By KATE PIERCE
News Editor
Every year around the holidays, my family gathers together to watch the classic film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Among other movies like “A Christmas Story” or “Elf”, Frank Capra’s masterpiece stands on its own as one of the best Christmas movies of all time.
The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to stay in his small town of Bedford Falls and help others, and whose impending suicide on Christmas Eve of 1945 brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, played by Henry Travers.
In order to understand George, Clarence is given a glimpse into George’s life starting when he was 12 in 1919 and following major life events until present day.
George is a good man that sacrificed his dreams and his youth by inheriting the loan business of his father. Despite temptation, he always made the tough choice to preserve the Building and Loan. He gave up his dreams of travelling, gave his college money to his brother Harry, and even used his honeymoon money to keep the business afloat. He resisted the proposals of the town’s evil banker Mr. Henry Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore, and never sold his business in order to protect the poor community of Bedford Falls.
However, when his uncle and business partner misplaces 8 thousand dollars on the same day the bank examiner comes to check the books, George goes to Mr. Potter to beg for a loan.When George offers his life insurance policy as collateral, Potter says George is worth more dead than alive. George takes the message to heart, and decides to commit suicide thinking the world would be better without him.
Clarence, who is trying to earn his angel wings by saving George, shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls would be if he had never been born. What ensues is a fantasy nightmare that builds to an emotionally charged scene in which George to pleads to live again.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” came out in 1946 and was produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the 1939 short story “The Greatest Gift”, by Philip Van Doren Stern.
In addition to being my favorite Christmastime movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is probably one of my favorite movies of all time. Even though it is set fifty years before I was born and portrays events like the Depression, a bank-run, and World War II, the overall message is easy to relate to, and Stewart’s portrayal of George Bailey is so personable and self-sacrificing that you can’t help but root for him throughout the movie.
But there’s a larger reason why “It’s a Wonderful Life” has become a traditional holiday viewing. Although Mr. Potter is the embodiment of the wrong way to live – in selfishness and cruelty – the main conflict of the movie is George against himself: The way George is against the way he sees himself and what he thinks his life is worth vs. what it’s really worth- Self-doubt and personal pain. The story is one of a man who questions himself, the story of an ordinary man.
What makes George a beloved character is that he hates his ordinariness and rails against it. He feels something grand and brilliant and heroic inside, and what he longs for is a chance to express it. It is not George Bailey’s “common man” status that makes him so easily relatable, it is his desire to transcend his commonness, because within, he is extraordinary.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a movie that exhibits victory but not without defeat, and a leading character that loses but also wins. It’s about dreams that don’t come true, which is something that everyone, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary, how rich or how poor, experiences at some point. In the end, nothing changes for George. Nothing except everything. He does not leave Bedford Falls, and he realizes that despite that – he truly lives a wonderful life.
