It's a Wonderful Life Review

The notices in 1946 are polite and the box office is a disappointment, and the film only becomes a fixture decades later when a lapsed copyright puts it on television every December. That accident of distribution has done the picture a disservice, because familiarity sands off how bleak it is. Capra spends two thirds of the running time watching a man lose things. Every time George Bailey packs a suitcase, someone dies or a bank fails or a brother gets a better offer, and the film is honest enough to let him resent it.

James Stewart comes back from the war and plays the resentment rather than the decency, which is why the breakdown at the dinner table reads as a real one. Lionel Barrymore's Potter never gets a comeuppance, and the refusal to punish him is the sharpest decision in the script. Donna Reed does the hardest work with the least fuss. The Bedford Falls sets are enormous and the chemical snow the crew invented for them still looks better than most digital weather, though the photography is workmanlike where the writing and playing are not.

The reservations raised at the time are still the right ones: the sentiment goes on thick in the last ten minutes, the angel framing is clumsy, and the alternate timeline treats a woman living alone as proof of catastrophe. None of it survives contact with the ending, which works on viewers who can see every seam. The modern consensus places the film near the top of American cinema, and the placement is earned by the dread rather than the cheer.