You know those classics that every year you insist that you'll finally get around to watching? Well Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life had been on my Watchlist longer than I've had my big grey beard, and after ticking White Christmas off my list last year, my obvious Yuletide blindspots are diminishing with every passing year. Capra's film has been another of those films that has been all over the UK Christmas television schedules yet again this year, something which makes its omission from my watched list rather embarrassing, well I managed to fit it in as my last film of 2022, and although my Blu Ray had both a colour and an original black and white version of the film, it felt only fitting to see it as Capra and James Stewart would have wanted us to.

Greatest Christmas film? I'm afraid not for me, but I can fully understand the love and appreciation this film gets in spades, because it'll bring tears to the hardest of hearts, and in both James Stewart and the beautiful Donna Reed we had two actors willing to go that extra mile. A tale about family, about friendship and loyalty, about community and how important every member of that community can be, in essence it's still a Christmas fantasy film that'll make you blart. We have goodies and baddies here, with Lionel Barrymore well cast in the role as Stewart's George Bailey's nemesis, and I would heartily agree that for the majority of this film, it takes a very pessimistic view of the times the residents of Bedford Falls are living in. Accusations that the film has a Communist leaning also seems fanciful at best, but I could see given the Post-War Era how some of this could have been seen that way? But where does Clarence the Angel fit in to the Communist agenda? It's those little touches of brilliance, especially in that final twenty minutes or so that elevates this above a host of 1940's dramas, and with a supporting cast that features everyone from Ward Bond to Thomas Mitchell, Gloria Grahame to Virginia Patton, Stewart and Reed don't have to quite do everything on their own here.

A film that I won't wait 76 years to watch again, I can see this becoming a Yuletide regular, and with each new James Stewart film I encounter, his stature as one the greats is only enhanced with each viewing. This was also my first Capra film, something that won't last long with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington lined up in January, I'm sure I'll delve deeper into his filmography sooner rather than later, did he make many Westerns?