December 19, 2024 • 41 mins
One of the most popular movies of all time, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed) is a holiday classic. It has also given us a cornucopia of history myths and urban legends. Lend an ear as the Professor analyzes these stories, talks about how the movie was received when released in 1946, and highlights many overlooked supporting actors in the film. And you learn why the Professor thinks he also has a “wonderful life”! A classic Professor Buzzkill episode!
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Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yes, it's Professor Buzzkill here with a special holiday episode
about the classic Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life. Imagine
being tortured by wartime memories, explosions, death, mutilated bodies, some
of them friends of yours, all the screaming. Now, imagine
(00:54):
them coming from a very confined and dangerous place. I've
always thought that being in a warplane or a submarine
would add the extra stress of being trapped and not
being able to contemplate running away from the situation.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
If you leave a.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Submarine, you'll drown. If you leap out of an airplane
without first having put on a parachute, you'll fall to
your death. You're trapped. Of course, even the most vivid
and active imagination can come close to the horrifying realities
of war and having to live with those images forever.
And if I'm right about the added submarine and airplane stress,
(01:31):
it's entirely possible that if you survive a war with
those experiences, the memories could affect almost everything you do
for the rest of your life. That's one of the
things that war induced post traumatic stress disorder can do
to people. Not all veterans of battle get PTSD, it
can vary in intensity, and in the most extreme cases,
it can ruin lives and lead to suicide. Well, Professor,
(01:55):
I can hear you saying this is a grim introduction
to a podcast episode about what is Why? Lee regarded
as one of the most uplifting, heartwarming, and life affirming
Hollywood films of all time. It's a Wonderful Life, starring
Jimmy Stewart, Donn Reed, and a host of other character actors. Yes,
I suppose it is a great introductor to a podcast
episode about It's a Wonderful Life, But you'll soon see
(02:16):
what I mean. This nineteen forty six Frank Capra film
is a holiday classic played every year at this time
in the United States and Canada and in some other countries.
It's the story of a man whose dreams never came true,
who thinks his life has been worthless, and who contemplates suicide.
He's then shown by his guardian angel what life in
(02:37):
his town and among his friends and family would have
been like if he had not lived. This helps him
realize that individuals have value, and that it's a great
gift to be shown just how much one's life can
affect the lives of other people. It's a Wonderful Life
is routinely listed among the greatest films of all time.
It makes almost every film organization's top one hundred list
(02:58):
and is often in the top ten. The Library of
Congress has listed it among the quote culturally, historically, or
esthetically significant works of art in American history, thereby giving
it special preservation status. The American Film Institute ranks it
number one in the category Most Inspirational American Films. And
(03:19):
more about its critical legacy later. The basic plot is
well known. George Bailey is a very personal young man
with big dreams of international travel and an interesting career
quote building things, planning, modern cities, and all that stuff
end quote. As he says early in the film, circumstances
that seem to be largely beyond his control conspire, however,
(03:40):
to keep him in his small hometown of Bedford Falls,
New York, and keep him working in the small family
business that bores him. His opportunities to go away to college,
to travel to see the world get sidetracked by relatively
random events that thwart those opportunities just on the brink
of him being able to take advantage of them. All
(04:01):
the while his friends and perhaps most gallingly, his younger
brother go off and do other things, leaving George to
stew in Bedford Falls. Now, George seems to handle all
these frustrations relatively maturely, with a reasonable amount of understanding
and calmness. In the background, though we know that his
(04:22):
relatively pleasant life has also prevented him from fulfilling his aspirations.
In essence, George is trapped like a pilot in a
wounded plane. His nemesis in the movie The Town Banker,
mean old mister Potter tells him exactly that, and here's
the clip.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
But George Bailey is not a common, ordinary yokul. He
is an intelligent, smart, ambitious young man who hates his job,
who hates the building and loan almost as much as
I do. A young man who's been dying to get
out on his own ever since he was born, A
young man, honest, one of the crowd, mind you, A
(05:01):
young man who has to sit by and watch his
friend go places because he's trapped, yes, sir, trapped and
defrittering his life away. Playing nurse maid to a lot
of garlic.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
He dos.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
George's troubles reach their peak when a serious business crisis
threatens through an even the little amount of dignity and
self worth he's built up over the years. In the
space of more or less one day, George goes from
being a relatively content man more or less resigned to
the fact that, while never being able to go adventuring
and living the life of his youthful dreams, his life
(05:35):
has been more or less as good as one can hope.
He goes from that to becoming convinced that his life
has been worthless, and that he's actually worth more dead
than alive because of his life insurance policy. As he
explains to Clarence, the guardian angel who's sent from heaven
to stop George from killing himself, I guess it would
have been better if I'd never been born. And here's
(05:57):
the original line delivered by Jimmy Stewart, butter, if I'd
never been born at all?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Like you say, I said, I wish I'd never been born.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Clarence the Angel is shocked, but then he sees an opportunity,
an angelic teaching moment in the parlance of our times.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, that's an idea. Where
do you think? Yeah, I'll do it all right, you've
got your wish, you've never been born.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Clarence arranges it with the heavenly higher ups to give
George a glimpse of what life and his hometown of
Bedford Falls would have been like if he had never
been born. The town has become Pottersville, named after the
greedy banker and major landlord mister Potter. Clarence then leads
George through the town to show him how Bedford Falls
slash Potterville had developed and what had happened to his
(06:50):
friends and his family in a world where he had
never existed. As you might expect from a Hollywood script,
things weren't so good in the George Bailey free world.
Rather than the sleepy and friendly Bedford Falls where he
had grown up, Pottersville is a relatively raucous and slightly
seedy place, and no one knows who he is. Of course,
(07:13):
the woman who would have been his mother doesn't recognize him,
and neither does the woman who would have been his wife. Eventually,
the shock of it all leads George to realize that
his life did have value and that he actually does
want to have been born. He begs Clarence to let
him live again.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Harsh bag, hel me, Clarence, get me back, Get me back.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I don't care what happens to me.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Get me back to my wife and kids, Helm Tires.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Please please, I want to live again. I wouldn't live again.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
I wouldn't live again.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Please God, let me live again.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
His wish is granted, and George returns to his house
with his friends and family there, all of them having
worked together to help solve the business problem that nearly
drove him to suicide, and it's implied all things in
George's wonderful life remain happy ever after. Anyone who's seen
the film recognizes and appreciates the wide range of emotion
(08:22):
that Jimmy Stewart had to command in order to be
able to play a character who goes through a lifetime
of frustration, peaks of happiness, canyons of despair, and perhaps
most difficult of all, he does it in a wonderfully
convincing way. Even the hard heart is cynic like yours,
truly sees the art and the talent and the skill
and what Stuart was able to do. But was it
(08:44):
all just art, talent and skill. Now here's where we
get to one of the big myths about It's a
Wonderful Life and where I explain why I started this
episode talking about war trauma and PTSD. A Facebook and
social media post flies around the internet at this time
of year about Jimmy Stewart and his experiences as a
World War Two aviator and bomber pilot. We've put a
(09:06):
link to this Facebook post in the blog post for
this episode on professor boskill dot com. The Facebook page
where that post appears more or less tells the stories
of American service members who have done extraordinary things during wartime.
Perhaps the most popular post on that page is the
one about Jimmy Stewart's World War II service and how
it might have affected his acting in It's a Wonderful Life.
(09:29):
The post tells the basic and very interesting story about
Stuart joining the Army in nineteen forty one, of him
pushing against the Army's attempts to have him make training
films and raise money by selling war bonds, and of
having Stuart more or less insist that he be given
combat assignments. All this is true. The American military routinely
(09:50):
used actors and celebrities in promotional and training roles, partly
because they were very good at these tests, and partly because, well, frankly,
having a a well known person die in combat might
have a dampening effect on wartime morale. And it's also
true that Jimmy Stewart worked very hard to get himself
posted to a combat unit. Stewart had been an accomplished
(10:12):
licensed pilot before the war and had longed enough hours
to make him an obvious choice to be a flight
instructor for new pilots, but he pestered his superiors to
let him transfer to the European theater to fly bombing missions.
