It’s A Wonderful Life

The Lord of Misrule's Christmas Guide
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					It’s A Wonderful Life

Released in 1946, It's A Wonderful Life - directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Henry Travers and Lionel Barrymore - is a sublime piece of cinema history which constantly crops up on people’s ‘best ever’ film lists.

Capra’s egalitarian hero (George Bailey played by Stewart) is a man hoping beyond hope to slip the reins of his small town childhood so that he can set off and see the world and really make a difference. Capra wields George a fate that is to thwart his efforts to leave Bedford Falls whenever it seems as if he might just about manage to find a way to escape the town. With a twitch upon a thread, George is hauled back each time from the minute of departure by a whole series of inescapable problems. The boy who dreamed of circling the globe is never actually seen stepping foot outside of the town.

In a moment of desperation when it looks as if George is about to be slung into prison for an error (a stack of lost notes) made at his Building and Loans company by his absent-minded uncle, George decides that life has really lost all meaning and, in turmoil, decides to end his perceptibly miserable existence by jumping off a bridge.

Time for Clarence, George’s appointed but somewhat bumbling Guardian Angel in-training, to appear. Realising what George is about to do and knowing that George is a good man who has always helped others before himself, Clarence throws himself off the bridge before George has climbed the parapet and George, unable to standby when anyone is in need, elects to jump into the water to save Clarence rather than to take his own life.

Drying out in an old cabin, Clarence tells George that he is an angel and that he has come to earth solely for George’s welfare. George, naturally enough, doesn’t believe Clarence and thinks at first that he is just a dotty old fool. When George declares that he wishes he had never been born, Clarence seizes on this idea and uses it to show George what life would have been like if George really never had been born.

You’ve guessed it: without George, life would have been a lot different: his beautiful wife would have ended up an old maid; his brother would have died in an incident on a frozen pond; the local druggist would have made a fateful error and killed a patient with a wrong prescription; and the town itself would have become a hell-hole run and owned by the avaricious Mr Potter. Seeing all this, George decides that, notwithstanding the way in which his dreams have been thwarted, he does want to live even if it means having to go to jail for someone else’s mistake.

Returning to the bosom of his iconic family, George is overwhelmed when the entire populous of the town wedges itself into his front-room and comes with open pockets to help replace the money lost by the uncle and therefore saving George at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute from inevitable incarceration.

Capra’s tear-jerking tale has not been bettered in the decades since it was made and it will always stand as a fine piece of art beyond that of mere moviemaking.

You can buy It’s A Wonderful Life on DVD using this link.

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