12 Films of Christmas: It's a Wonderful Life

You didn't honestly think we were going to feature 12 films from Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas without talking about this one, did you?

Clarence (Henry Travers), an angel who hasn't earned his wings, learns all about the life of George Bailey (James Stewart) so that he can help the man on the darkest night of his life. George dreamed of seeing the world, but wound up staying in his small town of Bedford Falls, N.Y., to run his father's Building and Loan company, lest the city's crotchety rich man Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) take over everything. George falls in love with Mary (Donna Reed) and raises children with her, and under his direction, the Bailey Building and Loan builds homes for lots of working-class people in town who never thought they could afford one.

One Christmas Eve, George's dotty Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) accidentally hands Potter a copy of the newspaper that happens to have $8,000 of the Building and Loan's money in it, and when Billy fails to make the deposit, Potter accuses George of stealing money from the company. George contemplates suicide, but when Clarence shows him how awful everything would have been in Bedford Falls had George never been born, the distraught small-town banker comes to appreciate the value of his life.

As with Capra's Meet John Doe, It's a Wonderful Life represents a battle between a man of the people (George) and a rich and powerful villain (Potter) for the very souls of the masses. Over the course of the film, we get to know and love George, which is why it's so painful to see him reach the end of his tether and, worse, to see how miserable the lives of everyone around him would have been in his absence. By the time, the story reaches its hyper-emotional climax, it's a sweeping ending that's been fully earned; we need an overwhelming catharsis to cap off the emotional rollercoaster we've been on. Like Ebenezer Scrooge and Kevin from Home Alone, George has gotten a glimpse of another existence that makes him appreciate his present circumstances, and that's a lesson that most of us enjoy learning all over again every Christmas.

Fun Facts:

· Thomas Mitchell, who plays sweet, scatterbrained Uncle Billy, was actually one of the actors in consideration to play mean old Mr. Potter. But Lionel Barrymore got the role at least partially because of the popularity of his Scrooge in radio versions of A Christmas Carol at the time.

· Jimmy the Raven, the pet bird who lives at the Bailey Building and Loan, also appeared in Capra's Oscar-winning You Can't Take It With You (1938) and in every post-Wonderful Life Capra movie.

· A financial disappointment in its original release, the film busted Capra's production company Liberty Films, which made only one other movie (the 1948 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy political drama State of the Union). It's a Wonderful Life didn't reach classic status until it went into the public domain and became a ubiquitous television staple in the 1970s and '80s. (The film's copyright has since been renewed.)

· The original screenplay began with a scene in Benjamin Franklin's workshop in heaven; this was later discarded in favor of the talking constellations that open the film.

· The story on which the film was based, Philip Van Doren Stern's "The Greatest Gift," was one that its author couldn't get published, so he sent it out as a Christmas card instead. That's how it landed on the desk of a producer at RKO.

RKO developed a special chemical snow for the film so that actors' voices could be recorded while they walked on it; prior to that, movies used crushed cornflakes.

· The swimming pool that opens up under a dancing George and Mary still resides in the gym at Beverly Hills High School. And that's Carl Switzer -- best known as "Alfalfa" in the Our Gang shorts -- as Mary's jilted escort.

· Despite the Christmas theme of the film, It's a Wonderful Life opened in theaters in January.

· It's a Wonderful Life won no Oscars, and out of its five nominated categories, it was bested in four of them by The Best Years of Our Lives, a darker take on post-war America.

· The Sesame Street characters of Bert and Ernie were not, despite appearances, named after the cop and the cab driver in the film; according to Muppet insiders, it's just a coincidence.

· Yes, Marlo Thomas starred in a made-for-TV remake called It Happened One Christmas (1977). Let us never speak of it again.

The dozen movies listed in the 12 Films of Christmas series merely scratch the surface of the many included in Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas; this clip reel includes several, but still not all, of them: