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It’s A Wonderful Life was my grandfather’s favorite movie of all time and one my mother has watched every year after he passed away. In fact, we always watch the holiday movie yearly as a family and to be honest I thought I knew everything there was to know about it, including how it pioneered a brand new type of snow (though also still used asbestos in some scenes, yikes) and filmed in such hot weather the cast once took a day off. But now, after more than 30 times of watching the film, I’ve learned the Jimmy Stewart/Frank Capra collaboration was a critical flop.
Honestly, I don’t know how I missed it. Maybe I was too busy making jokes about lassoing the moon while watching, but whatever the reason, this week I found out the movie that Frank Capra called “probably the strongest picture I made” as well as his “favourite film” was actually a critical flop when it came out.
Watching the movie with my mother for over the 30th time (I’d tell you exactly but then I’d be dating myself), my mom and I got into a conversation about the $8,000 dollars that’s a key plot point in the movie. We wondered about inflation between 1946 and now and suddenly I found myself searching around about the movie and the Post-War Era in which it filmed. Suddenly, I learned It’s A Wonderful Life was not always a beloved holiday film airing repetitively on TV around Christmas. In fact, plenty of critics hated it.
Bosley Crowther’s famous It’s A Wonderful Life review is still available to New York Times subscribers online, and it’s not particularly nice to the film. (Though plenty of modern humans apparently still think the Capra movie is not the best to rewatch.) When the outlet made the review available online, they even noted the movie “did not seem destined” for the holiday “glory” it would receive years later. Looking at this portion of the review you can easily see why.
Indeed, the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it — its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities. And Mr. Capra’s ‘turkey dinners’ philosophy, while emotionally gratifying, doesn’t fill the hungry paunch.
In 1946, this was the sentiment from many major outlets, though it’s worth noting the movie did reasonable business at the box office and did earn some Oscar nominations the year of its release. Still, in the years following its theatrical run, it was a largely forgotten Capra film for decades. And when I say decades I mean it.
In fact, it took until the seventies for the movie to get any real traction, which is when its shelf life extended considerably. USA Today mentions it was a clerical error that led to the public’s fascination with the movie decades after it’s release. Someone forgot to file to maintain copyright for the Jimmy Stewart-led film and in 1974, per the outlet, it went straight into the public domain and started airing regularly as part of the Christmas movie schedule. Years later, it’s still streaming for free during the holiday season.
Filmmaker IQ co-founder John P. Hess explained more about what happened to the outlet, which led to its status as great Christmas movies staple in subsequent years.
The paperwork was supposed to be filed just when one of these companies was being bought out by another company. Maybe this [film] slipped or didn’t get filed on time. And it kind of goes to the fact that no one cared about these movies. … It probably would have stayed in obscurity if all those little stations didn’t show it.
This means it became cheap to air on TV, and that plus the holiday theme was the perfect kindling to get one wonderful fire burning. A fire that has kept burning for the subsequent 50 years.