Capra Corn

Amazon Prime has It's a Wonderful Life so I watched it over the holiday for what must be the zillionth time. I know it almost by heart, but it's been a few years since I've last seen it.  So, among the puzzles it holds for me is why I still find it compelling to view.  One explanation is that it is a tearjerker and I've got a soft spot for movies like that.  But there are other things in the story that bring about questions, including several I didn't find answered when I surfed the Web to read about the movie.  I'll pose them here.

The first thing to note is that Capra's style in this movie is to bring in a host of issues, touch on them in a gentle way, and then leave them, perhaps for us to reflect on after the movie is over. The one most evident to me in this viewing is prejudice - Northern European whites, as represented by the character, Mr Potter, against Italian immigrants.  Potter refers to them as "garlic eaters." I don't believe I've ever heard the expression used in a different context.  Has anyone else heard the phrase used elsewhere?  Capra was himself of Italian extraction, so surely had a distaste for other slurs, which if used would have added realism to the story, but otherwise would have changed its tone.

The year the movie came out, 1946, Joe DiMaggio was the center fielder for the New York Yankees, probably the most familiar name associated with Major League Baseball, and quite possibly the best player in the game.  Yet in New York City when I was growing up, 20 years later, there was a pecking order among the ethnicities where the Italians perhaps were in the middle, but definitely not at the top. In Jane Leavy's book about Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, which I wrote about here, she recounts a story where on meeting Mantle he introduces himself as Mickey Lipshitz.   She inquires why.  Mickey responds with something he learned very early on as a ballplayer in New York - When you're going good you're Jewish, but when you're going bad you're EYE-talian.   Indeed.

The prejudice as depicted in the movie is linked to the predatory capitalism that Potter emblemizes, owning a slum where many of the townspeople live and pay rent to Potter.  This serves as a backdrop for what the Baily Building and Loan would accomplish, enabling people to leave this slum and to own their own homes in Baily Park, which in the post World War II era was a time of great economic expansion where the many shared in the wealth being created.  These homes would then appreciate in value as a result.  Potter, who prided himself on being an excellent businessman, entirely missed this investment opportunity.  His Bank had turned down mortgage applications that the Building and Loan later approved.  In some sense this shows the great change in the American mindset, from the late 1920s and into the 1930s to the post World War II era.

Pa Baily, who started the Building and Loan along with Uncle Billy, could be taken as prescient, getting ordinary working people into their own homes well before the post-war boom. But a characteristic of the "business model" that was employed by the Building and Loan was to allow the customers to capture the bulk of the gains from trade.  Nobody at the Building and Loan became rich, even after the war, definitely not George Baily.

To be fair to Potter, his prejudice was on class lines as much as it was on ethnic divisions. In the story the two melded together.  So, one question the movie brings up is this.  What happened to prejudice of the sort that Potter embodied?  Did it fade out as racial prejudice took it's place?  Or has it survived, perhaps morphing into other forms of grievance?   WASP was a pretty common designation when I was growing up.  I don't see it used nowadays.  What does that reflect?

Let me use that question to segue into a different but related topic.  Who views It's a Wonderful Life these days?  Does watching it correlate at all with political affiliation?  This is one of those things that we'll never learn, unless the polling organizations find it a worthwhile question to ask.  But let me speculate.  George and Mary, the heroes in the story, are completely accepting of other people in the story.  (Of course, George gets very upset at Zuzu's schoolteacher, and eventually gets socked in the jaw by her husband for having balled out the schoolteacher on the telephone, but that's because he blamed her for Zuzu getting the sniffles, and he was under a huge amount of stress at the time.)   This acceptance of people regardless of ethnicity or class might be touted as embracing the Liberal view, and perhaps can be seen as a forerunner of today's identity politics.  On the other hand, the Bailey's are clearly very family oriented and the movie depicts a very strong sense of community among the people in Bedford Falls who know George and Mary.  Indeed, traditional values are what tie the community together.  Conceivably, this could appeal to Conservative viewers as well.  Does it?

Now another segue as I am intermittently reading Maslow and he writes so extensively about being psychology, an end state of personal development where all challenges have been met and the individual perceives the world as it truly is.  In what I've been reading recently, Maslow seems to use the B-psychology label as much as he uses the expression self-actualization.  Which character in the movie most represents this psychology of being?  Most people probably would say George Baily, as he is the protagonist in the story and performs a variety of selfless acts during his lifetime.  Yet I would argue that Mary Baily is the better candidate here.  George has ambivalence, which he expresses many times in the movie.  He wants to leave Bedford Falls because it is a crummy little town.  As a kid and then again as he is ready to leave for college, he wants to make a lot of money and earn fame from his creations, as if these external validators would show he is an important person.  Of course, the story plays out so he never achieves these things.  Mary, in contrast, has pure motives from an early age.  She is in love with George even as a kid.  She makes a wish that they will live in that drafty old house when they are married and, of course, the wish comes true.  She gives up the money meant for their honeymoon to stop the run on the Building and Loan during the Great Depression. And, she's the one who contacts all the friends when George is in trouble with the bank examiner.   She was living the life she wanted to live.

Let me not talk at all about the fluff part of the movie, Clarence getting his wings and all of that.  It is charming, but I have nothing new to add here.  I want to talk about a few more detail things and then close.

For whatever reason, this is the first time watching It's a Wonderful Life where it occurred to me that Bert the cop and Ernie the cabdriver were used as precursors for the muppet characters with the same names.  On this one, I guess I'm slow on the uptake as it apparently has occurred to many viewers.  This site says it is merely a coinky dink.  Of course, tracing the full causality in our own thinking for when a spark of an idea emerges is virtually impossible to do.  So, who knows?

Then I learned that Capra went through many different screenwriters before he got a script to his liking.  This included some whose names I recognized.  (Capra himself is credited as one of those screenwriters.)  Donna Reed reported this was her hardest movie role, though I didn't find out what made it so difficult for her.  And Jimmy Stewart was apparently very nervous about the role, particularly the kissing scenes (youth is wasted on the wrong people - a truly great line) because he had served in World War II and this was the first movie he made after returning, so he was out of practice.  I'm going to speculate that Capra was something of a perfectionist, which put stress on Donna Reed that she wasn't used to.  Jimmy Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore too, had worked with Capra on earlier movies, so were more used to his style.   I do have some vague recollections of watching Jimmy Stewart talk about the acting style he typified, where the goal was for it all to look effortless and spontaneous, in contrast to the reality of the hard work in making the movie.

One last point is about intellectual property.  I learned that It's a Wonderful Life is in the public domain.  The original copyright holders didn't renew the copyright, because the movie was not a big success after it was released.  One reason that TV stations were so willing to air it around the holidays is that they didn't have to pay royalties to do so.  So the movie took on a second life and has since become an American fixture.  It seems to me this offers an excellent example in which to reconsider our copyright laws.  Such a revival probably can't happen for most movies (or for most recorded music).  But if there a few other hidden gems that would attract attention, yet aren't seen or heard now, because they copyright holder is keeping the property tightly, isn't that a shame and a huge social loss?  Why, then, do we allow this?