It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is the granddaddy of all Christmas movies; although, it certainly didn't start out that way. The movie nearly flopped when it opened, and during its first theater run failed to earn back the money it took to make it. Still, this film has endured down through the decades to become one of the most beloved movies of all time. And it's not hard to see why. The film's got a lot of power in it. Filmed in 1946, a lot of the actors were still carrying raw memories of World War II. The strain of the war shows in their faces and in their voices. This was probably Jimmy Stewart's first really serious role, and he pulls a lot of emotion from his time in the war into his character. When he's praying in the bar scene, those tears on his face are real. When he kisses Donna Reed for the first time, that's real passion you're seeing. In fact, that scene had to be cut short, because it got a little too hot for the censors. So, yeah, this is a powerful movie. I thought so the very first time I saw it when I was about ten years old. I've thought so every time I've watched it since then. I still think so today. In my book, that's what makes a film a classic. It never gets old. It never runs out of gas. As they say, it's got legs.

Stewart plays George Bailey, a man who had big dreams when he was younger. Didn't we all? Well, he was gonna sail around the world, go to college, become an engineer, design dams and bridges and skyscrapers. He was gonna be somebody. People would remember his name. He'd leave his mark on the world. Remember when you were gonna do all of that? I do. But life got in George's way, like it does for a lot of us. When his father dies, George takes over the running of the savings and loan bank that his family owns. Why? Cuz if he doesn't, then the board of directors will sell out to the greedy Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the richest man in town. If Potter gets a hold of the savings and loan, he'll foreclose on most of the people who have mortgages there. That's just the kind of sweet soul he is. So George takes over and he gives his college money to his younger brother Harry (Todd Karns). When Harry finishes college, he's supposed to come back and take over the savings and loan so that George can go to college too. But Harry meets and marries Ruth (Virginia Patton). Ruth's father owns a company and wants Harry to come to work for him. George is left to run the savings and loan. He marries Mary, and instead of going on a honeymoon George struggles to save the bank during the Great Depression. Time goes by. George and Mary have children. George starts designing houses and creates a new subdivision. When World War II comes, George is declared 4F and has to stay at home. Meanwhile, little brother Harry goes off and becomes a hero. Wins the medal of honor. On the day that Harry is set to come home, tragedy strikes.

Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), George's partner, loses $8,000 of the savings and loan's money, which conveniently ends up in old Mr. Potter's grasping hands. He neglects to tell George about his latest windfall. Instead, he threatens to call the police and have George arrested for embezzlement. To top things off, the bank examiner comes to town. Distraught, George leaves home and goes to a bar, where he offers his urgent prayer. Then, deciding that his life has been a complete failure, George decides to kill himself. This is where Clarence (Henry Travers) enters the picture. Clarence is an angel. He's been sent down to help George find his way back home. George tells Clarence that he wishes he'd never been born. Clarence grants him his wish. Suddenly, a thousand tiny - and not so tiny - changes take place in George's home town of Bedford Falls. George gets the opportunity to find out what the world would have been like if he had never been born. The savings and loan would have gone under when his father died, and old man Potter would have taken away the homes of a lot of people. What's worse, Potter would have gained control of the entire town and renamed it Potterville. It would have been a nasty place to live too. Mary would have been a spinster her whole life. George's children would have never been born. Hundreds of people that George helped over the years would have led much worse lives. Most importantly, Harry - whose life George saved when they were kids - would have died, and he wouldn't have been there during the war to save the lives of a lot of other soldiers. In the end, George realizes that during his insignificant life, he touched the lives of countless people, who in turn touched the lives of still others. George's goodness and generosity, his habit of putting other people's
needs ahead of his own, created a circle of goodness that spread outward over the passing years. With a little bit of heavenly intervention, George learns that he truly did have a wonderful life.

It's a Wonderful Life is definitely a feel good film, and if you don't feel good after watching it, then there's something wrong with you. It celebrates the contributions of the common man (and woman), the people who, in George's words, "do most of the working and and paying and living and dying" in this world. It tells us that each one of us, whether we realize it or not, whether we are important or rich or famous or not, touches on the lives of a lot of other people, sometimes for good, sometimes not. But we do, and when we do, we cause a ripple effect, just like the old rock and pond analogy. It's a Wonderful Life reminds us that this is so, that we really can't behave any old way we want with impunity, because our words and deeds will have an effect on those around us. And, as my mother used to say, eventually the chickens will come home to roost. We all get our payback in the end. For George, who always put others first, his payback is good. By the end of this movie, you'll be wondering what kind of a payback you're in store for. I know I wonder.

It's a Wonderful Life is rated G and is filmed in glorious black-and-white. It has a runtime of 130 minutes.

Moontide (1942)

Along the gritty San Pablo waterfront, a violent man saves the life of a broken young woman and discovers his capacity for love in Archie Mayo's Moontide. Bobo (Jean Gabin) is a hardworking, hard drinking dockworker, quick with his fists but just as quick to forgive. He's hooked up with Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), a man who rides along on Bopo the way pilot fish ride along on sharks, feeding off what remains of the sharks meal. They blow into San Pablo and wash up in the Red Dot saloon, where Bobo is determined to have a good time in spite of Tiny's insistence that they need to move on to San Francisco. After an all-night binge, Bobo wakes up on board a bait boat owned by Takeo (Victor Sang Yung) and Henry (Chester Gan), a couple of good natured bait fishermen. They give Bobo a job and a place to live on the bait barge, but he's worried that he might have killed Pop Kelly (Arthur Aylesworth) during the previous night's binge. That evening, Bobo sees Anna (Ida Lupino) trying to drown herself and he saves her life. Bobo and Nutsy (Claude Rains) take Anna back to the bait barge, where Bobo takes care of her. Over the next few days Anna and Bobo grow closer to each other, and both slowly realize that they may have found a safe harbor in the other's heart. But Tiny isn't ready to give up Bobo; after all, he's been sponging off Bobo for a long time. Tiny tells Anna that Bobo did indeed kill Pop Kelly the other night, and he'll send Bobo to jail if she doesn't stay away from him. Fortunately for Anna and Bobo, Nutsy sees and understands a lot more than others realize, and he helps guide these two lost souls past the dangerous shoals and toward the safety of each other. When Bobo marries Anna, Tiny decides to take matters into his own hands. He goes to their cabin on the bait barge and beats Anna severely, breaking her back. When Bobo returns from repairing Dr. Brothers' (Jerome Cowan) boat, they find her stuffed into the bait box and take her to the hospital. Once she's out of danger, Bobo goes in search of Tiny, who he has discovered is Pop Kelly's real killer. In the end, the bad guy is vanquished, Bobo and Anna return to their cabin on the bait barge, and they live happily ever after.

Sounds like just another 1940s weepy, I know, but there's more to Moontide than that. There's a grittiness and a reality to it that you don't often get in movies from that time period. The dockside is shabby and dirty, and so are the people who live along it. Bobo's bait barge is a squalid little vessel, but there's a certain coziness in its squalor. And although Anna lives and gets to be with Bobo in the end, her back has been broken. There's no miraculous movie recovery here. It could take months, maybe years before she's be able to walk again. But Bobo and Anna don't care. This is their life, and it's better than anything they've ever had before.A lot of bad things happen in Moontide. People are taken advantage of, people are hurt, people are killed. But a lot of good happens too. People are befriended and helped and saved from others and from themselves. Ultimately, Moontide is a movie about redemption, and about the power of love to save those who are lost and help them overcome all of life's heartaches and disappointments. Anna may never walk again, but the shabby little bait barge has been painted and fixed up, and - as Dr. Brothers said - there's always hope. And that's always a good note to end on.

Moontide is rated PG and is available in luscious black and white.

Lost Horizon (1937)

Frank Capra's Lost Horizon introduced the world to a place that everyone knows implicitly - Shangri La, the Edenic valley where everyone is happy, where there is no toil or strife, and where life goes on and on. Given the position of this place in our collective conscience, it seems odd that relatively few people have ever seen the movie that inspired it, and I am going to hazard a guess that no living person has ever viewed the movie in its entirety. That's because soon after its initial release, the film was chopped again and again from its original 180 minute running time down to 95 minutes. In recent years, though, the film has been restored to 134 minutes, thanks to dedicated film preservationists who literally scoured the earth for variant versions of the movie. But why such drastic editing in the first place? Partly to speed up the film; after all, not many people want to sit through a 3-hour movie. But the film was also cut because the it contained a considerable amount of isolationist philosophy. Unfortunately for Capra, it came out at a time when the world was plunging toward war and the governments of the US and England were pushing the philosophy of engagement. The last thing they wanted was a popular film encouraging people to resist involvement in the war effort. The war effort butchered Lost Horizon.