As the Allies began heavy bombing of Germany in nineteen
forty three nineteen forty four, the Army Air Corps finally
relented and he was sent to England to command B
(10:34):
twenty four Liberator bomber squadrons in their devastating missions over Germany.
By all reliable accounts, Stewart was an excellent pilot, highly
effective commander, and was superb at squadron organization and management.
But the Facebook post then goes on to say, and
this is a long quote, but his wartime service came
(10:57):
at a high personal price. In the fire final months
of World War two, he was grounded for being flack
happy today called post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. When
he returned to the US in August nineteen forty five,
Stuart was a changed man. He'd lost so much weight
that he looked sickly. He rarely slept, and when he did,
(11:18):
he had nightmares of planes exploding and men falling through
the air screaming. In one mission alone, his unit had
lost thirteen planes and one hundred and thirty men, most
of whom he knew. Personally, he was depressed, couldn't focus,
and refused to talk to anyone about his wartime experiences.
His acting career was all but over. As one of
(11:40):
Stuart's biographers put it, every decision he made during the
war was going to preserve life or cost lives. He
took back to Hollywood all the stress that he had
built up. In nineteen forty six, he got his break.
He took the role of George Bailey, the suicidal father
in It's a Wonderful Life. The Rest is History. Actors
(12:01):
and crew on the set realized that in many of
the disturbing scenes of George Bailey unraveling in front of
his family, Stuart wasn't acting, his PTSD was being captured
on film for potentially millions to see. But despite Stuart's
inner turmoil, making the movie was therapeutic for the combat veteran.
He would go on to become one of the most
(12:22):
accomplished and loved actors in American history. As many of
us watched the classic Christmas film, It's a Wonderful Life.
It's also a fitting time to remember the sacrifices of
Jimmy Stewart and all the men who gave up so
much to serve their country during wartime. We will always
remember you end quotation. Now we can all agree with
(12:43):
the final sentiment, that is, we should always remember in
honor the sacrifice that military veterans made during World War Two.
But we should also be careful not to jump to
conclusions or make unproven statements about the specifics of someone's
service and how it affected their later life. To do
so is not only historically dicey, but it risks overlooking
(13:04):
and undervaluing the actual trauma that other service people suffered
and still suffer. You can tell by the trajectory of
what I'm saying here that I'm about to tell you
that the story of Jimmy Stewart having PTSD that was
induced by war trauma is untrue, but in doing so,
I want to stress the difficulties in actually determining such things. Yes,
(13:25):
undoubtedly Jimmy Stewart must have seen horrific stuff during his
bombing missions, even if at a distance. And it is
certain that combat flying, especially when you're in a relatively
slow airplane like a bomber, which is kind of an
easy target for anti aircraft fire, is incredibly stressful and
wearing on a pilot's nerves and broader psychology. So I
(13:46):
don't want to discount any of that. But essentially, like
so many social media history stories, there's no good evidence
that Jimmy Stewart suffered from battle fatigue from shell shock,
or that he became flack happy because of his bombing
runs over Germany, apart from normal war weariness. There is
(14:08):
also no good evidence that he suffered PTSD after the war,
or that the effects of PTSD came out during the
filming of some of the more distressing and emotional scenes
in It's a Wonderful Life, And there is absolutely no
evidence that the quote actors and crew, as the Facebook
post has it on the production set of It's a
Wonderful Life. And again I'm quoting here realized end quote
(14:32):
that Stuart's acting in the more disturbing scenes came from
war trauma. Again, this is not to say that it
definitely didn't happen. Remember, when analyzing history, it's almost impossible
to prove a negative. But I am saying there's no
good evidence that it ever did happen. There are no
Army Air Corps medical records to suggest that Jimmy Stewart
(14:54):
suffered from these things or that he was grounded because
of them. And there's plenty of good evidence to show
that Jimmy Emy Stewart's very effective and convincing performance in
It's a Wonderful Life came from his talent, from his
acting experience, and from Frank Kapper's direction. It's easy to
dismiss the ptst acting story by an examination of Stuart's
(15:14):
performances in his early career. From his first supporting roles
in various theater productions in the early nineteen thirties, critics
quickly noticed his abilities to play a variety of parts,
from the upsetting to the comical. He broke into motion
pictures in nineteen thirty four, first as an uncredited extra
and then working in various supporting roles throughout the mid
(15:34):
nineteen thirties. Critics of the time usually ignored actors in
smaller parts, but several writers who had also seen him
perform in plays wrote that their initial assessments of him
as an excellent theater actor were born out in his
first films. In fact, the New York Harold Tribune complained
that he was being under used as a side character
(15:55):
in his first big film, nineteen thirty five's The murder Man.
