Hello and welcome back to Kat’s Catalog. Here I will be sharing films I conceived into a list of the top ones from multiple sources recommended for people to watch while they are in their twenties. Since I am freshly in my twenties and studying film, I wanted to delve deeper into these films and explain my take on each of them. Please be aware that there are spoilers integrated into this post.
The fourth film I will be discussing is Liberty Films’ classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Released in 1946 and with a budget of 3.18 million dollars, about 55.7 million dollars today, It’s a Wonderful Life was inspired by the 1943 short story “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern which was loosely based on the 1843 Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol.
The film follows a man named George Bailey who faces bad financial troubles and is thinking about ending it all on Christmas. As the angels discuss George, we see his life in different flashbacks which show different interactions he had with those within the town. When George is about to jump from a bridge, he rescues an angel, his guardian angel named Clarence. Clarence then takes George Bailey around town and shows him what life would have been like if he did not merely exist.
Despite this being a Christmas movie, anyone with any affiliation can take away an important message from this film. The message behind this I feel is very important for our generation to consider. Being a people observer and having the privilege of being a person people seem to feel comfortable talking to, I have caught on to a common theme of feelings that this generation and age group is feeling: a sense of inadequacy. By definition, inadequacy is the feeling of feeling insufficient in one’s actions or contributions to the world around them. A lot of people in this age group seem to experience anxiety or depression for multitudes of different reasons. George Bailey is a character that a lot of people can relate to. The conflicts in the movie that George faces could occur to anyone in their everyday life which makes him very relatable to any audience member.
When George reached the point of wanting to jump off the bridge, I empathized with him, not because of the idea of ending it all, but because of the belief that there was no other way for him to get out of the situation he got into. He had a family and a lot of people counting on him to take care of them but he did not reach the means to do so because of what was going on. However, when Clarence comes into the picture and shows him around the town with what everyone’s lives would have been like if George never existed, it caused me to take a step back in my life and look at it with a new perspective.
The deliverance of showing the impact one person could have on so many people’s lives is the focus of this film. Some of the situations include George saving his brother from drowning in the frozen lake when they were children, George stopping a pharmacist from giving the wrong medication to a customer, and his wife’s (Mary Hatch Bailey) entire life. If George did not exist, then his brother would have died when they were children. The pharmacist would have accidentally mixed the wrong medication while grudgingly drunk and would have been arrested and jailed for manslaughter. George’s wife, Mary, would have ended up with an old maid working as a librarian.
When concerning Mary, there has been some controversy about how her life ended up because people would argue that the movie portrays that a woman’s “worst case scenario” is to be single and childless. However, I took on a different interpretation because of one vital line within the movie. When talking to George, she says, “I didn’t want anybody else in town. I want my baby to look like you.” With this line, it could be insinuated that she is talking about her husband being the love of her life and that is why she did not end up in another household with another family. The film provides this soulmate theme within this line which is what Clarence is sharing when he shows George his wife. During this scene, George runs up to Mary which shows the audience that he is realizing what he is meant to be alive for and that he has found his reason again.
What I found to be important about this movie is that, as I mentioned before, it caused me to take on a different perspective on life. I grew up feeling like I had to achieve these great big things to be fulfilled in life and feel like I meant something. Sometimes I admit I still struggle with that, but this film has one of those stories where I realize I can do little things to fulfill the purpose I have here which is to have compassion. I feel like people often forget that being considerate is the backbone of what it means to be a human being. In today’s society especially, we see selfishness and negligence when it comes to helping others, especially when it is small things. George’s examples are quite impactful since he stopped the pharmacist from poisoning someone and saved his brother from drowning, but the point of the movie is to show how much of an impact a person can make by just simply existing. We especially see the influence he had at the end of the movie when the town comes together to help George get out of the financial situation he found himself in and this was merely because he helped those throughout his entire life. I do believe in the ripple effect an action has, whether it be good or bad, and that it could sometimes come back to you and other times it does not. When it does come back to you, it could come back tenfold which was the case in this movie.
I have personally experienced this in multiple ways, shapes, and forms in different parts of my life. While I am trying to remain humble about it, I will speak on the experience I had when I helped a friend throughout high school when she was going through a tough time with the end of a relationship. I would drive to her house and listen to her speak for hours and tell me the story as many times as she needed so that she could come to terms with it happening and how she could continue to live life without this weighing down on her. Last year, I got out of a pretty rough relationship and my friend was right there by my side. She would call me multiple times a week to check in on me, she would have visited but we were away at school so it was difficult to do so, and when we reconnected in person she took me to lunch and had me go over everything until I could confidently say I was okay. It was a truly humbling experience to know that someone had my back the way I had theirs.
Directed and produced by Frank Capra, who also directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It Happened One Night, It’s a Wonderful Life was nominated for five 1947 Academy Awards including Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Director and won the 1947 Golden Globes Best Director award. In this film, Frank Capra wanted to portray his belief in the power of individuals with how much impact they could have and he wanted to tell a story about the value of community. He did mention that he wanted to combat a modern trend toward atheism, which can be seen through the Christmas time within the movie and Clarence since he is a guardian angel.
A classic film for the 20th Century, It’s a Wonderful Life brings an entirely new perspective behind the true understanding of what it means to be human. It includes important lessons for those who are in their early twenties which they could learn through film rather than realizing them too late. A beautiful quote from the movie I would like to leave my readers with is one said by Clarence when he is talking to George.
“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. And when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
Katharine Svehla – Asst. Managing Editor, Prose Editor, Art & Design Editor, Layout Editor & Blogger: Katharine is a Junior at Lewis University. She is majoring in English with a concentration in General Writing and minoring in film studies. In addition to her academic pursuits, she is on the Lewis Women’s Bowling team and loves to work out, read, watch movies, and write contemporary fiction. After graduation, she hopes to get her master’s degree and aspires to find her place in the film industry and publish personal works. Some of her favorite authors include Markus Zusak, Michael Chrichton, and Alexandra Bracken.