1946's Oscar Nominees

The more life disappoints you (the royal "you"), the more IAWL grows in stature.

It's a Wonderful Life is practically In a Year of 13 Moons if you're given to self-pity--I mean that as a compliment.

Eric horribly otm there, also clem, neatly diagnosing my aging sentimentality

So many superior xmas movies of the era.

Even though I like it, this is otm. Is there an explanation for how IAWL became so ubiquitous as an xmas movie?

not an answer but via wikipedia:

Capra revealed that this was his personal favorite among the films he directed and that he screened it for his family every Christmas. season

this is what I thought, it became because it was on TV all the time:

The film's elevation to the status of a beloved classic came decades after its initial release, when it became a television staple during Christmas season in the late 1970s. This came as a welcome surprise to Frank Capra and others involved with its production. "It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen," Capra told The Wall Street Journal in 1984. "The film has a life of its own now, and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I'm like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I'm proud... but it's the kid who did the work. I didn't even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea." In a 1946 interview, Capra described the film's theme as "the individual's belief in himself" and that he made it "to combat a modern trend toward atheism".

became *a staple

It's a remarkably sad movie, and depicts a kind of veteran neglect that doesn't get talked about much anymore. When we talk about vets being mistreated, we think of soldiers coming back from Vietnam and being spit on, or PTSD wrecked post-9/11 vets that don't have health insurance. This is more of a universal neglect, not so connected to WWII: for their own comfort, people prefer to look the other way.

― flappy bird, Tuesday, August 7, 2018 1:24 PM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW, Wyler's The Stolen Ranch (1926) focuses on a pair of WWI vets, one of whom has returned with "shell shock"; the scenario takes particular note of how Frank's PTSD is triggered by gunfire. (The resolution of his trauma is tooth-grindingly facile, but the attention to this in a minor Western is interesting.)

Of these nominees I've only seen Henry V, and that all too many years ago, so I won't vote in this poll.

when it became a television staple during Christmas season in the late 1970s

During this time IAWL was assumed to have slipped into the public domain, so it was cheap and popular programming.

I remember being stunned, watching a circa 1970 interview with Donald Shebib on the DVD of Goin' Down the Road, where he expressed his fondness for Capra and cited IAWL as one one of the director's less well known films. As an 80s kid, I just assumed that the film had been a holiday standard since time immemorial.

As a 70s kid, it wasn't! I'm not sure when it became so ubiquitous, but I can clearly remember stumbling across it on late night TV in my early teens and being astounded by it.

My association with Best Years is very similar, extremely moving film as a kid. Love them both, voted Wonderful Life.

Mods weren't seeing the edit request so I logged in to my mod acct and fixed the title.

he made it "to combat a modern trend toward atheism"

Well that worked.

No and yes!

Western culture not exactly free of Judeo-Christian influence since the 1940s, especially, maybe, Hollywood

The "combatting atheism" quote is hilarious as, from the modern perspective, IAWL feels as much of a work of pop spirituality as The Force in Star Wars. Maybe Capra's guardian angels fit more snugly within the Judea-Christian tradition, but I feel like the film is hardly what contemporary Christians mean when they bemoan secular culture.

JudeO

crypto otm and more precisely than me

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Whoa, nice

the distance between the way ppl tend to talk about capra and my own experience of his films is so wide that it almost makes me wonder if i'm being totally objective. probably not, but i remember first seeing IAWL around the age of 10 and just being shocked at what a dark and sad film it was, right up until the last 15 minutes. suffice to say none of the "christmas classics" i was familiar with revolved around a man being driven to suicide, complete with a villain who gets away at the end. and every time i see the thing it seems sadder. capra is one of those artists whose ubiquity and reputation may make it difficult to see the darkness in his work (i used to have to make similar defenses of charles schulz). and yeah, his actual real-life politics seem to have been very confused. but "don't trust the teller, trust the tale" applies here i think.

Without giving too much away, David Thomson's 'novel' Suspects definitely speaks to the darkness at the heart of IAWL - and that was first published in 1985, so correctives to Capracorn critiques have been around for a while now.

Yeah, I think "IAWL is some dark shit" is a reasonably popular opinion now, coming both from its admirers and (less laudably) from the "did you notice Shaggy and Scooby are STONERS" brigade. My gf saw it for the first time a few years ago, with next to no previous cultural baggage, and came out of the movie depressed at how sad George's life was.

Capra's own justifications are total bullshit yeah. Bailey's belief in himself is centred around community, which he is both frustrated with and ultimately redeemed by, and the cartoon angels are about as canonical as Here Comes Mr.Jordan.

Re: the movie's supposed reactionary nature, I think the only aspect that you can truly throw that accusation at is Pottersville, the den of booze and Jazz music that springs up w/o George's presence - which is lame and crypto-racist moralizing, yeah, but also not really surprising for a movie from its time. Everything else in the movie is about helping the weak, building community and fighting against a slumlord businessman villain. Morb's point that the screenwriter was a socialist seems pertinent.

Well there's also the Kind Capitalist as the solution to all problems.

Yeah, but the Kind Capitalist leads a pretty sad life and brings his business to ruin through employing an incompetent person through his kindness - I don't think George Bailey can be read as aspirational.

I agree that any film that doesn't offer a thorough Marxist critique of its protagonist is morally bankrupt.

Rewatching The Best Years of Our Lives this evening thanks to TCM and it's still a shock to hear Theresa Wright declare "I'm going to break up that marriage."

lol yeah

I loved people who were captivated by It's a Wonderful Life before I saw the movie, it made it easier for me to appreciate it

It's a Wonderful Life is by a good measure the better film. Not the "righter" film, but the better one.

A movie that calls life "wonderful" and then goes out of its way to prove all the ways it isn't. Baller.

Rewatching The Best Years of Our Lives this evening thanks to TCM and it's still a shock to hear Theresa Wright declare "I'm going to break up that marriage."

― Pauline Male (Eric H.), Monday, September 30, 2019 10:46 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol yeah

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, September 30, 2019 10:54 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

goat

I say this every time i'm going to break up a marriage