The Making Of It's A Wonderful Life
Sixty-two years on and still going strong
BY Dec 24th 2008 15:15PMFILED UNDER: Features
It Happened One Night. You Can’t Take It With You. Mr Smith Goes To Washington. By all accounts the ’30s were a pretty decent decade for Frank Capra.
By the next decade, however, the man was making government-financed propaganda films.
Whilst they were considered the best of their type, Capra itched to return to his populist roots.
So, as World War Two drew to its close and he was sent The Greatest Gift – a 1943 story by Civil War historian Philip Van Doren Stern – Capra leapt at the chance.
According to the director, this 4,000-word fantasy, which the author had had printed on 200 Christmas cards after being unable to find a publisher, was “the story I had been looking for all my life.”
“My father sparked to [it] immediately,” reveals Capra’s son, Frank Jr.
“He said it was such a strong, powerful notion for a movie. And he ended up putting his heart and soul into it.”
“In a sense it epitomised everything I had been trying to say in my other films,” recalled the director shortly before his 1991 demise.
“It said so much about the importance of the individual and how no man is a failure.”
Erm, apart from Michael Wilson, Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets, that is: each being hired by RKO to have a crack at the screenplay, only to see their work unceremoniously passed on to Capra along with the rights.
Given Odets’ Leftie sympathies and Trumbo and Wilson’s subsequent blacklisting, it’s tempting to interpret venal banker Henry F Potter (Lionel Barrymore) as their swipe at the evils of capitalism.
Not so, says Capra Jr. “The Trumbo and Odets scripts were never used,” he tells totalfilm.com.
“My father did most of the writing himself.” Not without reason, one of Odets’ dubious innovations being a Superman 3-style scrap between the ‘good’ George Bailey and his ‘bad’ doppelgänger.
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