Film’s Nonpareil Everyman on His Approach to Acting, Career — and His ‘Wonderful Life’
George Bailey: Look, who are you? Who are you really?
Clarence: I told you, George. I’m your guardian angel.
George: Yeah, well what else are you? Are you a hypnotist?
Clarence: No, of course not.
George: Then why am I seeing all these strange things?
Clarence: Don’t you understand, George? It’s because you were never born.
George: Well, if I was never born … who am I?
Clarence: You’re nobody. You have no identity.
George: What do you mean no identity? My name is George Bailey!
Clarence: There is no George Bailey.
[George searches his pockets for identification, finds none]
Clarence: You have no papers, no cards, no driver’s license, no 4F card, no insurance policy.
[George finally searches his watch pocket for the rose petals from Zuzu]
Clarence: They’re not there either.
George: What?
Clarence: Zuzu’s petals … You’ve been given a great gift, George: A chance to see what the world would be like without you.
— “It’s a Wonderful Life”
By Gregory N. Joseph
JIMMY STEWART, whom Frank Capra lovingly described as being “unusually usual,” the movies’ nonpareil Everyman, sat down to reminisce about “It’s Wonderful Life” and his career-defining role in it some 40 years after the film opened as a box-office disappointment only to evolve over the years into the most revered Christmas picture of all time.
Unapologetically populist, unabashedly sentimental, at times gut-wrenchingly dark, it’s a fable reminding us that life is a gift, the ultimate gift despite its sometimes painful vagaries, and that every single one of us counts — no exceptions.
During a separate interview, Capra decribed its essence simply: “One little guy can make an awful lot of difference in this world.”
The circuitous odyssey of the story from print to screen, how it was resurrected from failure and near obscurity through a fluke only to achieve a timelessness resonating over generations, is as dramatic and unlikely as the labyrinthine path traveled by its beleaguered protagonist George Bailey in the film.
In February of 1938, Philip Van Doren Stern, an editor and writer, awoke from a dream that had been inspired by Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella “A Christmas Carol.” He finally attempted to set it to paper in 1939, and after a series of drafts, in 1943 finally finished a 4,000-word short story he titled “The Greatest Gift: A Christmas Tale,” submitting it to his literary agent for possible publication. No one was interested.
Undeterred, he had the story printed in 200 pamphlets and sent copies as Christmas cards to his friends and family that December.
The holiday season after that, in December of 1944, the story was published in book form and also ran in Reader’s Scope magazine. Then Good Housekeepiong magazine featured it in its January 1945 issue under the title “The Man Who Was Never Born.”
One of the pamphlets caught the eye of RKO Pictures producer David Hempstead, who in turn showed it to actor Cary Grant, who thought it would make an interesting film in which he could star. RKO subsequently bought the movie rights for $10,000, assigning it to the respected writers Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets and Marc Connelly, who each took a crack at a script. But RKO wasn’t satisfied with any of their efforts and the project was ultimately shelved. (Grant soon found a Christmas story of his own that would become a film classic in its own right — “The Bishop’s Wife,” a 1947 fantasy with it’s own angel, this time played by Grant, who insisted upon playing that part; ironically, child actress Karolyn Grimes was featured in both films, as Stewart’s daughter Zuzu in what would become “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and as the bishop’s daughter in “The Bishop’s Wife.”)
Capra, who during World War II had led a special section on morale for the U.S. government producing propaganda films in direct reply to German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s disturbingly powerful ode to Adolf Hitler and Nazism “Triumph of the Will,” wound up making the seven-episode “Why We Fight series,” which are considered masterpieces of the genre. The first one, “Prelude to War,” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Now, fresh out of the service, Capra had a new production company, Liberty Films, which had a nine-film distribution agreement with RKO, and was on the lookout for something particularly meaningful to mark his return to Hollywood.
