By Wayne Allensworth
My wife and I were watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time the other night, and something stood out that I hadn’t thought of before. Early in the movie, when old man Potter, the story’s Scrooge character played by Lionel Barrymore, complains that the Building & Loan in which he holds shares has loaned the princely sum of $5,000 to Ernie Bishop, a cab driver played by Frank Faylen. It’s a home loan — and Potter doesn’t like it. Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey tells Potter off, asking the old plutocrat rhetorically whether he knows how long it would take a working man to save $5,000 to pay for a house. The rabble Potter despises, says George, does most of what matters on an everyday basis in Bedford Falls, George’s hometown, while the scowling skinflint Potter sits and counts his money.
Released in 1946 and directed by Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life is a sublime Christmas movie. But it’s an odd one in some ways. The movie was shot in black and white, with key scenes taking place at night. The scenes in which a disoriented George sees what his hometown would have been like without him are reminiscent of the style of film noir cinematography, shadows and neon signs contrasted with broken shafts of light that cut across the screen. The story has taken a dark turn: George believes his Uncle Billy, played by Thomas Mitchell, has lost an $8,000 bank deposit, putting the Building & Loan, and George himself, in jeopardy. George contemplates killing himself so that his family can collect on a $15,000 life insurance policy, the only ready source of cash that he has.
It’s a Wonderful Life changed Jimmy Stewart’s career, as so many film aficionados have noted. The genial everyman was transformed, portraying a man undergoing intense suffering. George is angry, resentful, and frustrated. And most of all, he is afraid. A man who has always done his duty, George feels slighted by fate. Reels picturing lost dreams, the price he has paid for following his conscience, play in his head. Nevertheless, his conscience, that still, small voice in his heart, guides him. Stewart was able to credibly play other intense characters in films like Winchester ’73 and Vertigo as a result of his endearing and frightening portrayal of George Bailey, a good man on the edge of the precipice.
In the end, his dark passage becomes a return to the light. A whimsical guardian angel, Clarence, played by Henry Travers, gives George the greatest gift he can receive: George learns he has been indispensable to his family and to Bedford Falls. He has been their guardian angel without knowing it, never letting his doubts turn him away from them. What would Bedford Falls have been like without him? Clarence tells George that his life has touched so many others that his absence would leave a great rift in reality. For Bedford Falls, the alternative reality without George is the wide-open debauchery of Pottersville.
The film ends in George’s home as the people of Bedford Falls come to the rescue. And those faces! People looked older then, and the lines and creases in the faces of those great character actors like Faylen, Mitchell, Ward Bond, Beulah Bondi, and especially H.B. Warner as the druggist Mr. Gower, who owes so much to George, tell the story. Donna Reed as his wife Mary and Gloria Grahame as Violet Bick, Bedford Falls’ fallen angel, are the fair faces of the two paths George might have taken. And both love George. Mary has, in a sense, been saved by him. Violet redeemed.
George learns that his trials are the sort of tests we all face in life — and that they are necessary to one degree or another to help us develop our character, to achieve something that lends a deep meaning and purpose to our lives. We can accept that and be fulfilled or reject it and fall into bitterness and self-destruction. Providentially for George, he has been granted the eyes needed to see that. It’s a Wonderful Life is an inverted version of A Christmas Carol, a yearly reminder for all of us about gratitude and grace, and the struggles that make us who we are, for good or for ill. It’s about embracing life with all its complexities.
Potter is George’s antithesis, the man who has lived only for himself. Unmarried and childless, Potter compensates for his failure to launch a true and worthwhile life by hoarding money and power, scheming against anyone who repudiates his chosen path. George is relatively innocent, as was his father, Peter Bailey. Potter, like Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd, cannot abide their innocence and unquestioning goodness, as Claggart could not tolerate Billy. They are loved, while Claggart and Potter are not. They are living refutations of the cynicism and bitterness that rule Claggart and Potter. And in their envious rage, Claggart and Potter scheme, like Cain, to destroy the light, to engulf it in an all-encompassing darkness.
The pivotal scene of Potter complaining about the loan to Ernie — and George’s response — took me back to another time and another place. In the Spring Branch, just outside Houston in those days, of the 1950’s, I don’t think equivalents of Mr. Potter were much in evidence. The sourpuss face of smug superiority would be a collective one worn by an elite class, one that reached its apogee in this dismal century, that disdains the ordinary folk of my America. But George? Oh, yes, he was around, both individually and collectively.
Take Mr. Schultz, our man at the local bank. In the 1950s, he loaned my carpenter father, married with a wife and child, $8,000, which Daddy used to buy land and materials and build our home with his own hands. When the house was complete, my father still had some money left, which he wanted to return to Mr. Schultz. But Mr. Schultz told him to take his time — anyway, maybe he could use the money for furniture for the house. My father paid the loan off in full by the time I was in junior high. The house was truly ours, my father just the sort of homeowner Mr. Schultz, and George Bailey, wanted to see, but Potter didn’t.
When I bought my first car out of college in the early 1980s, Mr. Schultz was still around and he approved my car loan. I had one of those loan coupon books the bank gave you in those days. Mr. Schultz and my father told me to pay the loan off as soon as I could. A little debt might be necessary, but it certainly wasn’t desirable.
There were lots of Mr. Schultzs around. That appliance salesman at Sears & Roebuck, for instance, that my grandparents and parents, and others in the area, all went to to buy a refrigerator (we called them “ice boxes”) or washing machine. That barber my father had known from school. That car salesman that people trusted. The family doctor who was like a family member. The carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, plumbers, telephone linemen, and mailmen of our neighborhood went to the same people. And they would reciprocate the fairness they received whenever possible.
Community was built on families. It’s a Wonderful Life seems familiar to many of us because George’s Bedford Falls, distant as it may have been in time and geography, wasn’t off the mark. Loneliness is the postmodern malaise that engulfs so many of us nowadays, but in Spring Branch and in Bedford Falls, there were neighbors and families, including extended families, you could count on. Today, the collapse of marriage and childlessness reflect post-modernity’s Potter-like rejection of that very web of social relations that made us fully realized human beings. Without those essential bonds, real community becomes impossible, and the Potters of the world and their cynical resentment become all too common. Nihilism, despair, and the reflexive hatred of innocence, beauty, and goodness are at the end of that trail.
For George and the people of Bedford Falls, and for the community I knew as a boy, marriage, children, family, and friendship formed a web of relationships that helped us develop personally. That way of living and personality development was common, a path unselfconsciously followed. Today, like George after the scales have fallen from his eyes, we must attempt to follow that path consciously. Contentment in life isn’t something distant from us. It is, or can be, after all, a wonderful life.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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