It’s a Wonderful Life: Like His Bible?
The stories everyone knows: Few really ‘get it’ because we’ve only seen bits and pieces
Published in
5 min readDec 20, 2022
It’s a Wonderful Life (75th anniversary) was in theaters (the nation’s fourth most popular film). We knew we had to go — because we’d never quite “gotten” all the fuss — until now.
“If that final scene didn’t make you cry, you don’t have a soul,” TCM host Ben Mankiewicz concluded.
Director Frank Capra called it “the story I’ve been looking for all my life.”
You’ve seen the story — but not as it was designed to be seen
A key takeaway from finally seeing it in a theater: It’s a Wonderful Life is like the Bible:
- In both cases, we all know the basic story (it’s mentioned in every form of media, and its plot has been copied many times).
- We’ve all seen excerpts — snippets here and there — every year of our lives.
- But how many have seen either story the way it was designed to be seen and heard from start to finish? Few saw It’s a Wonderful Life in theaters, just as few Americans have sat down and read a whole Bible.
When the film date arrived on December 18 (it plays again in theaters tomorrow), we…