Better roles eventually followed, and by the late nineteen thirties,
Stuart was a leading man, usually playing average people whose
extraordinary talents and gifts and determination are revealed through the
various plot devices and challenges in any good movie plot.
Even a cursory glance at his filmography and the critical
(16:18):
reception of his work in the nineteen thirties shows a
very talented young actor working his way up the Hollywood
ladder and sharpening his skills with each new picture. By
the time he appeared in Mister Smith Goes to Washington
in nineteen thirty nine, it was very clear that Stuart
was a major Star And if you haven't seen Mister
Smith Goes to Washington, by the way, I recommend it
(16:39):
very highly. It's a Capra film. Like It's a Wonderful Life.
Stuart's part as Jefferson Smith and every man sent to
Washington whose backbone prevents him from being eaten up by
the various political machines and graft going on there, is excellent.
The emotional range required to play mister Smith was handled
admirably by Jimmy Stewart, even if the lot of the
plot was corny, and it was exactly the type of
(17:02):
emotional range that Stuart had to draw upon for It's
a Wonderful Life, filmed seven years later. In between those
two movies, Stewart appeared in eight major Hollywood films, ranging
from gritty westerns to feel good stories to outright comedies
and farces. And of course he had grown older and
undoubtedly his wartime experiences helped shape his overall character and work.
(17:25):
So how did the story about wartime PTSD appear? Well?
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that
the heavy lifting for this episode was done by other
historians and investigative journalists. Their work and links to it
are provided in the blog post for this episode. But
Dan mcguill, a international journalist and noted fact trigger, wrote
an excellent summary of this myth in his Snopes article.
(17:47):
He concludes that the wartime PTSD is shown in Jimmy
Stewart's acting story is quote unproven. As I said earlier,
though I feel more strongly about this story, and that's
why I say not only is unproven, there's no good
evidence for it. The original Facebook post seems to have
been based on the book Mission Jimmy Stewart and the
(18:08):
Fight for Europe by Robert Matson. In that book, Matson
argues that Stuart became flack happy during the later stages
of the war and had to be grounded by the
Army Air Corps to prevent him from having some sort
of mental breakdown during a mission. While Matson had done
research about the combat conditions and experiences of American flyers
over Europe during World War Two, the evidence for Stuart
(18:30):
suffering from PTSD comes mainly from one source, the interview
that Matson conducted with a fellow American World War Two flyer,
Lieutenant Barry Shillito. According to Shiloto, Stuart changed visibly in appearance,
lost weight that a lanky man like him couldn't afford
to lose, and that he quote went flack happy there
for a while end quote. But that's where the direct
(18:51):
connection with Jimmy Stewart and suffering from war trauma ends.
The stories about Stuart being plagued by nightmares about exploding planes,
body parts hitting his aircraft, and the sound of airmen
screaming as they fell from the skies were based on
the general and over all reports of nightmares and the
trauma that happened to some American pilots. Undoubtedly, as I
(19:15):
keep saying and implying, Jimmy Stewart suffered during his wartime experience.
