On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 05:14:04PM +0100, Paul Mison wrote:
> Warning: this is me being (void)y on the wrong list, but it makes a
> change from p*l*t*cs. Anyway, Dominic told me to.
>
> On 17/09/2001 at 16:48 +0100, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> >On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 04:41:42PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> >> For me the best films of all time would be,
> >>
> >> Its a wonderful life
>
> Oh, please. It's so cheesy, and that's not just because of its age. The
> sort of film you can only watch on Christmas Eve, and that's because
> the months of crass commercialism have turned your brain to sludge.
Now you've done it.
Warning, film geekage follows.
It's A Wonderful Life cannot be fully understood outside of the context
of the similar films that preceeded it.
Capra made a film in 1936 called Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, about a country
bumpkin who inherits a fortune and comes to the big city during the
depression to find not only many wonderous sights, but corruption and
deceit all around him. He tries to improve the plight of the common man,
the corrupt try to stop him. Things work out after a bit of a close call
where he almost gets put away as a nutter. Cf. Cinderella Man by Rush.
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington follows, wherein a country bumpkin gets
sent to the Senate to replace a deceased Senator. He finds wonderous
sights, as well as corruption and deceit. He refuses to play ball with
the corrupt, who attempt to discredit him, and he only perseveres
through an amazing act of courage, combined with the breakdown of one of
the corrupt. Things work out. Barely.
Meet John Doe (probably the least known of these films) features a
newspaper columnist who fakes a letter from a common man which gives
hope to the masses. They find someone to fill the shoes of the
ficticious letter writer. He becomes the center of a wonderous movement
among the common man to improve human relations, which he eventually
finds is being administered by the corrupt and deceitful. The only way
in which we can say that things work out is that no one actually *dies*.
This brings us to It's A Wonderful Life. How this turned into the
feel-good christmas film everyone takes it for is beyond me. Except for
the "happy ending", which, if one thinks about it at all is *not* really
all that happy, the movie is horribly depressing. The absence of one,
admittedly very good, man causes the entire town to turn into a cesspool
of corruption and deceit (well, sort of... following a theme here...) -
*one* man's life is removed from the equation and *every single person*
in town becomes evil (or, at best, self-absorbed) or crushed underfoot.
This is a *happy* film? The ending is usually taken to show that
everything is going to be just fine - with little justification. All we
see is this one impending disaster momentarily averted. Everything that
led up to it is still in place.
I am of the opinion that this string of films shows Capra's increasing
disillusionment with the idea of the American archetype of the man from
the sticks who uses his "common" wisdom to to keep the world on an even
keel. Keep in mind that this decline in his faith in said archetype
coincides with the onset of WWII - Mr. Smith being made in 1939, and
John Doe in 1941, just before he went into the service - and Wonderful
Life was his first film *after* the war (Aresenic and Old Lace being
made in '41 and not released until '44).
One of these days I'm actually going to write a paper on this.
dha
--
David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
If history teaches us anything, it's that everyone will be part of the
problem, but not everyone will be part of the solution.
- Larry Wall
