By Michael F. Duggan
I have always loved the Capra Holidays classic It’s a Wonderful Life, but have long suspected that it is a sadder story than most people realize (in a similar but more profound sense as Goodbye Mr. Chips). One gets the impression from the early part of the film that George Bailey could have done anything but was held back at every opportunity. After watching it last year, I tried to get my ideas about the film organized and wrote the this analysis.
In spite of its heart-warming ending, the 1947 Christmas mainstay by Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life, is in some ways an ambiguous film and likely a sad story. George Bailey, the film’s protagonist played by Jimmy Stewart (in spite of his real-life Republican leanings), is the kind of person who gave the United States it’s most imaginative set of political programs from 1933 to 1945, policies that shepherded the country through the Depression, won WWII, and resulted in the greatest period of economic prosperity from 1945 until the early 1970s. Bailey wants to do “something big and something important”—to “build things” to “plan modern cities, build skyscrapers 100 stories high… bridges a mile long… airfields…” George Bailey is the big thinker—a “big picture guy”—and his father, Peter Bailey, the staunch, sensible, and fundamentally decent local hero. We need both kinds today.
In a moment of frankness bordering on insensitivity, George tells his father that he does not want to work in the Bailey Building and Loan, that he “couldn’t face being cooped up in a shabby little office… counting nickels and dimes.” His father recognizes the restlessness, the boundless talent and quality, the bridled energy, the wide-angle and high-minded ambition of his son. Wounded, the senior Mr. Bailey agrees with George, saying “You get yourself an education and get out of here,” and dies of a stroke the same night (his strategically-placed photo remains a moral omnipresence for the rest of the film, along with photos of General Pershing and U.S. presidents to link local events to broader historical currents).
One local crises or turn of events after another stymies all of George’s plans to go abroad and change the world just as they are on the cusp of fruition. Rather than a world-changer, he ends up as the local fixer for the good—a better and more vigorous version of a local hero, a status that confirms his “wonderful life” at the film’s exuberant ending where a 1945 yuletide flash mob descends on the Bailey household, thus saving the situation by returning years worth of good faith, deeds, and subsequent material wealth and prosperity. But what is it that sets George apart from the rest of the town that comes to depend upon him over the years?
At the age of 12 he saves his younger brother Harry from drowning (and by extension, a U.S. troopship in the South Pacific a quarter of a century later), leaving him deaf in one ear. Shortly thereafter, his keen perception prevents Mr. Gower, the pharmacist (distracted by the news of the death of his college student son during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919), from accidentally poisoning a customer. As a young adult, George’s speculating about making plastics from soybeans by reviving a local defunct factory adds to the town’s prosperity and makes a fortune for his ambitious but less visionary friend, Sam “hee-haw” Wainwright, but not himself.
Other than saving the Building and Loan from liquidation, George’s primary victory is marrying his beautiful and wholesome sweetheart—“Marty’s kid sister”—Mary (Donna Reed) and raising a family. With a cool head and insight and the help of his wife, they single-handedly stop a run on the Building and Loan in its tracks with their in-hand honeymoon funds. The goodwill is reciprocated by most of the institution’s investors (one notably played by Ellen “Can I have $17.50” Corby, later Grandma Walton).
From there George goes on to help an immigrant family buy their own house and in fact helps build an entire subdivision for the town’s respectable working class, all the while standing up to the local bully: the cartoonishly sinister plutocratic omnipresence and dark Manachiest counterweight to everything good and decent in town, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). Potter is the lingering unregulated nineteenth-century, a caricature of the predatory robber baron, a dinosaur that in modified form cooked the economy during 1920s, resulting in the Great Depression. Even Potter comes to recognize George’s quality and, with an approach distantly related to charm, unsuccessfully attempts to buy him off (after presenting a brutally accurate assessment/summary of George’s life to date).
During the war, George’s bad ear keeps him out of the fighting (unlike the real Jimmy Stewart who flew combat missions in a B-24), and makes himself useful with such patriotic extracurriculars as serving as an air raid warden, and organizing paper, rubber, and scrap metal drives. And yet he seems to have adapted to and even accepted his fate of being tethered to the small financial institution he inherited from his father, and therefore the role of the town’s protector. He seems more or less happily resigned to his fate as a thoroughbred pulling a scrap metal wagon.
Were George Bailey just another guy in Bedford Falls or most towns in the United States (or, in Old Man Potter’s words, “if this young man was a common, ordinary yokel”), this would indeed be a wonderful life and indeed for most of us it would be. Even with all of his disappointments, his life is a satisfactory reply to the unanswerable Buddhist question, “How good would you have it?”