With that in mind, RKO executive Hempstead urged Capra to read Stern’s story. Capra — a fervently patriotic immigrant (the youngest of seven children, he was born in Bisacquino, Sicily, Italy, to a fruit grower and his wife and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1903 at the age of five) — especially wanted to do something that celebrated life and human values in the wake of what had proven to be a devastating global conflict. He was immediately drawn to Stern’s story, and purchased the rights (the amount is a matter of some dispute, but Capra claimed the cost was $50,000). The studio tossed in the rejected scripts as part of the deal.
Capra, using some scenes from Odets’ script, brought in his own team of esteemed writers — Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Jo Swerling, Michael Wilson, and Dorothy Parker — to work on drafts.
As with so many other promising Hollywood projects that have a lot of creative fingers in the pie, collaborations involved in this production sometimes became bitter and contentious. A dispute developed over credits and who wrote what, at one point reaching the Screen Writers’ Arbitration committee for resolution. As a result, the final version of the film, which Capra by now had renamed “It’s a Wonderful Life,” was credited onscreen to Goodrich, Hackett and Capra, with an “additional scenes” listing for Swerling.
For the lead in the film, Capra knew exactly whom he wanted.
Capra was renowned for his meticulous casting right down to the last background player, actors whose very facial expression and mood could express a character and advance the storyline with little or no dialogue, immediately registering with audiences. Capra understood their quiet importance and skillset, and that there was no such thing as a throwaway “extra.” (One such uncredited background player in this film, for example, was Ellen Corby, who two years later would be nominated for an Academy Award and win a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Aunt Trina in “I Remember Mama” and years later would win three Emmy Awards as Esther “Grandma” Walton on the iconic television series “The Waltons”).
The person Capra envisioned for the lead in this film could do all of those things, who was not only a star but who could make an immediate connection on a very human level — in fact, that was what made him a star, and a unique one at that: James Stewart.
Stewart was an actor of gripping “Everyman” appeal to a broad swath of America with whom the director had previously collaborated on “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938), two enormously successful films, the latter bringing Capra — then at the peak of his career in Hollywood — Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Those pictures had made Stewart an A-list star (“Mr. Smith,” about a deceptively tenacious country bumpkin appointed as a U.S. Senator who turns the tables on Washington, brought him the first of his five Oscar nominations as Best Actor — he won the award the very next year, for playing a whimsical reporter in the romantic comedy “The Philadelphia Story” opposite Grant and Katharine Hepburn).
Grant later recalled one memorable moment with Stewart in “The Philadelphia Story,” when Stewart’s reporter character is inebriated and speaks with unscripted pauses and hiccups that both surprised and charmed Grant into a full understanding and appreciation of his cast mate’s acting ability and range.
“In that scene I was absolutely fascinated by him,” Grant explained. “When you watch him, you can see how good he is in the film. I think the reason Jimmy stood out from other actors was that he had the ability to talk naturally. He knew that in conversation people do often interrupt one another and that it’s not always so easy to get a thought out. It took a little while for the sound men to get used to him, but he had an enormous impact.” Added Grant: “Some years later, Marlon Brando came out and did the same things all over again. But what people forget is that Jimmy did it first. And he affected all of us, really.”
When I spoke with Stewart, I asked him about his acting style — and critics’ charges that he was actually always just playing himself. He had a ready response: “Whenever people say that I always play myself,” he said, “I just quote Larry Olivier: ‘I always play myself with deference to the character.’ Well, if it’s good enough for Olivier, it’s good enough for Stewart.”
(I put the same question to Grant about his own performances. He responded a bit more colorfully: “You don’t lose your own identity up on the screen. It’s always you, no matter how you behave.
(“How can you lose your own identity, because you’re there, in the flesh, photographed and blown up 60 feet across a screen? How the hell can you lose yourself — what do they mean, lose yourself? You mean you feel hypnotized?
(“It’s rather stupid for critics to knock Gary Cooper or Duke Wayne for playing themselves, because they were both number one at the box office for many years. It’s much more difficult than anyone could possibly imagine.”)
Stewart was really the only one Capra seriously considered for the lead role of George Bailey in “Wonderful Life” because the director believed he brought a guileless rectitude to his portrayals unmatched by any other actor. In his autobiography, “The Name Above the Title” (1971), Capra wrote: “Of all actors’ roles I believe the most difficult is the role of a Good Sam who doesn’t know that he is a Good Sam. I knew one man who could play it (the role of George Bailey) … James Stewart.”
