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The world would have been a much poorer place if It’s A Wonderful Life had never been made. But its journey to beloved festive favourite was far from straightforward, as FOCUS finds out.
In the 1930s he made his name with films like It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes To Town and - with Wonderful Life star James Stewart
- Mr Smith Goes To Washington. Now it seemed his sweet natured story
of a good man who gets to see how the world would have been had he
never been born was simply out of step with the taste with audiences demanding broad comedy or more gritty fare.
At 37 James Stewart had serious doubts about resuming his acting career after distinguished service in the Army Air Corps. But he did resume his career, and though he may not have immediately realised it, Stewart would give his definitive good guy performance as George Bailey. It is George who, with the help of an unlikely angel named Clarence, sees the effect he has had on those around him, from his nearest and dearest to mean and nasty Mr Potter played by Lionel Barrymore.
The late Frank Capra Jr, a successful producer in his own right who passed away in December 2007, recalled the path that It’s A Wonderful Life took from flop to classic in the space of just a few years.
“My father, Willy Wyler and George Stevens had put this company together called Liberty Films,” he said. “Each one of them was in the process of making a film for the company and my father’s was It’s A Wonderful Life. They had this arrangement for RKO to release it in January 1947, but RKO ended up moving It’s A Wonderful Life to come out just before Christmas.
“The picture fared only moderately well, and looking back I think part of that was down to the release date. My father also thought that soon after World War Two people were looking for more of an out and out comedy. This film had bigger, darker issues so the reviews were very mixed, some were great and some were terrible.”
"We bring a lot when we come into a country," Silver adds. "We bring a lot of employment, a lot of dollars, pounds whatever, and we spend it. It's great. The situation that they created here for us was very effective.
“It became a regular every Christmas, partly because it was essentially free to screen,” Capra added. “They began to get a lot of calls for it, every year it built and more and more stations would put it on. So it had this entire life of its own which was not being directed by any distributor, it was just happening.”
For Frank Capra Senior the re-birth of his film was an enormous, if unexpected, source of satisfaction.
“He always thought it was the best picture that he had made,” his son explained, “that he had more of himself in it and that at the time he made it he was really at the top of his game. I think he felt also that because it had not started as a play or a book but a story idea the film was really his own creation.”
The idea itself was conceived as a magazine story by Philip Van Doren Stern, but when he found no interest he sent it out to friends in Christmas card form. Eventually Cary Grant saw the filmic potential of it, but no-one was able to realise this in script form until Capra took it on.
“This was the film my father was born to make. I think he also felt after the war that he’d been away from Hollywood for four and a half years, that Jimmy Stewart had been away, so they were both re-testing their creative abilities. And I know that during the film Jimmy Stewart both privately and publicly said that maybe he didn’t want to be an actor, maybe this wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore. Maybe he’d go back and help his father run his hardware store or something.
“Lionel Barrymore really got him back on the right track. Working with this icon from this great stage family, he was the kind of person who would say ‘every day I thank God that I’m an actor’. He got Jimmy back into thinking that being a film actor was a proper career for somebody, that it was not frivolous. During the war we’d been dealing with all these huge life and death issues and suddenly acting was not enough. When they finished the film they realised that this film dealt with things they didn’t even realise as they were doing it.”
Frank Capra senior died in 1991, at the age of 94, but was witness to the tremendous warmth and affection the film inspired – and continues to inspire to this day – in successive generations.
“In his later years of his life my father spent time going to colleges, doing a two or three day seminar sort of thing and often he would show It’s A Wonderful Life. For many of the students it was the first time they had ever seen it on the big screen, and he would always get this amazed reaction at how much more powerful it was, how they saw details they never had before when you were focussed for that whole two and a half hours. But that’s what it had been designed for.”
ANWAR BRETT
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