In some ways I'm glad I never got around to this until now; its reputation for sentiment and mawkishness might have unduly colored what I can now see clearly as outrage and defiance. George Bailey is a hyperbolically good man—giving of himself until there is seemingly no more to give—but the film consistently counterweights his fundamental goodness with the visible effort his morality costs. Just look at the way George's eyes and head dart back and forth when his brother returns home with a wife and a story of a job offer; he looks as if he's tracing the beads on an invisible abacus, calculating just how badly this news shatters his own dream of escaping town and his father's suffocating business (Capra, a lifelong Republican who despised the New Deal as a handout, nonetheless captures in vicious strokes the incompatibility of decency and capitalism).

Potter, truly one of the most vile and brutally conceived characters in all of film, is presented not even as a grotesque of normal lending and monetary power but the embodiment of a status quo that must be constantly checked lest it take over all. How horribly modern Pottersville seems, a vision in which workers are bled dry to prop up towns of easy vice for the few who can afford it. Even Potter's reality, of an endless series of power plays as minute as setting his own office chair towering above the sinking plush given to those who visit him, is so abhorrent as to generate immediate revulsion.

I was surprised just how little of the film involves Clarence's guided tour through an alternate reality, given how much that aspect of the film has entered the public consciousness as to be public domain. Instead, the arc leading up to that suicidal vision depicts a life slowly spiraling out of control from the weight of morality and the cost of selflessness. Stewart, still fresh-faced and all-American, gives a performance that points most definitively toward his paranoid work with Hitchcock. He saddles his face and frame with the erosive effects of living for others, and in its conception of a man reduced to rage and despair by living a life according to Hays Code morality, the film is as bracing in its own way as the other 1946 masterpiece of postwar moral confusion, The Best Days of Our Lives. The finale, of George's sense of renewed purpose, is so treacly out of context but so bitterly won when viewed properly. When Will calls his brother "the richest man in town," he's met with literal cheers, but the moment is laced with such profound irony that it's almost a marvel that it doesn't fully tip George into madness. And even in this moment of wild celebration, it's impossible to miss that the worst fate that Potter suffers is that his plan to destroy George simply fails, this time. Nothing is put into place to stop the fight from resuming later.