That choice was the right one for reasons that might not have been evident to Capra at the time.
For Stewart, this also was his first movie following the war, one in which he had fought with great distinction as a combat pilot in Europe. He reportedly had doubts about continuing his film career, wondering if he could still act — and if he really wanted to return to the glossy world of motion picture-making after the horrors of war he had seen. Stewart’s daughter later remembered instances of his waking up with nightmares, what we now think of as post-traumatic stress disorder, because of his experiences.
The doubts Stewart felt about himself combined with what he had witnessed during the war provided an unexpectedly deep, rich interior for George Bailey’s character, and gave the movie an edgy dimension that took it well beyond the usual Christmas-fantasy froth of the day. In that respect, the movie was far ahead of its time.
In the filmed story, George is running the family business, Bailey Brothers Building and Loan, which his late father and his father’s brother, Uncle Billy, founded in the small town of Bedford Falls, New York. Upon his father’s sudden death, he’s forced to put aside his own aspirations and dreams to head the company, a decision he feels an obligation to make because he grew up in the community and knows how much the people there depend on it. He understands each of them and their needs on the most personal level.
But on Christmas Eve, just as the town is preparing a hero’s welcome for George’s brother Harry, a Medal of Honor-winning Navy veteran returning from World War II, disaster strikes.
When Uncle Billy (played to frazzled, tipsy perfection by Thomas Mitchell) goes to deposit $8,000 of the Building and Loan’s money in the bank, he absentmindedly misplaces it and it’s found by cruel, rapacious board member Henry Potter (an over-the-top Lionel Barrymore at his wicked best), who controls most of the town and regards the decent George as an obstacle to be cast aside. George, after futilely retracing Billy’s steps, appeals to Potter for a loan, offering his life-insurance policy as collateral. Potter refuses, growling that George is worth more dead than alive, and sets about phoning the police.
With a bank examiner about to review his company’s records and realizing that a tremendous scandal and likely prison will follow, George has a breakdown, questioning the fairness of life, vicously lashing out at his unsuspecting family, drinks and mainly prays at Martini’s bar (film aficionados will recognize Adriana Caselotti, “the voice of Snow White” in the animated Disney classic, singing in the background), gets humiliatingly bounced out the door into the snow, then angrily weaves his way with unsteady determination to a nearby bridge with the intention of leaping over the railing and ending it all.
But Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers in a bit of heaven-sent casting), a stammering, somewhat distracted but always well-meaning “angel second-class” who has trekked to earth to (hopefully) earn his wings, has other ideas: He rescues George by diving into the water first and having George save him.
Like a ghost of Christmas past (and quite possibly present and future), Clarence then sets about to show his earthly charge what the town would be like and what would have happened to countless people, even those he has never met, if he had never existed.
Chief among them is George’s devoted wife Mary Hatch Bailey, played with winsome wholesomeness by a young Donna Reed (a greatly underrated actress of deceptive range who would win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Montgomery Clift’s hooker girlfriend in the Oscar-winning 1953 World War II drama “From Here To Eternity” before going on to play the quintessential ’50s America homemaker, a pediatrician’s wife and mother of two, in her own sitcom “The Donna Reed Show” from 1958 to 1966).
Here, with no George in her life, Mary is shown as a startlingly drab, unsmiling spinster who screams for the cops when a stranger — George — arrives at her door.
We also see that Mr. Gower, the stumbling, tortured town pharmacist, was imprisoned for manslaughter because young George was not there to prevent him from accidentally poisoning a prescription (Gower, who’s turned to drink over the death of his son from the flu and has become a tragic, broken figure, is played with unsettling effectiveness, someone we have all met, by none other than H.B. Warner, who starred as Jesus Christ in the 1927 silent epic “The King of Kings” and went on to become a favorite supporting character in Capra films, including as Chang in the original, 1937 “Lost Horizon,” which earned him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor).
