FWIW "ITS A WONDERULL LIFE"

[Ca.]

Their was a recent article in Sott addressing the movie "Its a Wonderfull Life". I wanted to review the article again, but was not able to find it. What i do remember was that the article tended to make it seem that was suggesting that the movie was sort if wash of what could be considered to propagandize reality, as it is always shown at Christmas time and tends to make things a little fluffy then they are at this point in time with all that is happening on the big blue marble.

I will say that there is no question the ideas about the setting of the movies background that i have never been in a town in the states that was as peacefull, as Bedford Falls, in this day and age or any time in my life and doubt it could even exists. Maybe others have but i have not had the experience.

For anyone whom has not seen the movie, the story line is a of man whom all his life from childhood to adult, is confronted with many adjustments and charges that continue to alter his life and future dreams to helping others continue the futures and for fill there dreams. Then one day his life is confronted with a problem that moves him to the brink of insanity, with the contemplation of suicide having exhausted all his ability's to find a solution to an ordeal.

The opening of the movie starts with all his friends, family, praying on the eve of Christmas for help that might bring salvation to troubled and confused George Baily (played by Jimmy Stewart) whom consciously searching for a miracle at a time of great desperation. In his darkest moment, at a bar called Martinis, he breaks down into prayer for help and guidance from the Almighty. It is when he finds himself at the bridge facing the only option in a rash idea of desperation of a desperate person in a desperate time is to jump into the icy waters, hoping a life insurance policy might help others in his passing.

But his prayer's are answered and the Angel by the name of Clarence, is sent to to aid him (and in doing so will receive his wings if successful) in his ordeal of life and death. Clarence gives George a wish that he has asked for. The wish that he was never born, and he is given the vision and shown the ramification's of that wish, and the ripple effect it has on his family, friends, and the town of Bedford Falls.

The original story was written by Philip Van Doren Stern From Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Wonderful_Life

The original story "The Greatest Gift" was written by Philip Van Doren Stern (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Van_doren_Stern) in November 1939. After being unsuccessful in getting the story published, he decided to make it into a Christmas card, and mailed 200 copies to family and friends in December 1943. The story came to the attention of RKO producer David Hempstead, who showed it to Cary Grant's Hollywood agent and, in April 1944, RKO Pictures bought the rights to the story for $10,000 hoping to turn the story into a vehicle for Grant. RKO created three unsatisfactory scripts before shelving the planned movie with Grant going on to make another Christmas picture, The Bishop's Wife.

At the suggestion of RKO studio chief Charles Koerner, Frank Capra read "The Greatest Gift" and immediately saw its potential. RKO, anxious to unload the project, sold the rights in 1945 to Capra's production company, Liberty Films, which had a nine-film distribution agreement with RKO, for $10,000, and threw in the three scripts for free. Capra, along with writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett with Jo Swerling, Michael Wilson, and Dorothy Parker brought in to "polish" the script—turned the story and what was worth using from the three scripts into a screenplay that Capra would rename It's a Wonderful Life. The script underwent many revisions throughout pre-production and during filming. Final screenplay credit went to Goodrich, Hackett and Capra, with "additional scenes" by Jo Swerling.

Also also a link from "Zoetrope Allstory" for the original story, that was written by Philip Van Doren Stern, and passed around as greeting card and eventully picked up by Capra, before it made into a script for the movie version.

http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=132

And lastly, is a personal account from Mr. Jimmy Stewart's found memory's of the making of this picture, and it is his last sentence, in this reflection that is what the C's have have expressed of the meaning of life.

"Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future"

."


Jimmy Stewart Remembers "It's a Wonderful Life"

A friend told me recently that seeing a movie I made in 1946 is a holiday tradition in his family, "like putting up the Christmas tree". That movie is It's a Wonderful Life, and out of all the 80 films I've made, it's my favorite. But it has an odd history.

When the war was over in 1945, I came back home to California from three years' service in the Air Force. I had been away from the film business, my MGM contract had run out, and frankly, not knowing how to get started again. I was just a little bit scared. Hank Fonda was in the same boat, and we sort of wandered around together, talking, flying kites and stuff. But nothing much was happening.

Then one day Frank Capra phoned me. The great director had also been away in service, making the Why We Fight documentary series for the military, and he admitted to being a little frightened too. But he had a movie in mind. We met in his office to talk about it.

He said the idea came from a Christmas story written by Phillip Van Doren Stern. Stern couldn't sell the story anywhere, but he finally had 200 twenty-four page pamphlets printed up at his own expense, and he sent them to his friends as a greeting card.

"Now, listen," Frank began hesitantly. He seemed a little embarrassed about what he was going to say. "The story starts in heaven, and it's sort of the Lord telling somebody to go down to earth because there's a fellow who is in trouble, and this heavenly being goes to a small town, and..."

