Anyone with a heart loves It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), one of the greatest icons in the history of American culture. But its director, the Sicilian immigrant Frank Capra, was also a genius and one of the greatest directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Most of Capra’s films bubble over with an immigrant’s idealism about Roosevelt’s Greatest Generation America, and this one bubbles most of all. But Capra was also a hard-nosed Sicilian realist who grew up in a poor hick town not far from another poor hick town called Corleone. So he knew which end is up as only a Sicilian could, and the moral clarity and righteous indignation about America’s flaws he brought to most of his films is epitomized in this one. Bottom line: lots to enjoy again in this film (I’ve probably seen it ten times, and it never gets old for me), but also lots to discuss. So much to think about in this encapsulation of the America we have lost, the same America as in Boys in the Boat, whose motto, you’ll recall, is “It’s not about YOU. It’s about the boat.” George Bailey’s, Frank Capra’s, and FDR’s ideal entirely. 

 

 

 

 

About Fred White and his passion for movies: “I've been a movie buff since I was eight or so and used to ride my bike to our neighborhood theater in Atlanta on Saturday, staying there from noon to 6PM, to watch a double feature, with a news reel, a couple of weekly "serials," and some other "shorts." As an adult, I was lucky enough to be able to teach film, as well as literature, for forty years in Baltimore at Goucher College. For example, for years I taught a course on the films of Stanley Kubrick and their literary sources. I team-taught an interdisciplinary honors course with a Japanese history professor called "Japan in Film," a survey of Japanese history from the 1930s to the 1990s using nothing but Japanese films as texts. And when I taught composition classes, I had the students view, discuss, and write about the films of the Coen Brothers.