Then there was Uncle Billy, who was institutionalized after the Building and Loan failed.
And George’s own mother doesn’t recognize him. After all, he was never born.
And that’s not all, not by a long shot.
The entirety of Bedford Falls has changed. It is now Pottersville — a sleazy, ugly, polluted hellscape.
Bailey Park? It’s no longer a park, but instead a cemetery. There, George discovers the grave of his younger brother Harry, who drowned as a child because, unlike what really happened in their childhood, this time around George wasn’t there to save him — which also means that a huge number of troops aboard a transport ship in the war died because Harry wasn’t there to save them.
Although bringing “It’s a Wonderful Life” to the screen and doing it so well was a noteworthy feat in and of itself — indeed it was nominated for five Academy Awards (Best Picture and Director for Capra, Best Actor for Stewart, as well as Best Editing and Best Sound Recording) — that didn’t translate to box-office success, nor for that matter, praise from critics.
Instead, the film opened to lukewarm reviews (sappy and depressing, the arguments against it went) and audiences, for various reasons, stayed away. The result was that the picture failed to reach even its break-even point of $6.3 million, about twice its production cost, recording a loss of $525,000. In sum, upon its original release, the movie was a flop. (It didn’t help, either, that its box office competition that year included the eventual Best Picture winner, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a back-from-the-war tale considered a classic in its own right.)
In 1948, Capra sold Liberty Films to Paramount. Ownership of the film changed hands several times, and in 1974, National Telefilm Associates failed to renew its copyright. (In 1994, the next owner, Republic Pictures, restored the copyright through court action, and in 1998 Paramount would buy it back.)
The 1974 copyright lapse was a plot twist that would make “It’s a Wonderful Life” a perennial (and free) Christmas-entertainment gift and save it from obscurity.
Because the film was now in the public domain and there were no royalty fees to pay for broadcasting it, television stations looking for inexpensive programming during the holiday season snapped it up, airing it repetitively, even to the extent of sometimes having “Wonderful Life” marathons.
So it was during the 1987 holiday season, when “It’s a Wonderful Life” was flooding the airwaves, that George Bailey himself — aka Jimmy Stewart, then 79 years young — sat down to discuss the film, how he became involved in it, and why it didn’t register with audiences the first time around. Stewart seemed eager to do so.
In the same slow, thoughtful crackling voice that had warmed moviegoers for generations, he began explaining, emphasizing that this most beloved Christmas movie of all time was not, ironically, conceived as a Christmas film.
It seems that RKO, the movie’s distributor, originally intended to premiere it on Jan. 30, 1947. But the studio’s big color film set for the holidays, “Sinbad the Sailor,” a lush fantasy starring second-generation swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks Jr., had to be put on hold because Technicolor went on strike.
Enter black and white ‘Wonderful Life” instead, just ahead of Santa on Dec. 20, 1946 (the film’s preview showing for charity at New York City’s Globe Theater, a day before its official world premiere there). No other way to put it, the film was a scheduling substitute, a last-minute cinematic stocking-stuffer.
“Christmas was just sort of part of it, and a wonderful way to end the movie,” Stewart told me. “The picture didn’t do well when it opened because — and I know Frank (Capra) feels the same way — it was right after World War II, and the substance of the film wasn’t what people wanted to see.
“They wanted something sort of relaxing, a rejuvenating film, a lot of comedy — Red Skelton, Martin and Lewis, who were just coming into their own just then.
“The war was a tough thing to take for the people back home here. I think they wanted something sort of wilder than this.”
Of all Hollywood actors, he perhaps more than any other understood war and its toll.
Stewart, whose family had served in the military going back generations, from the Civil War to the Spanish-American War and World War I, was the first major American movie star to enlist in the U.S. Army during World War II.
He eschewed his celebrity status and lobbied for a chance to see action, and wound up as a highly decorated combat pilot, rising through the ranks to colonel by the time he returned to America in early 1945 (decades later, in 1985, he was promoted to major general in the Air Force reserves, the highest rank ever attained by an actor in U.S. history).
