For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!

by Daniel Pecoraro, Contributor

“Remember no man is a failure who has friends.” — Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers)

Perhaps aside from The Ten Commandments (1956) at Passover, there probably isn’t a more lasting holiday-to-film connection for me than It’s a Wonderful Life in December. It’s a Wonderful Life is generally considered one of the best American-made films of all time, let alone one of the best Christmas movies. Even after its release in 1946, it was nominated for five Academy Awards — losing all of them, mostly to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives — and earning a special Technical Achievement Award for the snow scenes. It’s a Wonderful Life just had the misfortune of being like the Bailey Building & Loan’s: it’s well-meaning, reasonably resilient, but not great at making money. It was ultimately a box office loss and led to a premature end for Frank Capra’s independent production venture, Liberty Films.

So watching it in July for this countdown was a bit out-of-step and led me to realize that it doesn’t quite work in a less schmaltzy time of year. I think the film’s most beloved quality is its messages — life is a gift, one life touches upon other lives, and the strength of community is key — because I’ve always thought the film itself is a bit clunky. For all the legacy of the you’ve-never-been-born trick–I’m especially fond of the Family Matters take–it only accounts for about 20 minutes of the film. The lion’s share is the biography of George Bailey (James Stewart) as told to Clarence, his guardian-angel-in-training, going from scene to scene in his life from 12 years old to the day of his attempted suicide. And while the cast is all great and some of the individual scenes are classics–especially the dance scene and the run on the Building and Loan–it’s a bit of a patchwork quilt.

I suppose that’s much in line with George Bailey’s life and of life itself: the good interspersed with the bad, filled with points of sacrifice and obligation (in George’s life more than others). But there’s something that particularly bugged me during this rewatch–aside from Lillian Randolph’s character of Annie essentially serving as a Mammy stereotype, which has always given me unease. Alternate reality Bedford Falls — aka Pottersville — is essentially a den of iniquity: a pool hall for the town emporium, juke joints for the movie theater, and a library that seems to exist solely to employ old-maid Mary Hatch (Donna Reed). Essentially, a grimy city implanted in small-town America. The whole point is to show that without George’s sacrifice for the greater good of the community, the whole town would go to Pot(ter), and his family and friends would be worse off. Yet, I know that community can still form amid desperation and squalor. (This year’s Love in the Time of Fentanyl, which I reviewed for MovieJawn in February, is proof of this.) Maybe this is just a product of my bottom-up view of history, but I have a feeling that even without George Bailey, there’d still be someone working to rise up against Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), perhaps out of more than a sense of familial obligation with their dead father (Samuel Hinds as Peter Bailey) looking on in portraiture.

Perhaps all this criticism of an overwhelmingly beloved film stems from the fact that I am a bit spoiled: I’ve been to Bedford Falls. It’s over on East 4th Street between Avenues A and B (not far from the Loisaida of my mother’s upbringing!). Every year, Metropolitan Playhouse hosts a community reading of a radio play adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life. And every year, my parents and I join in to read a randomly pulled part over some cookies and mulled wine—sometimes one of the eras of George’s and Mary’s lives, sometimes Clarence, and sometimes a small part like the bank examiner (who just wants to go home to Elmira to spend Christmas Eve with his family). This everything-blind casting has led to some great performances: the best Potter I’ve seen, for example, was a pre-teen boy who absolutely nailed the tycoon’s sense of selfishness and greed. But more than anything else, it’s a great cross-section of the East Village, an opportunity to come in from the cold (or amid Covid, the isolation and ennui) and spend time in community with one another, acting (some better than others, and I’m more on the “others” side of the spectrum), chatting, and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” 

The reading—both the script and the cast—always reminds me that the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t really George, and, while Monica Hesse makes a great argument, it isn’t quite Mary. It’s the people of Bedford Falls, the folks who do all the working and paying and living and dying. They come together to keep the Building and Loan alive; they collectively stifle the anxiety of the run on the Bedford Falls Bank to keep the B&L going; and they come through for George when Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) loses $8,000. Yes, George and Mary–especially Mary, I would argue, given her perennial intention to stay in Bedford Falls compared to George’s wanderlust–are the spearheads, but they can’t do it alone. It’s a Wonderful Life shows that it’s the friends, rather than the man, that are at the focus of the film’s moral.