It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

“It’s one of those ageless movies, like Casablanca or The Third Man, that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they’ve surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. It’s a Wonderful Life falls in the second category..” — Roger Ebert

“The film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked his return to features after four years of turning out propaganda films for the government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it… Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast and told with a sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant) that appears in no other Capra film. The epiphany of movie sentiment and a transcendent experience.” — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

SYNOPSIS

One of Hollywood’s most beloved holiday traditions is also one of its darkest portraits of disappointment, despair, and the distance between the life we imagine and the one we actually live. James Stewart gives one of his defining performances as George Bailey, a decent, ambitious man whose dreams of escaping Bedford Falls have been repeatedly deferred by responsibility to his family and community. When financial catastrophe pushes him to the brink on Christmas Eve, the intervention of an unlikely guardian angel allows George to glimpse what the world might have looked like without him. Returning to feature filmmaking after directing wartime documentaries for the U.S. government, Frank Capra transforms this supernatural premise into an expansive portrait of American life, patiently accumulating decades of frustrated ambitions, small sacrifices, romances, rivalries, and economic anxieties before bringing them together in one of cinema’s great emotional climaxes. Its enduring power lies precisely in how hard-won its famous affirmation proves to be: before the bells ring and the tears flow, Capra takes George through the darkness necessary to understand just how much one seemingly ordinary life can mean.