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Yesterday, we looked at two Yuletide classics directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby. Today we’ll continue our journey to Christmas by looking at two movies directed by McCarey’s colleagues and fellow Catholics, Frank Capra and John Ford.
The two Father O’Malley movies were stunning achievements, yet McCarey’s peer Frank Capra did him one better in making films drenched in the sense of our better angels. Capra’s movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Meet John Doe (1940), both starring Gary Cooper, virtually defined the 1930s.
“Meet John Doe”
In Mr. Deeds, Longfellow Deeds has inherited a massive fortune he decides to give away to those in need. Meet John Doe is about a man desperate for money in the depths of the Depression who agrees to assume to role of a non-existent person who has vowed to commit suicide on Christmas Eve as a political protest against the comfortable rich.
His transformation into a real hero prompts “the people” to rise up in this tale of the triumph over the dark forces of home-grown fascism.
After those films came the war and Capra’s work for the Defense Department and production of the Why We Fight series of documentaries highlighting the real fight against fascism.
“It’s a Wonderful Life”
When Capra saddled up again in post-war Hollywood, he was ready with It’s A Wonderful Life starring Coop’s best bud, James Stewart, who had famously starred in Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and had himself fought in the war.
As far as Stewart was concerned, Capra walked on water, figuratively speaking. If the director wanted him to play a desperately frustrated businessman, George Bailey, who helps an angel (played by Henry Travers) who has been sent from Heaven to earn his wings by showing Bailey what life would be like without him, then Stewart was Capra’s man!
Joined by a stellar cast also including Lionel Barrymore as the moneygrubbing “Mr. Potter,” they made a Christmas classic.
Answered prayers in a bar
The film’s power is epitomized by the scene in the Bedford Falls bar when Bailey is at his breaking point, in which he utters these unforgettable lines: “Dear 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.”
Capra was filming from this scene from afar, but then manipulated the image so that it became the close-up that will forever live in filmmaking history… and in our hearts. After Clarence jumps into the river to save George Bailey from taking his own life, they show up at the same bar – but it’s now in the George-less town renamed Pottersville.
It’s yet another classic scene among many in the film.
“3 Godfathers”
Then there was John Ford, who made his own classic Christmas film, 3 Godfathers, two years later. It’s a Western, naturally, that tells a tale, as only Ford could, of three outlaws on the lam, risking their very lives and liberty to return a newborn to civilization. The film stars Ford’s great friend John “Duke” Wayne.
3 Godfathers is a parable for the birth of Jesus based on the story by the same name that first appeared in the November 23, 1912 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, the story concerns four men who rob a bank in Wickenburg, Arizona. After one is shot and killed, the other three, one of whom has a gunshot wound in his shoulder, flee into the wilderness. There they encounter a woman in labor in a covered wagon, who, after delivering her baby, asks the three men to act as godfathers to the baby. Then she dies.
It is quite a journey back to civilization during which two of the men also die — of dehydration — and the third, riding on a burro, i.e., a little donkey, suffering extreme thirst, carries the baby to the town of New Jerusalem, while coyotes chase him.
These are but a sampling of sparkling classics that bring to life cinematically the Christmas spirit. And, while their flickering images are nothing compared to the real Christmas that lives in our hearts, eternally, they help point the way.
Meet John Doe, It’s a Wonderful Life, and 3 Godfathers are available on DVD and Blu-ray, and also available to stream on most major streaming services.
