It's A Wonderful Life
A Meditation on the United States of Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, and Donna Reed.
Mary did it, George! Mary did it!
She told a few people you were in trouble and they scattered all over town. They didn't ask any questions – just said: "If George is in trouble – count on me."
You never saw anything like it.
So begins the climactic scene of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, as the townspeople rally to save a good man pushed to his breaking point. An answer to prayer. A Christmas Miracle. A testament to the power of the people. A triumph of love over greed. Proof that God is in his Heaven, and all is right with the world.
We will drink a cup of kindness yet…
We love George Bailey. Friend to humanity, he is the all-American everyman who instinctively puts the well-being of others ahead of his own desires. A person of enormous talent and lofty ambition, he wants to see the world, “build things, design new buildings, [and] plan modern cities.” He is after that first million before he turns thirty. “The smartest one of the crowd, mind you, a young man who has to sit by and watch his friends go places, because he's trapped.” Trapped because his propensity for saving his neighbors from calamity derails his own aspirations time after time.
But there is also joy. He has Mary. He has his family. He has Bedford Falls. He is a builder, in fact, of home and family and community. He presides over the Bailey Building and Loan, employing his guileless Uncle Billy and his eccentric cousins, and offering affordable financing for the working people of his town.
Then, through no fault of his own, $8,000 is missing! And it means “bankruptcy and scandal, and prison.” “One of us is going to jail,” he angrily tells his absentminded uncle whose mistake has them in dire straits. “Well, it’s not going to be me,” George bellows. But, of course, it is going to be him. He will take responsibility. Once again, he prepares to sacrifice himself for a loved one.
His nemesis, the richest and meanest man in town, “sick in his mind, sick in his soul,” Mr. Henry F. Potter, actually knows the truth about the missing money. Determined to finish the nagging problem of the Baileys once and for all, he holds fast to his secret and watches with satisfaction as the walls close in around George. Desperate, in a world of dollars and cents, equity and securities, stocks and bonds, facing arrest and ruin, with a fifteen thousand dollar life insurance policy his only asset, George realizes “he is worth more dead than alive.”
By 1946, Frank Capra had already led a wonderful life. An immigrant from Sicily, steaming across the Atlantic in steerage with his family, he arrived in New York as a five-year-old in 1903. He remembered his mother comparing the Statue of Liberty to the star of Bethlehem. Raised in Los Angeles, a veteran of World War I and a naturalized American citizen, he earned a degree in engineering. The only college graduate in his family, ironically, he was the one chronically unemployed until he broke into the movie business, making silent films during the 1920s, and then a string of fabulously successful feature films during the 1930s.
Often referred to as the “American Dream” personified, critics called his pictures “fantasies of good will.” In his time, he became the king of “rags to riches” romantic comedies in which immigrants found happiness, security, and often upward mobility in a magical land. Born Catholic, and increasingly faithful as he grew older, he consistently portrayed integrity triumphing over greed and collective evil. Convinced that “man is essentially good” and bearer of a “divine spark,” his characters modeled moral virtue.
He collected three Academy Awards for Best Director on movies that also won Best Picture during his amazing run as one of Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers. Perversely, he did not win for his two most famous offerings. His patriotic tale of one good man overcoming corruption through the democratic process, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, aggravated Washington politicians while delighting the movie-going public, but lost out to Gone With the Wind on Oscar night.
Then came another world war. Once again, Capra enlisted. This time in the signal corps where he produced and directed movies in aid of the American war effort. He did not make a commercial film for five years. He worked directly for George Marshall, and he produced a succession of high quality “war information” pictures. His series entitled “Why We Fight” combined art and patriotism and offered potent rationales for a war to preserve individual freedom and national self determination by defeating European fascism and Japanese imperialism .
At the conclusion of the all-engrossing world conflict, he formed a partnership with two other heavyweight directors who had served in the war, William Wyler and George Stevens. All three of them, changed so fundamentally by what they saw during their service, wondered whether they could go back to something so frivolous as making Hollywood movies. They formed Liberty Films. The first offering from the independent studio, It’s a Wonderful Life, garnered six academy award nominations for 1946, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
In a vaguely familiar echo of 1939, the film failed to win a statuette in any of the major categories, picking up one special effects Oscar for innovation in movie snow (seriously). Ironically, Liberty Films founding partner, William Wyler, in his final project with Samuel Goldwyn, a longtime collaborator and fellow independent operator, swept the 1946 Oscars with his picture depicting the return of three veterans and their uneasy adjustment back to civilian life, the Best Years of Our Lives.