Stewart pushed back hard against the notion that his post-war film choices and performances, beginning with “Wonderful Life,” were darker and more pessimistic because of what he had lived through in combat, as some critics and movie historians have suggested.
“Not at all! When I came back, I was very much optimistic,” he insisted, his voice rising, placing special emphasis on the words “all” and “optimistic” with the patented Stewart spike that reflected a respectful but unmistakable forcefulness.
The movie’s tone aside, another thing didn’t help “Wonderful Life’s” box- office prospects when it opened: a real white Christmas that year that may have warmed hearts seated around the Christmas tree but discouraged moviegoers from venturing outside. Snow blasted the eastern U.S.
Ironically, filming took place from April through July, 1946, in warm, sunny California, at RKO Radio Pictures Studios in Culver City and at the RKO movie ranch in Encino, with the temperature sometimes hitting a sticky 90 degrees.
Snow was simulated by use of 3,000 tons of shaved ice, 300 tons of plaster, 300 tons of gypsum and 6,000 gallons of chemicals. The “snowstorm” that occurs when Stewart’s character attempts suicide took three weeks to create and required the largest special effects crew assembled for a movie up to that time.
Stewart vividly remembered the first time Capra described the film to him.
“Frank didn’t even have the story for ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ on paper when he invited me over to his house one day,” Stewart recounted.
“He told me, ‘I have an idea for a picture,’ and started taking about an angel named Clarence who hadn’t won his wings, and that I’m gonna commit suicide, and he said, ‘I’m not telling this very well.’’ I said, ‘Frank, if you want to do a picture about an angel named Clarence who hasn’t won his wings, I’m your man.”
Capra made it clear that “It’s a Wonderful Life” was his favorite film.
Without hesitation, Stewart said it was his, too.
“For quite a few reasons,” the legendary actor explained. “Number one, it was the first picture I got to do after the war, and maybe for that reason, it’s sort of a sentimental favorite. But beyond that, I think the picture had the main sort of things that mean so much to me … an idea with two basic points: There’s no man who is born to be a failure, and that no man is poor who has friends. Now, from those two sentences, the secret of the movie is made.”
A number of things were improvised, like the recurrent bit where George keeps knocking off the knob on the Baileys’ bannister railing.
“The first time I walked by,” Stewart said, “it was loose and it came off when I grabbed it. We just left the bit in. Frank and I never discussed it.”
These days, audiences can remember every facial expression, movement and line of dialogue from the film.
Its impact was poignantly driven home to me after my article was published and I was invited to appear on a San Diego radio program during which I played part of my taped interview with Stewart and listeners phoned in to share their feelings about the movie.
The program, with a broadcast reach across the United States, elicited a number of calls, but none as touching and revealing as one from a young woman in New England who sounded to be in her early ‘40s.
“I watch this movie as often as I can every single holiday season, every time it runs, no matter how many times,” she said with an unusual reverence, “and every time I do, I make sure I see with it was as many friends and members of my family as I can. I just like to do that, have them with me and surrounding me.”
I inquired about her family, and sensing that there was more to her story, asked whether her parents always watched with her.
“Well,” she said, “my father passed away.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I replied, and before I could finish, she added, “He jumped off a bridge.”
She was apparently unaware how her father’s death related to the attempt by Stewart’s character in the film to take his own life in precisely the same manner before being rescued by an angel.
Maybe, in her own mind, she was rescuing her father ever time she watched the film. And maybe the film rescues us from our own personal travails every time we watch as well, and that’s why it’s become a revered classic loved by generations. It provides perspective and gives us hope.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” has been chosen by the American Film Institute as one of 100 best American movies ever made (it was №11 on AFI’s 1998 greatest-films list, №20 in 2007, and was its choice for the №1 most-inspirational American film ever). In 1990, it was designated as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
As for Stewart, whose image off-screen as well as on it seemed to so perfectly embody the protaganist of the film, the AFI honored him with its Life Achievement Award in 1980, stating: “In a career of extraordinary range and depth, Jimmy Stewart has come to embody on the screen the very image of the typical American. Whether flying the ocean as Charles Lindbergh, going to Washington as Senator Jefferson Smith, or playing ordinary men who somehow never got around to leaving their home towns, Stewart has captured the essence of American hopes, doubts, and aspirations. His idealism, his determination, his vulnerability, and above all, his basic decency shine through every role he plays …”
In 1999, the AFI ranked Stewart behind only Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, respectively, on its “American screen legend” list of male actors, which honors actors recognized for their contributions to classical Hollywood cinema — “an actor or team of actors with a significant presence in American feature-length films whose screen debut occurred in or before 1950, or whose debut occurred after 1950 but whose death has marked a complete body of work.” He is the most-represented actor on its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.
