A Film Canon

The fourth - and finest - of Capra's American gospels, It's A Wonderful life finally achieves the balance between eccentricity and sentimentality for which the earlier three yearn. Not only is their democratic conversation-space generalised to an entire town, but the burden of preachiness, or speechifying, is placed squarely on the shoulders of a comparatively irreverant angel, whose mission - to prevent loans manager George Bailey (James Stewart) comitting suicide - produces the finest moment in Capra's career, in the form of an extended vision of how the world would have been had Bailey never been born. Generally, this imbues the fantastic dimension of Capra's sentimentality with a proportionate darkness; or, alternatively, translates the horror of Arsenic And Old Lace into a more realistic, sophisticated register. Specifically, it envisages America minus the common man as a world in which family are dead, diminished, absent or insane, the family home has been reduced to a boarding-house, nightclub, or ruin and, above all, the small town has become a mere extension of the city, its familial conversations reduced to so many neon-lit, hard-boiled vulgarities. That said, the small town is eventually subsumed into emergent suburbia, which, for the first time in American cinema, is envisaged as the province of true neighbourhood, as if the impending noir aesthetic were so great as to require some radically different topography. The result is an astonishing tribute to the miraculousness of everyday life - or, rather, a suffusion of Bedford Falls with the lushness of Bailey's thwarted exploratory ambitions - as well an artful reification of the role played by the common man in democratic society, both of which achieve their grandeur by virtue of being the flipside of an entirely unsentimental despair, as well as Capra's first genuinely political interrogation of capitalism and, more specifically, local tycoon Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), who only values a man as much as his life insurance, provides another subversion of speechifying ("You're a warped, frustrated young man...a miserable little clerk...worth more dead than alive") and, above all, mourns the emergence of a "discontented lazy rabble, instead of a thrifty working class"; big business as a draft board.