By: David Dudley

What It’s a Wonderful Life is really telling us about American cities


photo by Gaston Longet/mptvimages.com


Why, exactly, does the 1946 Frank Capra flick It’s a Wonderful Life blanket American television screens like a new snow every December? Blame the lawyers from Republic Studios, who forgot to update the movie’s copyright protection when it lapsed in 1974. Local TV stations pounced on the royalty-free holiday fodder and put it into heavy rotation, and the rest is history.

In case you have somehow avoided this three-plus-decade onslaught of seasonal redemption, here’s the précis: George Bailey, in the person of Jimmy Stewart at his most likable, reluctantly abandons his dreams of adventure and fortune in order to shepherd his father’s two-bit building and loan business through the Depression and World War II, never leaving his dead-end hometown of Bedford Falls. Marriage, family, and middle age arrive in short order. After a financial disaster leaves George suicidal one Christmas Eve, dopey guardian angel Clarence intercedes to offer him a terrifying glimpse of what the world would have been like if he’d never been born.

In its time, the movie was indifferently received, doing middling box office and leaving legendary New York Times critic Bosley Crowther unmoved by Capra’s relentless sentimentality. But when Bedford Falls and its denizens were rediscovered by—or perhaps inflicted upon—mid-1970s viewers, the film was reborn as a timeless holiday classic, a status that has only been burnished further since. This month, George and Zuzu and Clarence and the villainous Mr. Potter are as inescapable as ever. You can buy Paramount’s newly released two-disc Blu-Ray edition, which boasts a high-definition restoration of the film in both color and glorious black-and-white. Or you can see a live stage version produced by the Fells Point Corner Theatre, which uses a mock-radio script to simulate a vintage wireless broadcast. Or, of course, you could just watch it for free on TV. (It airs on NBC.)

Like many a cultural myth, Wonderful Life thrives by rewarding multiple interpretations. Me Decade audiences might have related best to the implicit tragedy of George’s thwarted dreams; in the greed-is-good 1980s, the film functioned as a rebuke of the more rapacious elements of Reagan-era capitalism. Modern social conservatives can enjoy the traditional family values and vigorously interventionist deity, while liberals are free to cheer George’s progressive lending policy toward Bedford Falls’ low-income immigrant population. But for any American who has grown up in a world that looks less and less like Bedford Falls, it’s hard not to see the movie as something else entirely—a cautionary fable about urban renewal and urban life in general.

One of the film’s most iconic scenes is the long tracking shot that follows George as he bounds exuberantly through downtown Bedford Falls on Christmas Eve. Having survived his noirish brush with the counterfactual bizarro-world of “Pottersville,” the garish sin city that would have come to pass had he never been born, George is delighted to see the place rendered decent again: There’s the one-screen Bijou movie house, once more showing The Bells of St. Mary’s instead of a live burlesque show; there’s the Bailey Building & Loan, for which George has traded his youthful dreams of escape. The disreputable-looking jitterbug emporium that took over the property has vanished. “Merry Christmas!” George shrieks, a man back in love with his crummy little hometown, and all it represents.

Capra spared no expense creating Bedford Falls for the film—the four-acre, three-block-long set was one of the biggest ever built at the time. Full-grown oak trees were planted along the street that George runs down, to give the place some sense of authenticity, and the special-effects people concocted a realistic-looking detergent-based chemical snow to simulate upstate New York in wintertime. (The film was actually shot on a studio lot in Encino in the summer.) Bedford Falls is as vital a character in the drama as West Baltimore is in The Wire. Indeed, it’s that trippy transformation to tacky Pottersville that sends poor George over the edge to pray for his dull old life back.

Which makes sense: He is, after all, a housing developer, and Wonderful Life is a paean not only to the small-town virtues of family and community but also to actual small towns, or at least their design principles. With its walkable downtown and abundance of well-kept porchfront homes, Bedford Falls is the kind of city Jane Jacobs would have asked Santa for, a New Urbanist showcase of enlightened mixed-use planning. When audiences rediscovered the film from the sunken living rooms of their subdivision ranchers, they saw a paradise lost of pre-suburban America. And George’s journey of redemption is also a narrative of his rejection of cold-hearted modernity—he essentially turns his back on the future, choosing instead to cower in the cozy confines of the past.

There are some rich ironies in this, as some critics have pointed out. George the frustrated architect dreams of designing bold new cities and building “skyscrapers a hundred stories high”; instead, he settles for creating Bailey Park, a low-income housing development of cookie-cutter homes carved from the outlying woods. (There’s no Smart Growth in 1946.) In other words, sprawl-happy George, even as he helps get a few people out of Mr. Potter’s slums, is unwittingly helping to plant the seeds of Bedford Falls’ eventual demise, if its demographic patterns follow the American flight-to-the-suburbs norm. Likewise, George’s commitment to the ownership society wouldn’t have saved Bailey Park from a wave of foreclosures when the economy tanked and the credit bubble burst. Bedford Falls is already shedding manufacturing jobs—George mentions that half the town is out of work since the old tool and die factory closed—and in all likelihood, downtown’s bustling sidewalks and thriving shopfronts would be empty within a decade or two, barring further angelic meddling.

As Gary Kamiya correctly noted in a clever Salon essay from 2001, Pottersville is more George’s kind of place anyway—at least, the adventure-minded young George. With its hoppin’ nightspots and permissive live-music zoning, it’s infinitely more interesting than suffocating Bedford Falls, where nosy neighbors lurk on every porch and George’s best suggestion for a wild night out with flirty Violet is an evening hike up to Mount Bedford. (She blows him off.) Wendell Jamieson, in the New York Times last year, further advanced the theory—confirmed by an urban policy professor at NYU—that the town (in its guise as gambling-friendly Pottersville) would probably be in better shape economically had George never existed.

“In the real world, Potter won,” as Kamiya writes. “We all live in Pottersville now.”

The supposed model for Bedford Falls is the village of Seneca Falls in upstate New York. If you go there today, you can see the ghosts of Capra’s simulacrum in Encino: There’s the steel truss bridge that George jumps from; there are the grand Second Empire homes, dead ringers for the Bailey family’s drafty rehab. It’s a cute idea and a cute town—they hold a weekend-long It’s a Wonderful Life festival every December—but any number of nearby settlements, from Elmira to Waterloo, could stand in as well. This is the forgotten country depicted in the elegiac novels of Richard Russo, a brain-drained district of hollowed-out manufacturing burgs strung between stretches of rural nothing. The Bijou has been dark for a long time.

Peter Bailey, George’s saintly dad, seems to see the writing on the wall, even as he battles mightily to keep the Potters of the world at bay. On the evening before he succumbs to his fatal stroke, he makes a half-hearted attempt to keep George around Bedford Falls instead of letting him go to college.
 
“I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office,” George complains. “I just feel like if I don’t get away, I’d bust.”

The thing is, George is right—and indeed, he will bust, soon enough. Even the elder Bailey has to agree. “You get yourself an education,” he says, echoing the advice of many a parent in many a hard-luck town. “Then get out of here.”

—David Dudley is Urbanite’s editor-in-chief


It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play runs December 10–20 at the Fells Point Corner Theatre. For tickets, go to www.fpct.org.










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