Reviews were mixed for It’s a Wonderful Life. Some called it “facile,” infused with a “spirt of unreality,” and hiding the truth. Foreshadowing later criticism that characterized the film as anachronistic even in its own time, charging real America increasingly resembled the scuzzy alternative “Pottersville” much more than the idyllic Bedford Falls. Or, as John Cassavetes famously wondered near the end of the century: “Maybe there really wasn’t an America; maybe it was only Frank Capra.”
The movie underperformed at the box office, technically breaking even but producing much less capital than necessary for a burgeoning studio. Facing foreclosure, the trio allowed Paramount Pictures to buy Liberty Films for a few million dollars in stock options and a multi-film deal for the three directors. Wyler and Stevens found great success at their new studio home, including the AWC Top 25 classic Shane in 1953. Capra had a rougher time after 1947. His next few pictures fizzled, and he was semi-retired from feature films by the mid-1950s. Hollywood wags called him a victim of “changing times” and out of step with an American morality in flux. Suddenly, the Capra everyman was out of vogue. When he died in 1991, at the age of 94, he had not made a studio film for thirty years.
But It’s a Wonderful Life would not go quietly into the night. Due to a copyright anomaly, local television stations started running it on the overnight “movies till dawn” circuit during the 1970s. By the 1980s, it was emerging as a Christmas Classic, culminating in 1994 when NBC bought the exclusive rights to run the movie as a holiday spectacular in primetime on Christmas Eve. In 1990, the Library of Congress added the movie to the National Film Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” motion pictures. By the turn of the century, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked it high in its Top 100 movies of all time—and first on various specialty lists, with the character of George Bailey listed as one of the Top 10 Heroes of American art and culture.
“I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him Father,” prays Mr. Gower. In the opening scene of the movie, we understand George is a man in trouble, as his friends and neighbors call upon the Almighty to intervene on his behalf. An imperfect angel, Clarence, trying to earn his wings, and still viewing the world through a glass dimly, watches the life of George Bailey unfold in an informal celestial screening room as he prepares to insinuate himself into George’s crucial moment. He first sees George Bailey as a boy save the life of his younger brother, Harry. A few frames later young George saves his his old boss, Mr. Gower, a druggist, from poisoning a customer in the midst of his blind grief over the loss of his own son.
“You put something bad in those capsules. It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Gower.” Expecting to be struck once more by the grieving, drunken madman, George pleads, “don’t hurt my sore ear again.” Sobered by the enormity of his actions, Mr. Gower is merely reaching to embrace the boy in his sorrow and relief—and eternal gratitude.
“I won’t ever tell anyone, Mr. Gower.” They are both crying. Us too.
Dissolve to George again. But he is fully grown and we are close up on Jimmy Stewart. “Hey, I like that face. I like George Bailey,” says the angel.
Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey stands tall and handsome. He attracts friends and admirers easily as he confidently speaks of the places he will go and the things he will see. He wants to “do something big and important,” and, with mesmerizing charm, he explains himself with enough humility and good cheer that we are all rooting for him to succeed.
Stewart was thirty-eight years old when he accepted this signature role. A major movie star for three years before Pearl Harbor, like Capra, he rejected any half measures and devoted himself to fulltime service for the duration of the war. The first star of his magnitude to enlist, the United States Army inducted him as a private in 1941. As a fully licensed civilian pilot, he maneuvered his way into flight school. He earned a commission as a second lieutenant in 1942 in the Army Air Corps, and joined the 445th Bombardment Group in 1943, flying B-24 Liberators over Germany. Promoted to major, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and then promoted to full Colonel and squadron commander, he mustered out of active duty as the highest ranking movie star of World War II—and all based on meritorious service in combat. Later, trained on the B-47 and then the B-52, Stewart served in the Air Force Reserves until 1968, retiring with the rank of Brigadier General.
