Jeremy’s Tophunder №49: It’s a Wonderful Life

7 min readMay 23, 2020

I did two things I had never done before as part of this here write-about-movies-every-day project.

I watched It’s a Wonderful Life in color.
I watched It’s a Wonderful Life outside the month of December.

And, I gotta tell you, both were pretty weird.

I had a really hard time ranking It’s a Wonderful Life accurately, because it has a ceiling of being probably one of my 10 favorite movies, but only for one month out of the year. There’s something strange about movies set around holidays — obviously they’re at their best when you’re watching them during that holiday season, but it really is jarring to watch a Christmas movie in the middle of May. It was something I noticed very obviously as I watched — the sentimentality of the movie just didn’t hit me in the same way.

I mean, it’s not like it’s suddenly a bad movie if you watch in when it’s sunny and warm outside, but it just kind of feels, you know, off. It’s a little like eating a cheeseburger for breakfast, or going for a jog wearing jeans. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, and it’s just close enough to “normal” that you don’t feel like a total idiot, but people will still look at you kind of funny.

But even weirder than watching a Christmas movie in May is probably the process of -making- a Christmas movie in May. Think about it — most movies that are set around a specific holiday are often released around that holiday season. But for a movie to be released in December, it’s probably going to be filmed over the summer. It’s a Wonderful Life was filmed between April and June of 1946. Home Alone was filmed between February and May 1990. Jingle All The Way was filmed between April and June 1996. Elf is one of the few Christmas movies I can find where they actually filmed during the Christmas season (December to March). I just have a hard time picturing a movie set filming a Christmas scene and then everyone going to the beach afterwards. It’s weird.

My favorite tid-bit that I learned was that the most common method to depict snow in movies at the time was to use untoasted corn flakes. The problem with this method was, the noise was so loud when they were stepped on that most of the dialogue would have to be re-dubbed after filming. RKO’s effects team developed a new method for It’s a Wonderful Life, using water, soap, foamite, and sugar.

It was also a bit jarring to watch the movie in color. I had seen It’s a Wonderful Life probably 20 times before re-watching it this week, and I had only ever seen it in black-and-white (the way it was originally filmed). It has been colorized a few times, but the one that’s easiest to find now was done digitally in 2007. It’s not bad. The process to colorize the movie over the years was kind of strange — at first Frank Capra (the film’s director) was in favor of it, because he thought he’d have control over the colorization process. That turned out not to be the case, though, and Capra was suddenly very critical of the idea, a position he maintained throughout the rest of his life. Jimmy Stewart was also highly critical. I had never seen it in color (nor did I even know that a colorized version existed), so I wanted to try it out. I think I’ll probably switch back to the original black-and-white in the future, though.

I saw It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time when I was probably 7 or 8. It’s a movie that I’ve seen at least once per year every year since, very often with family. I can’t think of any other movie that I associate more with Christmas, other than maybe Home Alone. The major difference between Home Alone and It’s a Wonderful Life (and the primary reason why Home Alone didn’t make the list) is that not only does Home Alone suffer from the same weirdness when viewed off-season, but also, it’s a movie that just hits so much differently as an adult than as a kid. Home Alone is about a 10-year old kid defending his house from burglars, and as a 10-year old kid, it’s about the greatest movie you could possibly imagine. But it’s not quite as awesome as a 31-year old. There are parts of Home Alone that I still love (mostly, John Williams’ score and the polka scenes with John Candy), but the rest of the movie just isn’t as cool 20 years later.

It’s a Wonderful Life, on the other hand, seems to get better every year. When I was a kid, I didn’t totally follow the internal conflict that George has between staying in Bedford Falls or going out to travel the world. Connected to that, I also had a hard time understanding his hesitance to settle down with Mary. I get it now. I haven’t personally experienced that level of internal anguish over following my dreams versus sacrificing them for the sake of my immediate community, but when I watch the movie now, it’s easy for me to use George’s struggle as a stand-in for my own existential quandaries. I’m not in my late 30s with a handful of kids, but I have days every now and then when I realize I’m in my 30s and my life hasn’t unfolded anywhere close to the way I thought it would 10 years ago.

It’s tough for me to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and not think about how the world would be different if I had never been born. I’m actually not sure whether or not that’s a common reaction to the movie. For as central to the movie as that premise is, I’d imagine that I’m probably in the minority. But that’s kind of how my brain works — I like to over-think things to the point of inanity sometimes. I’m not sure how different the world would be if I had never been born. To my knowledge, I’ve never done anything that saved anyone’s life. I’ve certainly never spearheaded socially-minded housing project that provided homes to dozens of families. For the most part, I think that my contributions to the world have been largely replaceable, and most of the other people I know in my life would be just fine if I had never existed.

But that’s kind of the whole point of the movie, isn’t it? Most of us never know the degree to which we impact the world around us. I’m sure that I’ve changed other people’s lives in ways that I (and possibly even they) don’t realize. I’ll never experience that realization in the visceral way that George Bailey does, but I also don’t need to. Watching the movie is enough of a reminder for me that all lives have unique impacts that matter, and it’s not worth the time to contemplate degrees.

Clarence's final message to George, “No man is a failure who has friends,” while being just grammatically ambiguous enough to annoy me, is one of my favorite movie messages of all time. It’s one that has stuck with me, and helped me to get through some tough times. My income doesn’t exactly break the bank. I’ve gone through a few unpleasant break-ups. I’ve been fired from a job. It took me an extra two semesters to graduate college. I’ve been cut from sports teams, and passed over for promotions. I’ve had friendships that faded over time, and ones that ended abruptly. Overall, I’ve probably had less hardship in my life than a lot of other people (and certainly less than George Bailey), but I’ve still gone through stretches where I’ve felt less than. What has always helped me bounce back out of it has been support from my friends. I like to think that I have two families — obviously, there’s the one that I was lucky enough to be born into, but there’s also the one that I chose, and I was lucky enough that they chose me also.

Ultimately, I chose to slide It’s a Wonderful Life into the top half of my list because it’s a movie that has meant a great deal to me over the years, despite the fact that it’s largely irrelevant for most of the year. It doesn’t hit quite the same way in the spring, but it still hits. With as high of a ceiling as it has around Christmastime, it seemed like the best way to average out the score would be to place it around the middle. It’s not a perfect science, but when I look at my list as a whole, it feels like the right place for it.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall