The Value of It's a Wonderful Life

At Christmas time, NBC airs It's a Wonderful Life for the public to watch because of the movie's status as a classic movie with a positive story. 

Some people look to it as a "Christian morality tale" that seems to anger the critics. 

The truth is that it is a movie that didn't do well until the copyright ran out in 1974 and almost every channel aired the Christmas movie. It saturated the airwaves with the story of a man that wanted to search for a life outside the town he grew up in because he thought his life was going to be more exciting if he left that little town. 

George Bailey is what every little man hopes to become in the United States and that is he wants to be important and noteworthy.  He wants to build buildings that are bigger than anything found in his town. He wants to explore the world and leave his fears in the town he grew up in and on the outside, he seems to despise the town for the reasons it isn't exciting. 

His perspective is warped liked his nemesis Mr. Potter, because he wants more than he needs and isn't happy with what he has, but he is David and Mr. Potter is Goliath. That theme plays out throughout the movie. 

George Bailey is a creative spirit and sure he didn't create skyscrapers but he created a community where the underserved people of Bedford Falls. He gives hope to people that would never experience anything other than renting from Mr. Potter. 

It is easy to see the story from the perspective that George is doing everything out of the sense of sacrifice, but isn't that what love is? A person gives up themselves because they love something other than themselves. Sure, George wanted to do things that he wanted to do, but he fell in love with Marry and the idea of preventing Mr. Potter from taking over the town. George Bailey keeps the town out of the hands of Potter, and that was no easy feat. 

When things looked hard, and life wasn't worth living, George contemplated suicide. He stood on the bridge and at a moment of weakness, George saves a stranger. He isn't happy about it and wishes he wasn't even born, and that wish is granted. The small town George grew up in isn't anything but a small Las Vegas, and all the good he did for the town was erased. Mr. Potter won. But it took Marry not knowing him to be the breaking point where he runs back to the bridge and wishes to live again. 

Mr. Potter doesn't get his wish, and that is something that isn't talked about much when people grumble about the movie. They don't talk about how Mr. Potter and his assistant steal the money and his plot to have George thrown in jail is foiled by a town that loved George and helped him with money to cover what was stolen by Mr. Potter. 

But at the end of the day, the movie is just a movie. It offers a story that isn't different from any Hollywood movie made in that era. It is okay to skip it and it is okay to find the idea of happy endings foolish and a Hollywood trick that upsets you. But it is also a modern take on A Christmas Carol and a modern take on the story of David and Goliath, so its success doesn't depend on you liking the movie or not, history will be the judge of that little fact. Something the angry critic can't accept because they think their opinion is new to the film, and to that fact I would like to remind those critics that the movie tanked when it originally aired in 1946 for all the reasons they claim in their criticism of the movie.