Like Capra, after the war, Stewart hesitated before resuming his career in Hollywood. According to legend, unsure whether he could act again, he contemplated returning to a more normal life in his Pennsylvania hometown running the family business. But, when the man who made him a star, Frank Capra, called with It’s a Wonderful Life, Stewart accepted the role of George Bailey. Although both Cary Grant and Henry Fonda were considered for the part, Capra claimed later in life he knew there was only one actor who could play this naturally moral man unaware of his virtue.
The mature veteran of a brutal war brought a layer of dark fatalism to the character. George Bailey, sometimes the ebullient everyman, also waxes gloomy and frustrated and unfulfilled. Drafted by birth into a titanic battle against Potter for the soul of Bedford Falls, he tries repeatedly to escape but he cannot pull free from the struggle. In his last conversation with his principled father, Peter Bailey, he weighs his ambition against the prospect of spending his life “cooped up in a shabby office trying to save three cents on a length of pipe.” He wants to do something important. Even as the elder Bailey argues that in “a small way we are doing something important,” his father concedes “this town is no place for any man who isn’t willing to crawl to Potter.”
But, on the verge of emancipation, his father dies suddenly, leaving him with an unintentional and unwanted inheritance. Packed and ready for his real life to begin, the Board “votes Potter down” and agrees to give the Building and Loan second life on “one condition. Only one condition. And this is the best part, George.” They want him to assume his father’s position, executive secretary.
“Oh, no! Let's get this thing straight. I'm leaving. I'm going to school. This is my last chance.”
With finality, George turns to go. He has said his peace; he has done his part. Let someone else step up. “But they will vote with Potter otherwise.” Cue the face again in close up, this time in agony. He realizes he must stay. He continues to believe he will get away somehow in some way, but, in this moment, he surrenders to the immediate necessity. And he sacrifices his desires to the greater cause.
What exactly are the Bailey’s fighting for?
When we are introduced to Potter, the angel behind the veil asks: “Who’s that…a King?” The wheel-chair bound villain is not a literal monarch—but he represents an unofficial American peerage of wealth and financial despotism. Potter holds the Baileys in contempt as “starry-eyed dreamers” infecting the “rabble” with “impossible ideas.” And for what? Not personal gain. “Peter Bailey was no business man.” What rankles Potter most, and, at this point, keeps George scratching his head as well, the business model for the Building and Loan does not enrich the Baileys. Potter hates with a white-hot passion what he cannot understand. How can you defeat a man who refuses to value the metrics by which you measure success?
What is in it for the Baileys?
Perhaps this part of the narrative does border on the facile. Maybe Potter is too black-hearted and the Baileys are too pure. The Building and Loan extends a helping hand to working class citizens who desperately desire “a couple of decent rooms and a bath,” the dream of home ownership in an increasingly industrialized economy of the twentieth century. And, in a dramatic rebuke to Potter, long before George embraces the value system of Peter Bailey as his own, the son exalts the father and foreshadows the man in full he is to become:
“Is it too much to ask that a man and his family might have a place of their own? My father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warp, frustrated old man, they are cattle. And, in my book, he died a richer man than you will ever be.”
Capra puts into the mouth of Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey the core argument of New Deal “liberalism.” In essence, he annunciates a “working man’s bill of rights” versus the tyranny of the “economic royalists.” Vintage FDR class warfare. Of course, to be fair, Capra does not look to government to lift up the working man. His answer is always hard-working people coming together to pool and marshal their strengths, persisting through the hard times with faith in one another. Nothing is more signature Capra than one man unifying the community around a high moral principle followed by a startling triumph via their own collective agency. “Together we cannot fail.”
The Chance of a Lifetime.
Of course, four years after outmaneuvering Potter in the board room, George Bailey is only marking time. We find him at the train station still waiting for an opportunity to “shake the dust of this crummy little town off his feet and see the world.” When events once again compel him to defer his dreams for the sake of his brother, he rejoices in Harry’s good fortune but discreetly sulks around town feeling aggrieved.