Taken at face value, George seems to be a great success at the end of the movie. In case this is not abundantly clear from the boisterous but benevolent 1940s Christmastime riot of unabashed exuberance—a reverse bank run or bottom-up version of a New Deal program or a spontaneous neighborhood Marshall Plan—at the movie’s end. His life’s investment in common decency pays dividends he did not imagine because it was all too close and familiar. Indeed, George’s bailout upstages his brother—now a Medal of Honor recipient—who proclaims, “To George Bailey, the richest man in town.” This is confirmed in the homey wisdom inscribed in a copy of Tom Sawyer by George’s guardian angel Clarence (a silly device and comic relief in a story about attempted suicide), that “No man is a failure who has friends.”
Of course Clarence is introduced into an already minimally realistic story to provide George with the exquisite but equally silly luxury—“a great gift”—of seeing what would have become of the town and its people without him (although to a lover of jazz, the counterfactual business district of Pottersville—an alternate reality to the overly precious Norman Rockwellesque Bedford Falls—is not completely lacking in appeal, with its hot jazz lounges, jitterbugging swing clubs, a billiards parlor, a (God forbid) burlesque hall, stride piano, and what appears to be a fleeting cheap shot at Fats Waller).
In this Hugh Everett-like alternate narrative device and dark parallel universe, he sees that his wife Mary is an unhappy mouse-like spinster working in a (God forbid) library; that Harry drowned as a child and was therefore not alive in 1944 to save a fully-loaded troop transport in the South Pacific. Likewise, everybody else in the town is an embittered, antisocial, outright bad or tragic version of themselves relative to the personally frustrating yet generally wonderful G-rated version of George’s wonderful life and town.
The problem is that George is not ordinary. He is no mere careerist, conventionalist, or money-chasing credentialist—he is a quick-thinking, from-the-gut maverick problem-solver with a heart of gold. He is exactly the kind of person we need now, but whom the establishment of our own time despises. Although harder to spot on sight in our own time, the charming and attractive Mr. Potter’s of the world have won.
In literary terms, George is not a typical beaten-down loser-protagonist of the modernist canon; he is not Bartleby the Scribner, Leopold Bloom, J. Alfred Prufrock, Willie Lohman, William Stoner, or the clueless victims of Kafka, but then neither is his stolid father. George is more akin to Thomas Hardy’s talented but frustrated Jude Fawley or a better version of James Hilton’s Mr. Chips—characters who might have amounted to more had they not been limited or constrained by internal and external circumstances.
Even more so, George is a descendant or modern cousin to the tragic-heroic protagonists of the Greeks and Shakespeare (i.e. a person who could have pushed the limits of human possibility). If only he could have gotten up to bat. He might have done genuinely great things, had his plans gotten off the ground, had the unforeseen chaos of life and social circumstances not intervened. We have seen what things would have been like without George, but we can only wonder what might have been if he had been allowed to succeed. Let’s see Clarence pull that trick out of his hat.
Just after breaking his father’s heart by revealing his ambitions, George confides to the older man that he thinks he is a “great guy.” True enough. But the conspicuous fact is that the older Bailey is much more on the scale of a local hero, a “pillar of the community”—a necessary type for any town to extinguish the day-to-day brush fires and is therefore perhaps more fully actualized and resigned to his modest role (even though it kills him mere hours later, or was it George’s announcement of his ambitious and desire to leave?). But George has bigger plans and presumably the abilities to match.
In a perfect world, someone like Mr. Bailey, Sr. would be better (and in fact is) cast in the role to which his son is relegated, even though his ongoing David versus Goliath battles with Potter likely contributed to his early death. George might have found an even more wonderful life if he had gone to college and law school and then gone to Washington to work for Tommy Corcoran and Ben Cohen drafting legislation, or as a project manager of a large New Deal program, or managing war production against the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. Instead he admonishes people to turn off their lights during air raid drills. In a better world, a lesser man could have handled all the relative evils of Bedford Falls. It’s a Wonderful Life is a tale of squandered talent.
Of course an alternative reading is that George is delusional throughout the movie, that he is not as great as we are led to believe, that—like most of us—he is not as good as his biggest dreams would suggest. Desire ain’t talent. But there is nothing in the film to suggest that this is the case. And the film’s ending suggests the opposite (to say nothing of its place in the Capra cannon—compare and contrast the ensemble and the feel of this film with those of Capra’s 1938 version of George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It with You, which also features Jimmy the Raven and a completely lovable Lionel Barrymore).
The moral for our own time is that we need both kinds of Mr. Baileys—father and the son—and it is clear that in spite of numerous local victories, George could have done far more in the broader world (his shorter, less interesting younger brother, Harry, seems to have unintentionally hijacked George’s plans and makes a good go of them: he goes off to college, lands a plumb research position in Buffalo as part-and-parcel of marrying a rich and beautiful wife, disproportionately helps to win a world war, and returns after flying through a snowstorm—amazingly, as the same happy-go-lucky prewar kid brother—complete with our nation’s highest military honor after lunching with Harry and Bess Truman at the White House). George is the Rooseveltian top-down planner and social democrat while Mr. Bailey, Sr., is the organic, Jane Jacobs localist. Harry provides a glimpse at what George might have accomplished.