When I interviewed Hollywood pioneer Andy Hervey, Warner Bros.’ first publicity chief who later had similar stints at MGM and Paramount, jobs that required him not only to get actors’ names in the headlines but all too often to keep less flattering stories about their personal lives out, he described working alongside some of the greatest stars of the Golden Age. When it came to Stewart, he had this to say:
“I liked him better than anyone in Hollywood. He was more man than any of them. I remember when they were going to release ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ a Boy Scout convention in Philadelphia wanted him to speak to them. His agent said, ‘Go ahead and call him — he’ll probably do it. I had a hard time getting him to take any money for ‘Greatest Show,’ because he wanted to play a clown so much. Call him.’ His answer was that he’d pay his own way, he’d be in New York anyway.
“He’s the most decent person I think I ever met in Hollywood. In World War II, he couldn’t get into the service at first because he was so thin. You looked in his kitchen and he had every weight-producing food known to man, and eventually he got his weight up and entered the service. Jimmy told me, ‘My father was an Army captain in World War I — I want my children to be just as proud of me as I was of him.”
Stewart brought all of those special “unusually usual” Everyman qualities to bear in “Its a Wonderful Life,” injecting it with a humanity that gives it a universal timelessness that few films have been able to achieve. A 2022 Variety survey of editors and critics tapped it as the eighth-greatest movie of all time.
Of the film, Capra would later say: “‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ sums up my philosophy of filmmaking. First, to exalt the worth of the individual. Second, to champion man — plead his causes, protest any degradation of his dignity, spirit, or divinity. And third, to dramatize the viability of the individual — as in the theme of the film itself.
“I wanted ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ to say what Walt Whitman said to every man, woman, and babe in the world: ‘The sum of all known reverances I add up in you, whoever you are … ‘ I wanted it to reflect the compelling words of Fra Giovanni of nearly five centuries ago: ‘The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within reach, is joy. There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see we only have to look. I beseech you to look!’ …
“I’m glad people want to keep looking at ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ I hope they’ll keep looking at it and loving it long after I’m gone.”
At film’s end, having beheld what the world would have been like without him, George dashes back to where his nightmare began, the bridge, this time not to kill himself but to beg for his life back, repeating as he buries his hands in his face, “I want to live! I want to live!” His prayer is answered, and reality is restored. A grateful George races through the streets of Bedford Falls, now back as it was, shouting “Merry Christmas!” to everyone and anyone. Reaching home, he finds a crowd of townspeople rallied by Mary and Uncle Billy who are gleefully pouring money donations into a basket — more than enough to cover the Building and Loan’s missing funds. The bank examiner sits at a table with an adding machine, giddily ringing up the cash.
“To my brother George — the richest man in town,” his Navy-hero brother Harry just back from the war proudly announces, his dark-blue uniform flecked with Christmas Eve snow as he holds aloft a glass of champagne like a glistening chalice at some unseen altar.
Among the donations, George discovers a copy of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” with an inscription inside written by Clarence. It reminds George that no man is a failure who has friends — and, by the way, thanks George for helping him finally win his wings.
Then a bell on the Christmas tree rings, and George’s youngest daughter Zuzu tells him that when a bell rings it means an angel has gotten his wings. A tearful, relieved — and reborn — George agrees.
He and the audience have taken a journey, together, in which they’ve learned about the immeasurable value of friendship and the gift of life itself.
Which makes “It’s a Wonderful Life” the richest Christmas movie in town.
Still.
