It's a Wonderful Life

It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is now treated as a Christmas classic, but it lost money on release and owes its present fame to a legal mistake. George Bailey has never managed to leave his town, deferring everything he wanted in order to keep his father's small loan company alive. On Christmas Eve, facing ruin, he decides to jump off a bridge. An angel arrives and shows him what the town would look like had he never been born. There are two real stories behind it. The first: it failed to recover its $2.3 million budget, and Liberty Films was sold as a result. Frank Capra's attempt to run his own studio ended with this film. The second is stranger. Republic Pictures, which held the copyright, forgot to renew it in 1974 and the film fell into the public domain. Television stations could air it without paying royalties, so they aired it endlessly every Christmas. It was not shown constantly because it was a classic. It became a classic because it was shown constantly. A third note: in 1947 a report reaching the FBI flagged the film as suspect. The reasoning was that making the banker Potter the most hated character might be an attempt to discredit bankers. The memo sits inside the Bureau's file on the motion picture industry. It runs 131 minutes, in black and white. Good for: classics, Christmas films, and family viewing. Less good for: it contains a suicide attempt, the pacing is old fashioned, and the last half hour lays the sentiment on thick.