Frank swallowed and took a deep breath. "Well, what it boils down to is, this fellow who thinks he's a failure in life jumps off a bridge. The Lord sends down an angel named Clarence, who hasn't earned his wings yet, and Clarence jumps into the water to save the guy. But the angel can't swim, so the guy has to save him, and then..."

Frank stopped and wiped his brow. "This doesn't tell very well, does it?"

I jumped up. "Frank, if you want to do a picture about a guy who jumps off a bridge and an angel named Clarence who hasn't won his wings yet coming down to save him, well, I'm your man!"

Production of It's a Wonderful Life started April 15, 1946, and from the beginning there was a certain something special about the film. Even the set was special. Two months had been spent creating the town of Bedford Falls, New York. For the winter scenes, the special effects department invented a new kind of realistic snow instead of using the traditional white cornflakes. As one of largest American movie sets ever made until then, Bedford Falls had 75 stores and buildings on four acres with a three block main street lined with 20 full grown oak trees.

As I walked down that shady street the morning we started work, it reminded me of my hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania. I almost expected to hear the bells of the Presbyterian church, where Mother played the organ and Dad sang in the choir. I chuckled, remembering how the fire siren would go off, and Dad, a volunteer fireman, would slip out of the choir loft. If it was a false alarm, Dad would sneak back and sort of give a nod to everyone to assure them that none of their houses was in danger.

I remembered how, after I got started in pictures, Dad, who'd come to California for a visit, asked, "Where do you go to church around here?"

"Well," I stammered, "I haven't been going -- there's none around here."

Dad disappeared and came back with four men. "You must not have looked very hard, Jim," he said, "because there's a Presbyterian church just three blocks from here, and here are the elders. They're building a new building now, and I told them you were a movie star and you would help them." And so, Brentwood Presbyterian was the first church I belonged to out here.

Later that church was the one in which Gloria and I were married. A few years after that it was the same church I'd slip into during the day when Gloria was near death after our twin girls were born. Then after we moved, we attended Beverly Hills Presbyterian, a church we could walk to.

t wasn't the elaborate movie set, however, that made It's a Wonderful Life so different; much of it was the story. The character I played was George Bailey, an ordinary kind of fella who thinks he's never accomplished anything in life. His dreams of becoming a famous architect, of traveling the world and living adventurously, have not been fulfilled. Instead, he feels trapped in a humdrum job in a small town. And when faced with a crisis in which he feels he has failed everyone, he breaks under the strain and flees to the bridge. That's when this guardian angel, Clarence, comes down on Christmas Eve to show him what his community would be like without him. The angel takes him back through his life to show how our ordinary everyday efforts are really big achievements.

Clarence reveals how George Bailey's loyalty to the job at the building and loan office has saved families and homes, how his little kindnesses have changed the lives of others, and how the ripples of his love will spread through the world, helping make it a better place.

Good as the script was, there was still something else about the movie that made it different. It's hard to explain. I, for one, had things happen to me during the filming that never happened in any other picture I've made.

In one scene, for example, George Bailey is faced with unjust criminal charges and, not knowing where to turn, ends up in a little roadside restaurant. He is unaware that most of the people in town are arduously praying for him. In this scene, at the lowest point in George Bailey's life, Frank Capra was shooting a long shot of me slumped in despair. In agony I raise my eyes and following the script, plead, "God...God...dear Father in heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if You're up there and You can hear me, show me the way, I'm at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God..."

As I said those words, I felt the loneliness and hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. This was not planned at all, but the power of that prayer, the realization that our Father in heaven is there to help the hopeless had reduced me to tears.

Frank, who loved spontaneity in his films, was ecstatic. He wanted a close-up of me saying that prayer but was sensitive enough to know that my breaking down was real and that repeating it in another take was unlikely. But Frank got his close-up anyway.

The following week he worked long hours in the film laboratory, again and again enlarging the frames of the scene so that eventually it would appear as a closeup on screen. I believe nothing like this had ever been done before. It involved thousands of individual enlargements with extra time and money. But he felt is was worth it.

There was a growing excitement as we strove day and night through the early summer of 1946. We threw everything we had into our work. Finally, after three months, shooting some 68 miles of 35-millimeter film, we complete filming and had a wrap up party for everyone. It was an outdoor picnic with three-legged races and burlap-bag sprints, just like the picnics back home in Pennsylvania. At the outing, Frank talked enthusiastically about the picture. He felt that the film as well as the actors would be up for Academy Awards. Both of us wanted it to win, not only because we believed in its message, but also for the reassurance we needed in this time of starting over. But life doesn't always work out the way we want it to. The movie came out in December 1946, and from the beginning we could tell it was not going to be the success we'd hoped for. The critics had mixed reactions. Some liked it ("a humble drama of essential truth"), others felt it "too sentimental...a figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes."