Even if we accept Capra’s questionable premise that George’s life is the most wonderful of possible alternatives (or at least a pretty darned good one), the ending is not an entirely satisfactory Hollywood ending. George’s likable, but absent-minded, Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) inadvertently places $8,000 dollars (perhaps ten or twenty-fold that amount in 2018 dollars) into Mr. Potter’s hands (a crime witnessed and abetted by Mr. Potter’s wheelchair-pushing flunky, who, without a uttering single word, is arguably the most despicable person in the film—an equal and opposite silent counterpart to the recurring photograph of the late Mr. Bailey, Sr.), and his honest mistake is never revealed nor presumably is the money ever recovered.
Mr. Potter’s crime does not come to light, and George is nearly framed by the incident and driven to despair. Instead of a watery, self-inflicted death in the surprisingly deep Bedford River, he is happily bailed out (Bailey is bailed out after bailing out the town so many times), first by a homely angel and then by the now prosperous town of the immediate postwar.
The fact that his rich boyhood chum, the affable, frat-boyish Sam Wainwright, is willing to advance $25,000 out of his company’s petty cash puts the crisis into broader perspective and makes us realize that George was never really in that much trouble, at least not financially (although the Feds might have found such a large transfer to a close friend with a mysterious $8000 deficit to be suspicious). Wainwright’s telegram is a comforting wink from Capra himself. Had he not been so distracted by an accumulation of trying circumstances—the daily slings and arrows of being a big fish in the plunge basin of Bedford Falls (to mix metaphors)—this kindness of Sam’s and the whole town is something that George might have intuited himself, thus averting his breakdown in the first place. The bank examiner (district attorney?), in light of the crowd’s vouchsafing George’s reputation with a cash flow cornucopia, tears up the summons, and lustily joins in singing “Hark, the Herald Angel Sings.” We know that the townspeople will be paid back with interest greater than a ten-year war bond.
Still, the loss of $8,000 in Bedford Falls in 1945 is a crisis that drove George to the brink of suicide. This is a movie about hitting one’s limit. The seriousness of the crisis is another manifestation of the scale of events to which George has been consigned. If he had been a manager of wartime industrial production or a 1940s industrialist, like Same Wainwright, a similar deficit would have been a rounding error on a government contract that nobody would have noticed. On a side note, it would have been more appropriate for Heaven to have dispatched its resources to war-ravaged Europe in late 1945, rather than to a single person in a prosperous American town (or was the Marshall Plan really the Clarence Plan?).
At the movie’s end, George is safe and obviously touched by the outpouring of his community and appreciates just how good things really are (and you just know that a scene beginning with Donna Reed rushing in and clearing off an entire tabletop of Christmas-wrapping paraphernalia to make room for the charitable deluge to follow is going to be ridiculously heart-warming). His life may not have been on a grand scale, but the historical course of events that includes him is clearly better than the alternative.
At the film’s end, George is just as local as he was at the beginning. He has been powerfully instructed to be happy with the way things have turned out (why not, it’s almost 1946 in the United States, after all, and the bigger events in the world appear to have turned out just fine, right?). His wonderful life has produced a wonderful effort to meet a (still unsolved) crisis. But the thought lingers: could Clarence have showed him an alternative life’s course in which he was able to pursue his dreams? Just imagine what he could have done with 1940s federal funding and thousands of similarly well-intended people to manage—like those who engineered the New Deal, the WWII military and industrial mobilization, and the Marshall Plan. Would his name have ranked along with the likes of Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Rex Tugwell, Adolph Bearle, Raymond Moley, Frances Perkins, Thomas Corcoran, Benjamin Cohen, Averell Harriman, George Marshall, and Franklin and Eleanor themselves?
It is impossible to resist the warmth and decency of this film’s ending (I have watched it in June and July), and I know that this essay has been minute and dissecting in its analysis. But what lessons might we take? I think the moral to those of us in 2018 is that below the surface of this wonderful movie is the cautionary tale that if we are to face the emerging crises of our own time, we will need a whole Brains Trust worth of George Baileys in the right places and legions of local people like his father throughout the nation. There is a danger in shutting out the George Baileys of our time or cosigning them to the wrong role. And yet our system as it exists today seems designed to do just that. We must also come to recognize the Mr. Potters of big business, big finance and their minions in the halls of political power who have dominated American public life for the past half-century. I suspect that they look nothing like Lionel Barrymore.