“It‘s a Wonderful Life”: Two Perspectives on “The American Christmas Carol”

Upteenth viewings (or, for that matter, readings) need not dim our fascination with a classic: In fact, it might add to it. Case in point: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Critically well-regarded at the time of its release in the 1940s, the movie was still not embraced wholeheartedly by TV audiences until the mid-1970s, when an expired copyright thrust it into the public domain—i.e., it could be broadcast repeatedly without the original copyright holder being paid. That’s how I came to watch it, when, urged on by my brother John, I sat down and became more intoxicated than I ever could with the most potent eggnog as I watched the vintage entertainment then playing on Channel 5 (WNEW) in the New York City area.

I’ve just referred to the Frank Capra classic as “The American Christmas Carol.” The most obvious similarities between Dickens’s novel and Capra’s film are that they concern a spiritual regeneration of a lost soul on Christmas Eve and that they prominently feature a conniving miser.

Lionel Barrymore, in fact, had supplied the voice of Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio for years, but had to pass up the opportunity to play him on the big screen because arthritis and a hip injury increasingly confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Yet, eight years later, as greedy banker Mr. Potter, that same disability provided him with an invaluable prop. As George Bailey notes, Mr. Potter “sits there like a spider” plotting stratagems, and Barrymore’s hands tighten on the wheelchair as much as his eye sockets do. Yet, while seemingly immobile, he can, whenever occasion requires it—such as when Uncle Billy’s misplaced money falls into his hands—move the wheelchair—and the plot—rapidly enough.

If you’re like myself, you felt in September a sudden astonished identification with at least one element in the plot: the scene with the run on the bank. I never thought I’d love to see the day when that all-too-common Depression scenario would ever replay in real life.

For readers who might not have come across these, I thought I’d highlight two newspaper pieces with different perspectives on the film.

The first, from USA Today, concerns the town that might have inspired it: Seneca Falls in upstate New York. American history buffs and feminists are likely to know of this village for another reason: it is often considered the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement, the site of an 1848 meeting in which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a group of close friends produced a “Declaration of Sentiments” patterned after the Declaration of Independence.

It would be ironic indeed if tourism to this town increased more for a film not based on real events than for a real-life event of crucial importance to American history. But I’m sure the town fathers wouldn’t mind any boost it could get, particularly in this crushing recession.

The second article, printed in The New York Times within the last week, is a somewhat curmudgeonly piece by Wendell Jamieson on George Bailey’s “Pitiful, Dreadful” life. I say “curmudgeonly,” though, to be sure, Jamieson performs the same kind of useful function that Lionel Trilling did when observing Robert Frost as a “terrifying poet” with more in common with Sophocles than with Longfellow: that is, reclaiming from accusations of empty sentimentality an artist who plunges to the depths of the human heart.

I really must draw the line, however, at Jamieson’s suggestion that Pottersville is a cooler place—and a more economically viable one to boot—than Bedford Falls…