Ma Bailey extols the virtues of Mary Hatch. “The kind of girl that will help you find the answers, George.” He seems unconvinced. Four years earlier, the night his father died, moments before his life took an unforeseen and unwelcome turn, he was walking down the street with a girl he had known all his life but finally seen for the first time on a warm moonlit night. And, then, more serious than he had ever been, he seemed about to ask her something: “Mary, I’ll make a deal with you….” But, before he could finish his thought, Harry and Uncle Billy drove up in a frenzy to tell him to come quick, his father had a stroke. “I’m sorry, Mary, I’ve got to go.”
Four Year Later. Mary is back from college. His mother tells him to go see her. He protests. “Sam Wainwright.” His friend, away in New York adding to his family fortune, made plain his infatuation. “Sam is crazy about Mary.” With supreme confidence in her intuition, Mrs. Bailey assures her son that Mary is waiting for George.
After taking the long way wandering around town, George finds himself in front of the Hatch home, unsure of his next move, walking back and forth, leaving and returning, wavering unsteadily, resisting a force he refuses to understand. From the window, watching with amusement, Mary asks whether he has “made up his mind yet?” Still confused, and after several instances of miscommunications, missed signals, and an obstinate denial of his true feelings, George leaves in a huff just as Sam Wainwright calls from New York. Back to retrieve his hat, Mary conspires to put George on the phone with her and Sam. As they listen nearly cheek to cheek, Sam explains a big deal coming up—and it’s going to make them all rich provided they get in on the ground floor.
“Tell that guy this is a chance of a lifetime.”
Turning to George, with their lips inches apart, Mary complies: “He says this is a chance of a lifetime.”
The script reads: “George can no longer stand it.” Mary begins to cry. Even as he continues to deny his feelings, he is coming undone. “I don’t want to get married ever. I want to do what I want to do.” With this last utterance of self, suddenly, as his conscious mind realizes he has desperately wanted this woman since he saw her in “the light of the silvery moon.” He begins to weep. Us too.
The script again: “He pulls her to him in a fierce embrace. Two meant for each other find themselves in tearful ecstasy.”
Donna Reed was not first pick to play Mary Hatch. Reportedly, the production offered the part to a number of actresses including Jean Arthur, Olivia de Haviland, and Ginger Rogers, the latter supposedly turning down the role because it was “too bland.” Like a football team of destiny, great movies often gel when they happily stumble into major talent in positions where they expected something less exceptional. The cast includes a host of fine actors in supporting roles, including Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Sheldon Leonard, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, and so many more. But the virtuoso performance from the female lead, Donna Reed, around whom the whole story quietly pivots, represents a blessing from the movie gods.
Raised in the heartland, Reed was a reluctant actress who had first pursued a career as a teacher. She appeared in forty films over the course of her forty-year career in Hollywood, won an Academy Award in 1953, and later starred in a long running hit show during the golden age of television. Her eponymously titled sitcom ran for eight seasons on ABC—and is now remembered as a vehicle that offered a more sophisticated portrayal of female strength in an era of witless, one-note women submissive to the patriarchy.
An Aside: while true the Donna Reed Show offered a smart female lead with strong feelings and a trenchant sense of humor, the premise of witless submission perpetuates a common misconception. In actual fact, clever matriarchs proved a standard trope of 1950s family television. Playing against overly confident, sometimes boorish but mostly well-intentioned men, socially intelligent moms more often than not artfully saved the family from calamity in the third act. It was funny because it was true. Good art reflecting a reality in life often unstated but understood by all.
Mary embodies the virtue of prudence in all things. She understands what she wants, and she plays the long game. Mary provides the ballast to George’s bluster and flights of fancy. When George blows off course, she redirects. She remains calm and focused as they navigate the wonders of life together. Mary balances setbacks and frustration with constancy and wisdom.
A partner in the life they are building, we find Mary welcoming the boisterous Martinis as the newest residents of Bailey Park. As she presents the overstated Italian immigrant strivers with symbolic gifts of bread, salt, and wine, corresponding to the blessings of home, health, and family, Mary joins the Bailey family project to make life better for people. Later, after Potter tempts George with wealth, power, and prestige, in a last-ditch effort to seduce his renunciation of the Bailey mission, Mary offers much more important news: she is pregnant with their first child. In their joy, the machinations of Potter seem insignificant.
