The Christmas message shines through in It’s a Wonderful Life as George Bailey, played by James Stewart, comes to understand that if not for him, the Bedford Falls narrative would be far different.
He thinks he’s ir-redeemable. In fact, as Clarence the angel, sent from heaven, tells him, “You really had a wonderful life.”
But, first Lionel Barrymore, who played Mr. Potter, “the meanest and richest man in the town,” had to set Stewart straight.
Stewart wasn’t so sure he wanted to play Bailey or anyone else for that matter after he came back from the war where he had served as an Air Force Lieutenant, executing many dangerous missions behind enemy lines.
“I came back home to California,” Jimmy wrote in Guideposts as told to Dick Schneider. “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.”
Capra, too, was unsure of his prospects. But he had this “role of a Good Sam who doesn’t know he’s a Good Sam” that showed promise and he was impressed with Jimmy’s war service. So he arranged a meeting.
“He was older, shyer, ill at ease,” Capra wrote. “My butterflies fluttered. It was four years since I had last told a story to an actor. It was six years since Stewart had last heard a story from a director. Jimmy listened quietly — bored, I thought.”
Au contraire. “I jumped up,” wrote Jimmy. “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!”
But, for all his enthusiasm, he was still not convinced acting was his future.
Barrymore, besides not liking his attitude, wanted Stewart to realize what a “noble profession” acting was. Stewart was thinking film was just an interlude in his life. The war, Barrymore said, was the interlude, telling him, “Forget about being away… Don’t you realize you’re moving millions of people, shaping their lives?”
Jimmy got the message and turned in a marvelous performance, feeling a kinship with his character in WWII’s wake. As his daughter recalled, he would “sometimes … wake up” with “bombers coming at him, Mom said.”
It was as if the angel of Psalm 91 that his father had tucked in his pocket as he left for war, was once again rescuing his life.
From the start, “There was something special about the film,” wrote Jimmy.
Certainly, its message, “No man is poor who has friends.”
“Even the set was special” — one of the longest ever in American film, sprawling across four acres, and the first to utilize realistic-looking snow. And, “Bedford Falls” — its streets, lined with 20 full-grown oaks, was just like his hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania.
Also, during filming, Jimmy lost his hearing in his left ear when he dove into icy cold water to save Clarence from drowning — mirroring the fact that George Bailey as a young boy also lost his hearing in the same ear when he dove into freezing water to save his little brother from drowning.
Then, too, Jimmy, as Capra rightly observed, was a genuine war hero, which gave him a depth of emotional range he had not possessed prior to the war. “Jim had matured tremendously in his four years away in the War,” said Thomas Mitchell, who played Uncle Billy, of his co-star. “He had always been a wonderful, decent person, but went away a boy and came back a man … (having) acquired a new depth of spirit.”
It all showed up on the screen from that initial scene with prayers of petition to “Joseph, Jesus, and Mary” to the scene of Bailey after he’s unjustly accused of “malfeasance and misappropriation of funds.”
He’s at a roadside tavern and, not realizing most of the townspeople are praying for him, he pours his heart out. Jimmy was rehearsing this scene as Capra was shooting a long shot of him “slumped in despair,” wrote Jimmy.
“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 …”
Then, something amazing happened. “As I said those words, I felt the loneliness, the 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.”
The scene was so perfect, so heaven-sent, that Capra kept enlarging the frames to make it look like the close-up it is in the film.
Stewart had created a “moment,” something, he told the BBC’s Michael Parkinson, was the essence of acting. In a movie, he said, “it’s not really so much the performance. There are moments.”
Moments that capture the essence of the Christmas spirit.
