IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE [1946] review

It might be hard to imagine, but until this Christmas, I had never seen IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. I know, how does an American boy go 33 years without seeing it? I guess it was just never a tradition with my family and I established my own traditions with Rudolph and Charlie Brown and the Grinch and Garfield. Even though I really like LIFE, and recognize it as a film made with passion and sincerity and art, I don’t think I’ll watch it every Christmas. Or maybe I will.

Jimmy Stewart is great in acting out first a boy with big dreams, then a young man still holding onto those dreams, then a grown man coming to terms that his dreams didn’t need to come true in order for his life’s dream to come true. He became a rich man not by seeing the world as he wanted to, or making a fortune like some of his classmates, but as the movie declares, having the most friends in town. Yet I felt for him each and every time he was literally seconds from getting out, only to be pulled back in by another crisis, be it family related or family business related. The deflation on his face each of these times was masterful acting. Not overly done, and it certainly didn’t stop him from being a hero to the folk of his town.

He was a man of honor in a time and place that desperately needed one, and all those sacrifices he made accrued him a great amount of respect and capital in friendship.

On a side note, I am glad I never saw this movie before reading any of the Harry Potter books as LIFE definitely put an evil association on the name “Potter.”

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