She could have married Sam Wainwright and lived the life of a rich society matron. But she knew a life with Sam would automatically subordinate her to his pursuit of wealth and the indiscretions of a powerful man. College educated, she could have lived the life of an independent woman, finding a place as an educator or a nurse, or, frankly, even in her time, a doctor or a lawyer. But she settled upon George because it was the life she wanted for herself. And, not to diminish her passion and humanity, when George asks his longsuffering wife why she ever married him, she responds with earthy frankness: “I wanted my baby to look like you.”
With Mary, George finally begins to grasp his father’s legacy. On the day of their wedding, strengthened and enhanced by the love of Mary, George demonstrates his emerging greatness of soul.
“Now just remember this thing is not as black as it appears.”
On the fly, he courageously stands up to Potter again, and he wisely safeguards his people in the face of cataclysmic financial crisis.
“Potter’s not selling; he’s buying. He’s taking advantage of a panic.”
Rock-ribbed and forward-thinking, George inspires confidence in a skittish herd. In support, Mary provides the spark of selfless genius and the quiet motivation to persevere. George, in his dramatic soliloquy that encapsulates the message of the film on every level, convinces his depositors to take the long view.
“We can get through this thing all right. We’ve just got to stick together. We’ve got to have faith in each other.”
Later that evening, with the Building and Loan secured, but their plans for an exotic honeymoon dashed, Mary sees the bigger picture. They are together, finally, and Mary confides, “this is what I wished for all those years ago.”
A modern feminist critique of Mary bristles at her devotion to George and her willingness to subordinate herself to a traditional version of marriage and family. Even more objectionable, in an infamous scene, the film mercilessly portrays Mary as an unhappy spinster in the dystopian “Pottersville” interlude in which George “was never born.” Without George, “she’s an old maid. She never got married.”
Fair enough.
EXT. LIBRARY – NIGHT
CLOSE SHOT
Mary comes out the door, then turns and locks it. We see
George watching her from the sidewalk. Mary is very different
– no buoyancy in her walk, none of Mary's abandon and love
of life. Glasses, no make-up, lips compressed, elbows close
to body. She looks flat and dried up, and extremely self-
satisfied and efficient.
Unkind.
Chewed to exhaustion in many venues, I have little to add to this celebrated bone of contention save this one point:
Just as George finds meaning in a rejection of his desire for material success and individual self aggrandizement, the alternative Mary embodies the emptiness at the end of self interest narrowly defined. Based on the premise, “what if George had never been born,” we will never see the unimpeded and undiluted results of George’s immature instincts in an alternate reality. But the anti-Mary represents a metaphor for both of them. George needed Mary. Mary needed George. Without one another, both capable and talented, surely, they would have succeeded in the world as independent agents, but they would have missed out on the true, the good, and the beautiful.
In their united “search for meaning,” in their dedication to a cause greater than themselves, in their surrender to transcendent love for another person, George and Mary find rapturous contentment as an unintended side effect of their devotion to the happiness of the other.
Perhaps we live in a modern world in which we can have it all. Let the social commentators debate. But Mary and George faced starker choices in their time. In a world of tradeoffs, Mary selects her path with a full understanding of her options and consequences and pursues exactly what she wants without regret.
When his crucial night comes, Mary rescues George in two ways.
She solves the immediate problem of the shortfall. She keeps her head in the face of ruin and rallies the town on his behalf.
And, much more importantly, through full realization of his love for Mary, George will finally and fully submit to the transcendent value of life.
God’s Greatest Gift.
“Clarence Odbody, A-S-2. Angel, Second Class.”
Clarence is the “clockmaker” who has not yet earned his wings. What he lacks in brainpower, he more than makes up with his childlike faith. Sent to George as a guide on his crucial night, his Heavenly superiors tell Clarence he must comfort “a man who is seriously thinking of throwing away God’s greatest gift.”
“Oh dear. His life.”
With George convinced he is worth more dead than alive, suicide seems his best situation-rectifying alternative. Not surprisingly, knowing him so well after his intensive research, Clarence distracts George from self harm by jumping off a bridge into a cold and rushing river. “I knew if I were drowning you would try to save me.” It worked. “And that is how I saved you.”
Naturally hyper-skeptical of this entirely implausible guardian angel scenario as explained by Clarence, George ruefully laughs: “You look like just about the kind of angel I would get.”