When I started this review, I was going to write a lengthy summary of the plot, but I decided to scrap all of that. A plot summary would give you very little information about this film. Suffice it to say that Lost Horizon tells the story of British diplomat Robert Conway, played by the incomparable Ronald Coleman, who crash lands - along with several other people - in Shangri La, where he learns some incredible secrets about life and living. But Lost Horizon is really a story of Paradise Regained. It's the Garden of Eden or the Fountain of Youth. It's the desire in all of us to find someplace in the world where we can be happy, where we can live out our lives in peace, free from want, from disease, from the thousand ills that beset us in this mortal existence. But since that is not attainable in this earthly life, Lost Horizon is really a story about finding heaven. And as such, it is a story about the redemption. For all but one of the characters are redeemed in the end, because their hearts are no longer set upon the things of this world.

Lost Horizon was shot largely on Columbia Ranch on a massive and truly gorgeous set inspired by the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. The detailed sets and lavish costumes and props all serve to testify of Capra's scrupulous attention to detail. He's fairly faithful to James Hilton's novel as well, unfolding the story carefully, offering little bits of information at a time to keep the audience's curiosity piqued all the way up to when the secret of Shangri La is finally revealed at the climax of the film. Lost Horizon is a wonderful film, even lacking the 46 minutes that have not yet been found. With luck, they someday will be, and we'll have this entire classic once again.

Lost Horizon is rated G. Picture quality varies throughout the film due to edited scenes being spliced back in. However, the preservationists have done an excellent job restoring this black and white film to its original luster.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings tells the story of the men and women who flew mail over the Andes Mountains back in the 1930s. This was at a time when airplanes where largely wood framed craft covered with cloth and powered by temperamental engines that could barely get planes over the high Andes passes. Many craft were lost, along with the pilots who flew them. The French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about the experience in his novel Night Flight which was given the Hollywood treatment in 1933. I've never seen that film, but I seriously doubt that it could be better than Hawks' film. Hawks was, after all, a master at creating atmosphere and winding up the tension.

Only Angels Have Wings follows the adventures of an air cargo service run by Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) and Dutchy (Sig Raumann). Geoff and his crew - The Kidd (Thomas Mitchell), Les (Allyn Joslyn), Sparks (Victor Killian), and Joe (Noah Berry, Jr.) - fly mail and freight to villages and mining camps on the other side of the mountains. It's hard dangerous work in planes that are barely able to make the flights. Some of the planes have been patched back together so many times that they are little more the chewing gum and bailing wire. The pilots who fly the route are men who have exhausted all of their other career opportunities - they do this job because it's the only flying job they can get. They're fearless, even reckless, but they get the mail through. Into this cocky group of men comes Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a nightclub singer touring South America. She falls for Geoff, but he was burned in the past and is not having any part of her. She decides to stay on for a bit to see if she can't get him to change his mind. Meanwhile, Bat MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess) arrives with his wife, Judy (Rita Hayworth). Bat has come to sign on as a new pilot, but he's responsible for the death of the Kid's brother years earlier and Judy is the woman who broke Geoff's heart. As if this weren't enough, Geoff and Dutchy have to make a certain number of flights in order to win a lucrative contract, but the weather is getting worse and they're running out of lanes and fit pilots.

With all of the pieces in place, Hawks slowly ratchets up the tension as the flights become more dangerous and plane after plane crashes. The tension also grows between Judy, Geoff and Bonnie, as Geoff tries to forget about the former and open himself up to the latter. And all of this takes place against the backdrop of a rustic bar and a tiny airport somewhere on the coast of South America during the Great Depression. These are people with nothing to go home to and nothing to lose, fighting a desperate battle - pitting canvas, wood, and steel against nature itself - to create a business and a life they can call their own. But with all of the death and injury portrayed, Only Angels Have Wings is ultimately a story of hope, a story of how it is possible to prevail against the all the odds if you believe in your dream hard enough.

Only Angels Have Wings is rated G and is available in glorious black and white.