal fable by Frank Capra, set in a snow-covered American small town, has become a staple of Christmas television in the US. It isn't quite as familiar in Britain, but it's a good enough film to repay seeing in a cinema.
Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the local hero of the small town of Bedford Falls. He rejects offers of foreign travel and an exotic future to run the family business, a philanthropic savings bank, and to preserve it from the attentions of Potter, a callous millionaire played by Lionel Barrymore in a truly evil manner. All goes well until one Christmas, when Bailey's world starts to collapse around him, and divine intervention is called for in the way that only a film can portray.
Of course it's dated in places: in particular the assumption that the worst fate that could have befallen Donna Reed's character, had she never met her husband, would have been to become an unmarried librarian, looks very strange in 1997. The division between the heroes in the small-town, caring, bank and the villains looks quaint and over-simple today. And if somebody as virtuous as George Bailey, who had saved his brother as a child, and built up the family business against the odds, only deserved a second class guardian angel, what hope is there for the rest of us?
But some of the film's strength is actually in its sense of period. Straight after the second world war, it didn't just satisfy a need for a feel-good movie, but it also mirrored a society intent on reconstruction, and one where each community's war hero was feted. It also resists the temptation to show its hero as perfect. George Bailey doesn't just contemplate suicide (never the easiest topic to deal with), but he arrives home irritable when his children are preparing for Christmas, he gets into fights, and he even makes life difficult for the angel who is trying to help him. Drama this good is always worth watching - even fifty years after it was filmed.
-- Martin Rich Phone(0171) 477 8627 Fax(0171) 477 8628 Lecturer in Information Management City University Business School Frobisher Crescent Barbican Centre, London EC2Y 8HB, UK M.G.Rich@city.ac.uk http://www.city.ac.uk/martin
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