Clarence knows a lot. George wonders if he is a mind reader, or a hypnotist. Unfortunately, he does not seem to be a genie, as he claims they don’t use money in Heaven, and he has no way of helping him with the eight thousand dollars in this human realm.
Finally, they stumble onto the perfect device. “I suppose everyone would be better off if I had never been born.” Clarence seizes on the idea. We will run the experiment and find out.
In the flourish of a chilling wind, George Bailey no longer exists. He no longer has a care in the world. His physical infirmities are removed. He no longer has an identity or a past—or a present.
As George and Clarence ramble around the former Bedford Falls (now “Pottersville”) in this initially “funny dream,” the tour increasingly turns macabre. They find a mean and unforgiving town full of desperate characters, where vice trumps virtue, and formerly good friends are unconnected and in pain. The Building and Loan now houses a dance hall. The drugstore is a pawn shop. Mr. Gower went to prison for twenty years for poisoning a kid. Uncle Billy lost his mind when he lost his business. There is no Bailey Park. Ma Bailey lives alone and dispirited in her boarding house bereft of surviving sons. They come across the tombstone for Harry Bailey. He died in 1919 when he slid through the ice and drowned. He never won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He never shot down the kamikaze plane headed into the transport ship full of soldiers.
“You’ve been given a great gift, George. A chance to see what the world would be like without you.”
“Strange isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful big hole, doesn’t he?”
Now George is violently distraught and desperate. “Where’s Mary?”
When he finds her, she is not the same person, merely a shell of the vibrant woman full of life and love we know so well. George screams in pain: “What happened to us?”
“Please help me, Mary! I need you, Mary!”
She runs away in fear. He runs after her in futility. He is nobody to her. They no longer exist as a single life force bound by love. Now on his knees and even more distraught: “I want to live again. Please, God, let me live again.”
God hears him and answers with quiet snow fall.
Now George is George again. With his human frailties restored, and Zuzu’s petals in his watch pocket, and all of his terrestrial problems of financial impropriety and criminal indictments once again pressing on his life, he only cares about finding his family. He rushes home where the authorities are waiting for him.
“Mary! Mary!”
Now reunited. Hugging his wife and his children for dear life, he no longer frets over the bank examiner, or the reporters, or the warrant for his arrest.
“Isn’t it wonderful.”
Mary is real. His family is real. Nothing else matters. He is now prepared to face whatever comes.
“Hallelujah!!!”
But one more miracle of love is afoot. Uncle Billy arrives and he is ecstatic.
“Mary did it, George. Mary did it.”
A crowd of friends pour into the house carrying a seemingly endless stream of small donations and declarations of loyalty and gratitude.
“I wouldn’t have a roof over my head, if it wasn’t for you, George.”
A telegram comes in from London.
“Mr. Gower cabled you need cash. Stop. My office instructed to advance you up to twenty-five thousand dollars. Stop. Hee-haw and Merry Christmas. Sam Wainwright.”
The good tidings continue to roll in. The district attorney tears up the arrest warrant and places it on the massive pile of cheerful giving. Now, Harry Bailey, in uniform and in the flesh, rushes in to everyone’s surprise and delight after flying through a blizzard to support his family hero. He lifts a glass.
“To my big brother, George. The richest man in town.”
In the midst of the pandemonium, George finds a note from Clarence:
“Dear George, Remember no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks for the wings. Love, Clarence.”
With bells ringing, and redemption thick in the air on an enchanted Christmas Eve, with the words of the hymn still hanging over the joyous Bailey home, “peace on earth and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled…”
We are all together. We have kept the faith. The precious gift of life really is wonderful.
Fade Out.
I'm sure I'm not the first, but I see in Gary Cooper's Will Kane in High Noon the antithesis of Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey. While both characters reluctantly do their duties, one overestimates his connection with the people he serves, while the other underestimates. Kane the mercenary vs Bailey the philanthropist...one alone at the end, the other surrounded by friends and family. High Noon is considered hip, while It's a Wonderful Life is cheesy. Solomon's warning in Ecclesiastes 4:10 against Paul's encouragement in Philippians 2:3. High Noon relegated to art houses and Intro to Cinema courses, It's a Wonderful Life a beloved tradition cherished by many.