Given the types of missions he flew and the claustrophobic
nature of flying a bomber, any pilot must have been
seriously affected. But that is specifically why the Army Air
Corps routinely stopped pilots from flying after a specific number
of missions. After reaching a certain number of missions over
(19:36):
enemy territory, Stuart was rotated out of combat assignments and
given a promotion. He moved to the position of operations Officer,
planning and supervising missions including deciding which flyers needed rest
and when they should take it. More reliable work done
by military historian Starr Smith, who had served with Stuart,
and by Michael Munn, the film historian, shows that but
(20:00):
this was more or less standard procedure, and that Stuart's
range of abilities, which included on the ground organization and leadership,
brought about his promotion, not fear of him losing it
behind the controls, and at any rate, Stuart wouldn't have
had much of a choice. These types of assignment, rotations
and promotions were required after certain number of missions had
(20:22):
been flown. He couldn't have lobbied against it because it
was actually an Army Air Corps procedure and regulation, unlike
the informal practice of using celebrities mainly for pr work. Again,
according to Smith, the military historian who served with Stuart
during World War II, quote, when the appointment was announced
nothing was said about flying too many missions. The official
(20:43):
word was that the four hundred and fifty third needed
an operations officer, and Major Stuart had been promoted to
the job. Further, there is no direct evidence of Stuart
being flack happy or having nightmares either during his war
years or afterwards about aviators falling from the sky. Again,
both of these things were technically possible, and Stuart could
(21:05):
have done a good job of hiding them for the
rest of his life. It's also very unlikely that war
trauma would have gone unnoticed by Stuart's commanders. The diagnosis
of PTSD didn't exist in the nineteen forties, but doctors
and medical researchers had been studying war induced psychological trauma
for decades. In the nineteenth century, it was called battle fatigue,
(21:26):
and then with the enormous increase in the mechanization of
war and the power of explosives, it became known as
shell shock, mostly during World War One, and the study
of it only improved during World War Two. PTSD is
a much newer term. Diagnostic methods have gotten much better
in the last half century, and so as treatment, but
the knowledge of this kind of trauma had been with
(21:48):
us for a long time. It's not as if this
trauma was unknown during World War Two. Still, the Jimmy
Stewart World War two PTSD to It's a wonderful life
story is a very hearty one. It's impossible to do
an exhaustive study across all social media, but Buzzkill Institute
researchers tell me that close to seventy thousand Facebook users
(22:12):
have read the story and clicked like, and the number
of shares is impossible to determine. It's also very common
to see it on Twitter and Instagram, especially this time
of year. Now, unless and until there's some reasonably hard
evidence for it, this story remains just that, a story.
(22:34):
Like so many stories we've analyzed on the show over
the years, it's truth, and I'm putting truth in quotation marks.
Here relies on a number of fallacies. The first is,
as I mentioned before, reasoning from the very general to
the highly specific, that bomber pilots and crews sometimes witnessed
horrific scenes of battle, and that therefore Jimmy Stewart must
(22:55):
have seen such things as quote bodies falling through the
air end quote, and heard quote screams of falling airmen
end quote, even though there's no good evidence that he did.
The story takes that as a given, and from there
it makes the assumption that Stuart's war trauma came through
in his post war acting, especially in the scenes of
(23:15):
suicidal desperation in its wonderful life, Once you believe that
there's enough evidence for the trauma in the first place
that everything else that follows in the story just seems
to make sense. In this chain of reasoning is not
surprising at all. In fact, it seems inevitable that Jimmy
Stewart would draw on his emotional experience of being flack
happy to make George Bailey's desperation seem more believable. As
(23:38):
I've said, however, there's lots of good evidence that the
range of emotion shown in Stuart's work on It's a
Wonderful Life was built on two decades of increasingly sophisticated
practice of his craft. Again, you'll only have to look
at the climactic scenes in nineteen thirty nine's Mister Smith
goes to Washington to see exactly the same display of
(23:59):
acting skills and nearly the exact same emotions that would
show up in It's a Wonderful Life. Certainly, being in
the war affected Stuart like it did everyone else, and