As more reviews came out, our hopes sank lower and lower. During early February 1947, eight other current films, including Sinbad the Sailor and Betty Grables's The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, out-ranked it in box-office income. The postwar public seemed to prefer lighthearted fare. At the end of 1947 It's a Wonderful Life ranked 27th in earnings among the other releases that season.

And although it earned several Oscar nominations, despite our high hopes it won nothing. "Best picture for 1946" went to The Best Years of Our Lives. By the end of 1947 the film was quietly put on the shelf.

But a curious thing happened. The movie simply refused to stay on the shelf. Those who loved it loved it a lot, and they must have told others. They wouldn't let it die any more than the angel Clarence would let George Bailey die. When it began to be shown on television, a whole new audience fell in love with it.

Today I've heard the filmed called "an American cultural phenomenon". Well, maybe so, but it seems to me there is nothing phenomenal about the movie itself. It's simply about an ordinary man who discovers that living each ordinary day honorably, with faith in God and selfless concern for others, can make for a truly wonderful life."

Movie trivia of It's a "Wonderfull Life" :

1. Pharmacist Gower's son's death at college is attributed to "Influenza" in the telegram that Young George reads, dated May 3, 1919. Around that time, there was the "Spanish Flu" worldwide epidemic that claimed millions of lives.

2. When Officer Bert shoots at George, the "s", the "v" and the "i" in the electric "Pottersville" sign far away in the distance, go out.

3 .Lionel Barrymore convinced James Stewart to take the role of George, despite his feeling that he was not up to it so soon after World War II.

4. For the scene that required Donna Reed to throw a rock into the window of the Granville House, Frank Capra hired a marksman to shoot it out for her on cue. To everyone's amazement, Donna Reed broke the window with true aim and heft without the assistance of the hired marksman!

5. In 1947, an FBI analyst submitted, without comment, an addition to a running memo on "Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry," recording the opinion of an industry source who said that the film's "obvious" attempt to discredit bankers "is a common trick used by Communists."

6. After the war Frank Capra set up Liberty Films with George Stevens and William Wyler to make more serious, soul-searching films. This and L'enjeu (1948) were Liberty's only productions.

7. The instant that George says "God" on the bridge, it starts snowing, showing that he is back in the real world.

It's a Wonderful Life HD Part 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xIzkZ83MzA&feature=related

 

[Sinapi]

You mean this one? _http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/24/its_wonderful_life_terrifying_movie_ever

"It's a Wonderful Life": The most terrifying movie ever
Underneath the warm fuzzies, Frank Capra's holiday classic is a tale of hunger, greed and a troubled America
By Rich Cohen

*

Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life"

I don't care what your parents told you. "It's a Wonderful Life," that reassuring holiday spectacle, is really the most terrifying Hollywood film ever made. It's one of a handful of masterpieces directed by Frank Capra, an Italian immigrant who loved America because America saved him. Capra lived through the Depression, then through the rise of terrible ideologies. He knew how bad things could get. He knew, too, that the United States was not immune and this knowledge spiked his love with the worst kind of fear. The result was that special melancholy, blue shot through with black, that runs through his films, the best of which are parables that operate on various levels, some of which were probably unknown to Capra himself.

If you were to cut "It's a Wonderful Life" by 20 minutes, its true subject would be revealed: In this shortened version, George Bailey, played by a Jimmy Stewart forever on the edge of hysteria, after being betrayed by nearly everyone in his life, after being broken on the wheel of capitalism, flees to the outskirts of town, Bedford Falls, N.Y., where he leaps off a bridge with thoughts of suicide.

That's the movie: The good man driven insane.

Oh no, you might say, you've missed the entire point. Following the trials of George Bailey without seeing his rescue is like hearing the story of the Passion without knowing of the Resurrection. It's just Jesus on the cross saying, "Oh, Father, why hast Thou forsaken me," followed by a star wipe and end credits. It's the power of editing. Where you start and where you finish is the whole story. That's all modern literature is: the identical image cropped. It's the same with the narrative experienced by everyone every day. The story is reframed for taste. On this channel, Barack Obama fails and is condemned. On that channel, Barack Obama stumbles but is resurrected in the way of George Bailey. Did the Chicago Bears lose? Well, then let's find the channel on which the Chicago Bears win.

In other words, I did not miss the point. The story of the George Bailey who is honored and saved remains. It's the explicit message of the final scene: A man with friends is never poor. But another, deeper message is there, too -- it's Capra wailing at that secret register picked up by bats and dogs, saying, "Help, help, America is in trouble!"

