Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time watch challenge #138 - (film =133 out of 264)

I’ve somehow gone thirty-two years without ever actually watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Again, it was just another film that most people kind of just know about through cultural osmosis. It’s ubiquitous. The Christmas episode parodying the film is standard in so much of American media. Everyone’s heard the line “Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings”, maybe not from watching the movie in full, but maybe from a clip of it playing or a character in a completely different film or show quoting the line, like how everyone knows “Say hello to my little friend”. If I’m being honest, I always dismissed the film as being saccharine and too sugary despite never seeing it, purely because I thought that the entire film was basically the final thirty minutes that everyone knows the film for, the concept of an angel showing a man exactly how things would have gone if he never was born. So much of the actual meat of the film is George, played masterfully by James Stewart, sacrificing so much of himself for others simply because he is a good person. He loses his hearing to save his brother’s life. He misses out on his dream of traveling the world because he had to take care of his father’s affairs after his sudden death. He misses out on college because he didn’t want his brother to turn down an incredible job opportunity. He gives away the money that would’ve been used for his honeymoon in order to prevent people from giving their homes up to a greedy land developer. Without seeing any of that you don’t have the emotional context for why George is going to throw his life away. You don’t have the context for why things are worse for people if he hadn’t been born. You don’t have the context for why so many people are willing to give to him when he and the loan office he worked so hard for in order to protect peoples’ livelihoods are in trouble.

And the film is just gorgeous too. There’s a certain aesthetic to classic RKO pictures that is always lovely to see in other films and I love it just as much here. The opening sequence starts with whimsy and charm but then dissolves away to a more down-to-earth and even somewhat bleaker tone depending on the scene. Capra’s editing always favors the intimate, with cuts that would be jarring if done by anyone else working perfectly here because he learned quickly and before anyone else that the emotional weight of a sequence can replace the logic of a sequence if done right. There’s a certain delicacy that you can tell could only be done by a forceful hand working under Capra’s watchful eye. The attention to detail, having to work on a set that requires change over the course of several seasons, several years, and even an alternate reality, is just impressive.

How did I go so long without watching this?