it probably contributed to the maturity and subtlety displayed in
the second half of his career. Despite the fact that
all this makes me sound like an uber buzzkill bordering
(24:21):
on being a misanthrope. I do so because I think
it's crucial to read the things you come across on
social media and in emails with a skeptical eye. If
the story sounds too good to be true, or if
has all the right answers pat down, it's probably weak
on the evidence side, and the real full story is
(24:42):
certainly more complicated. If you can believe this story about
Jimmy Stewart or trauma and It's a Wonderful Life, given
how thinly sourced it is, no wonder people believe crazy
political stories that fly across social media. Okay, now that
I've ruined a part of your holiday warmth regards that
aspect of It's a Wonderful Life mythology, let me quickly
(25:03):
address some of the minor myths and offer some other
observations about the film. Despite being one of the most popular,
highest ranked, and best loved movies of all time, It's
a Wonderful Life was not an immediate hit when it
was released on December twentieth, nineteen forty six, competing with
the Best Years of Our Lives, another brilliant, absolutely brilliant film,
(25:23):
and with the Christmas feel good movie Miracle on thirty
Fourth Street. It's a Wonderful Life didn't seem to find
a place or a niche with the public or with
the critics. You'll often hear that the film was panned
by the critics. It was another dose of capricorn, a
play on Capra, the director's name, and his tendency to
make the same sorts of heartwarming, corny films about individuals
(25:47):
overcoming hardship for the good of their fellow citizens over
and over again. But that's only partly true. The film
reviewers who didn't like it concentrated on what they saw
as shalloonist in the plot and characters. For instance, Bosley
Crowther wrote in The New York Times on December twenty third,
nineteen forty six, which is three days after the film's release,
(26:08):
and I quote, mister 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. End quote.
And there were many similar criticisms leveled at the film,
(26:29):
But it's a myth that this was the universal reception.
Time magazine loved it. It's a Wonderful Life. As a
pretty wonderful movie, it has only one formidable rival, Goldwin's
The Best Years of Our Lives as Hollywood's best picture
of the year. Director Capra's inventiveness, humor, and affectionate human
beings keep it glowing with life and excitement. Incidentally, published
(26:53):
on the same day as The New York Times as
a critical New York Times review, I just read It's
a Wonderful Life. One only one Academy award, a special
one for the technical achievement of creating artificial snow in
a new and improved way. I know, Yon Yon. And
then for the most part, the film just went into
the Hollywood back catalog with so many others. It was revived, however,
(27:15):
in a very interesting way, during the holiday season of
nineteen seventy six, Yes, nineteen seventy six. Over the years,
the television syndication rights to the film had passed from
Liberty Films, its original owner, to Paramount to National Telefilm Associates.
But in nineteen seventy four, the correct filing forms for
(27:35):
continuing the copyright on the film got screwed up and
the copyright wasn't renewed, so television stations were able to
play it at a considerable savings in copyright fees, and
it was aired frequently in the second half of the
nineteen seventies. It was watched by millions and became more
popular than it ever had been. And oh, by the way,
the copyright story has become a legend in itself, but
(27:56):
there's a teeny tiny mini myth associated with it. The
film and its images slipped out of copyright and entered
the public domain, but the copyright on the original story,
called the Greatest Gift by author Philip van dorn Stern,
upon which the film had been based remained. So it's
a myth that the reason It's a Wonderful Life became
(28:18):
so widely seen was that television stations could play at
quote for free. In fact, they still had to pay
admittedly less for the copyright fees for the original story,
so the slipped into the public domain thing was not
the real reason why it was shown so often. It
became a much cheaper film the show starting in nineteen
seventy six, but it wasn't technically free, but its popularity
(28:41):
was such after nineteen seventy six that It's a Wonderful
Life became a Hollywood classic starting in the late nineteen
seventies because, again after being shown at a discounted rate
if you will, so often, people started to watch it
a lot and value it for its own sake, and
it became commonplace for TV stations to air it. By
the early ninetheen eighties, it had become so popular during
(29:02):
the holiday season that no station management in its right
mind would quibble over the pittance they had to pay
for the original story copyright. From then it took off.