"It's a Wonderful Life" is about hunger. It's about greed. It's about the many ways a good man is stymied. Finally, it's about George Bailey, whose decency prevents him even from killing himself. Though he wants to jump, he dives into the river to save another suicide, instead -- the angel, it turns out, who has come to show George that his life has been wonderful after all, because human commerce is a web and as part of that web George has affected and saved thousands of people. To make this point, the angel famously shows George what the world would be like had he never been born, leading him back into town, which had been Bedford Falls but is now named after the treacherous banker who controls it: Pottersville.

Bedford Falls was quaint and fine; Pottersville is vulgar and mean.

In this new world, George Bailey's wife is a spinster. His brother is dead. His house is a ruin.

OK, OK, says George, I've had enough.

Just like that, he's returned to life, resurrected.

He runs home, where friends and relatives have gathered to save him.

Here's my point: I do not think the hidden message vanishes when the movie goes Hollywood and happy. I believe the resolution of the darker movie is, in fact, still there, wrapped around the happy ending of the classic. Look again at the closing frames -- shots of Jimmy Stewart staring at his friends. In most, he's joyful. But in a few, he's terrified. As I said, this is a terrifying movie. An hour earlier George was ready to kill himself. He has now returned from a death experience. He was among the unborn, had crossed over like Dante's hero, had seen this world from beyond the veil. In those frames -- "The Night Journey of George Bailey" -- I don't think he's seeing the world that would exist had he never been born. I think he's seeing the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own.

George had been living in Pottersville all along. He just didn't know it. Because he was seeing the world through his eyes -- not as it was, but as he was: honest and fair. But on "The Night Journey," George is nothing and nobody. When the angel took him out of his life, he took him out of his consciousness, out from behind his eyes. It was only then that he saw America. Bedford Falls was the fantasy. Pottersville is where we live. If you don't believe me, examine the dystopia of the Capra movie -- the nighttime world of neon bars and drunks and showgirl floozies. Does Bedford Falls feel more like the place you live, or does Pottersville? I live in a place that looks very much like Bedford Falls, but after 10 minutes in line at the bank or in the locker room where the squirts are changing for hockey I know I'm in Pottersville.

I'm betting this was as much the case in Capra's time as it is in our own. He loved America but was watching the triumph of Pottersville. That's why, in the last scene, George looks at his friends with terror. He's happy to be alive, but he's disillusioned, wised up in just the worst way. He finally knows the world as it really is, what his friends are capable of, the dark potential coiled in each of them. His wife is a spinster in Pottersville because, if she's not with George, she cannot be anything. She's just one of two characters who are, in fact, the same in both worlds, the other being Mr. Potter. Everyone else is two-faced, masked. Simply put, George has been cursed with knowledge, shown the truth of the world -- seen hidden things. It's the sort of vision that makes a person go insane.

Instead of ending the movie 20 minutes early, it might be interesting to let it run for another hour, to see the hero after the guests have left the house and the money has been collected and the children gone to sleep -- George left to grapple alone with the meaning and the message of what he has been allowed to see. He is like Jacob and he has wrestled with the angel and carries a terrible burden. He would either sit quietly in darkness, or weep like a baby, or wander through the streets of Pottersville, shouting, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

You may also find this thread interesting: _http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=4501.0

It's one of my favorite movies. Thanks for the info. :)

 

[Ca.]

Thanks zlyja, Its is an interesting comparison and a good real world depiction of current events to say the least. Its would be interesting to see where the original idea came from, like the "Wizard of Oz" which was inspired by the C's as the future and fate of humanity.

Perhaps he is right, that there is always a fine line in the movie, between staying together and coming apart and coffee and cake land to reality. But this film was made just after WW2, and nation couping with the trauma's of war. I feel there is some Synchronicity in moving from short story, to the big screen, and a lot element's that didn't favor its production. But it happen anyway, through some lucky breaks.

So i have to wounder, if there was a bigger message here, then what is expressed to today's comparison.

 

[Ca.]

Son gives his father a classic car.

http://www.wimp.com/classiccar/​

 

[PottersvilleUSA]

This is the very article that inspired me to name my new website and discussion forum PottersvilleUSA! I hope it's not crass or forbidden to link to it: _http://www.pottersvilleusa.com/forums/content.php.
I just think that Pottersville (the alternative reality shown to George if he'd never been born) is so much like our actual reality, at least those of us in the US. And Mr Potter is every president since JFK, putting profit over people.

Dang but Lionel Barrymore really sold that role! He just oozes greed and disdain. Again, like he was born to inhabit the oval office.


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