Around this time last year, I marked the holiday season with a jaundiced essay on Christmas movies, including It’s a Wonderful Life:
Don’t get me wrong: I like Wonderful Life–the dance contest, the romance, the seductive mystery of Violet Bick. But isn’t there something a little oppressive about it? To me, a former small-town kid, it’s a tragedy, about a man whose dreams are beaten down by his needy, parochial, busybody neighbors. I want to yell at the screen, “You go on that honeymoon, George Bailey! Tell that cabdriver to floor it and never look back!”
Today’s New York Times one-ups me with a brilliant piece (by a Wonderful Life lover) detailing the movie’s truly dark vision:
Soon enough, though, the darkness sets in. George’s brother, Harry (Todd Karns), almost drowns in a childhood accident; Mr. Gower, a pharmacist, nearly poisons a sick child; and then George, a head taller than everyone else, becomes the pathetic older sibling creepily hanging around Harry’s high school graduation party. That night George humiliates his future wife, Mary (Donna Reed), by forcing her to hide behind a bush naked, and the evening ends with his father’s sudden death.
Disappointments pile up. George can’t go to college because of his obligation to run the Bailey Building and Loan, and instead sends Harry. But Harry returns a slick, self-obsessed jerk, cannily getting out of his responsibility to help with the family business, by marrying a woman whose dad gives him a job. George again treats Mary cruelly, this time by chewing her out and bringing her to tears before kissing her. It is hard to understand precisely what she sees in him.
Author Wendell Jamieson also notes that in real life, George Bailey probably would have had to do prison time even after paying back the missing $8,000, and that by having been born—and eventually preserving Bedford Falls’ manufacturing-based economy—he probably doomed his hometown to decades of future industrial decline, which would have been prevented had it gone the Pottersville route of investing in the gambling and “entertainment” businesses. Merry Christmas!