I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” the other night. Oh, SO wonderful …. as always. I have a couple posts I want to put up about it.
Here’s an excerpt from a piece Jimmy Stewart himself wrote on this classic. I love hearing his thoughts about it:
Frank (Capra, the director) came to see me and started telling me about it: “Now, you’re in a small town,” Frank said, “and things aren’t going well–and you begin to wish you’d never been born. You decide to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into a river–and an angel named Clarence comes down from heaven–and Clarence hasn’t won his wings yet, you see. But he comes down to save you by jumping into the river. But Clarence can’t swim, so you save him.”
And then Frank stopped dead. He said, “This–this story doesn’t tell very well, does it?”
Well, I just said, “Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I’m your man.”
Frank had never worked on a story that meant so much to him. He changed the name to It’s a Wonderful Life, and we started to shoot it in the spring of 1946.
Whenever Frank thought he had made a mistake, he’d go to great lengths to fix it. I remember the day we shot the scene where George Bailey, the film’s main character and the part I played, having apparently misplaced $8000, huddles at Martini’s Bar and asks God for help. “Dear Father in Heaven,” I say, “I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way.”
In the middle of praying, I was overcome with emotion and started to cry. Frank didn’t know I was going to cry, you see. And neither did I. Afterward, Frank said, “I think I made a mistake, Jim. The camera was too far away when you cried. Do you think you could do it once more?” But because the emotion had been spontaneous, I didn’t think I could do it over again.
Frank said nothing more about it. But he stayed up that whole night enlarging every single frame of that scene–maybe 200 feet of film–on an optical printer. So when you see that close-up of me crying, it’s not the camera moving in–it’s a cut-in to that painstakingly enlarged footage.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes is of family and friends gathering around the Bailey Christmas tree, helping George out by replacing the missing money. When we finished the picture, Frank expressed his hope that “it’ll be a film that says to those who can’t afford more education, or lose their job, or take radiation treatments, ‘You are the salt of the earth, and It’s a Wonderful Life is my memorial to you. No man is poor who has one friend. Three friends and you’re filthy rich!’ ”
The sad thing, as I said, was that right after the war people didn’t want this story. They just wanted wild slapstick comedy, westerns, stuff like that. It took a while for the country to sort of quiet down. So It’s a Wonderful Life got no Oscars and didn’t do much business in 1946 and 1947, which meant the end of Liberty Films, the independent company Frank had founded. It was one of the lowest lows of Frank’s life.
He made only five more feature films and an educational series for television. Meanwhile, It’s a Wonderful Life began playing on televisions every Christmas. Groups of friends gathered in one another’s homes on Christmas Eve to decorate the tree and watch It’s a Wonderful Life together.
Frank and I started getting the most amazing letters about the effect the film was having on people’s lives. “I don’t know if this means anything to you,” many of them would begin, “but your film has been an inspiration to me.”
My wife, Gloria, heard about one man who tried to commit suicide and was given a videocassette of the film by his friends as a way of telling him, “Please don’t–you’ve made a difference for good in our lives.”
Many writers have referred to the part in which Clarence the Angel tells George, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” As one columnist once wrote of the film: “In an increasingly impersonal world, this is an urgently needed message: that we count.”
*****
I love that Frank Capra spent all that time enlarging that footage just to get the perfect shot. (And it WAS the perfect shot.) It shows such dedication to the moment, to the story. It shows the love he had for what this film was about. True artists are dedicated that way, staying up all night, rehearsing something time and again, rewriting until it’s just right — signs of true devotion to the creative process. Inspiring.
And what a lovely tribute by the great Jimmy Stewart, don’t you think?
“If you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I’m your man.”
How can you NOT love that man?