It's been colorized a couple of times, and has been
produced on stage across the country certainly since the nineteen
nineties and early two thousands. A couple of other misinnurban
legends about It's a Wonderful Life remain, However, It's not true,
(29:24):
for instance, that the popular characters Bert and Ernie on
the children's program Sesame Street were named after two important
characters in the film, Bert the cop and Ernie the
cab driver. This is a coincidence, even though Sesame Street
has had fun slipping in references to the film during
some of Burt and Ernie's sketches over the years, and
even though Seneca falls in upstate New York has held
(29:45):
and It's a Wonderful Life festival every December for years,
and the town has claimed that it was the inspiration
for Bedford Falls, the setting of the movie. There's no
evidence for that either. In fact, the author of the
original story The Greatest Gift I said in nineteen forty six,
long before the film became a classic, that this story
and film were set in Westchester County, just north of
(30:07):
New York City. There's a town called Bedford in Westchester County,
but Van Dornstern said quote the town I had in
mind was Califon, New Jersey, near to where he grew up.
These places are two hundred and fifty miles from Seneca Falls.
A larger myth, and perhaps a longer standing myth, is
that the film has been universally admired for its positive
and life affirming message over the decades. In nineteen forty
(30:29):
six forty seven, as I said earlier, those who didn't
like the film called it shallow, and then said that
the emotions on the display were merely cardboard cutouts of
genuine emotion. In more recent decades, It's a Wonderful Life
has been characterized as dark and claustrophobic, with a depressing
plot about how the vagaries and the sort of bad
luck chaos involved in life can grind an individual down
(30:52):
and drive him to near suicide. A critic for The
New York Times wrote in two thousand and eight that
It's a Wonderful Life was far more complex than a
simple feel good tale about realizing your own value. It
was also quote, a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up
and relinquishing your dreams of being trapped. There's that word again,
of compromising, of watching others move ahead, and a way
(31:16):
of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse
your children, their teacher, and your oppressively perfect wife. Other
critics have called it quote the most terrifying Hollywood film
ever made, end quote, and quote one of the most
profoundly pessimistic tales of human existence ever to achieve a
lasting popularity. End quote and again. The citations for all
(31:37):
these things are on the blog post. Now you know
what a glory hound I am. I want to take
some credit for this late twentieth century early twenty first
century take on the film. I remember very clearly that
it hit me one day out of the blue, in
the early nineteen nineties. Wait a minute, Sure, George Bailey's
short term business and financial problems are solved in the
(31:57):
film's climax, but he's more or less still back where
he started, trapped in Bedford Falls, with daily reminders of
his abandoned dreams all around him. Unfortunately, I wasn't smart
enough to record these revelations in print back then in
order to prove that they originated with me, so I
just started mythbusting, heart unwarming podcast instead. Now I don't
(32:21):
know for sure, and my parents aren't telling and the
family archives and records are silent about this. But if
my memory is correct, we've been watching It's a Wonderful
Life in the family buzzkill for a very very long time,
maybe even before the increase in airing after nineteen seventy six.
My mother more or less insisted that we watch it
when we were young, and then she'd tell us what
(32:43):
a good story it was, and that the story had
a good moral. But I can't resist saying this. There's
another important thing about It's a Wonderful Life that fits
in well with the aims of this podcast, and that's
asking people who to recognize that It's not just the
stars of history who make it such a rich and
important subject of study. It's not just Jimmy Stewart Donna Reid.
(33:06):
We spend an awful lot of time on this show
talking about how people overlook and undervalue the vast numbers
of lesser known historical figures who deserve our attention. You
know what I keep complaining about. Winston Churchill gets painted
as the sole victor in the Battle of Britain. Franklin
Roosevelt ended the Depression single handedly. John F. Kennedy put
(33:27):
a man on the Moon practically all by himself. And
although I sound like a cranky old mister Potter every
time I go on about this, the stars are given
far too much credit. There are countless people who are
overlooked who shouldn't be. And so I'd like to wrap
things up by asking you to watch the fantastic performances
by all the other actors in the film, note especially
(33:50):
how well they accomplish the multiple transformations that they must
undertake during the plot. First of all, there's a simple
passage of time during the story, from George getting ready
to go to college in the early nineteen twenties to
the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine to the
end of World War Two. That's a common demand placed
on actors. Not so common is to be asked to
(34:10):
play the same character in completely different versions of reality,
Bedford Falls at one point and Potterville at another. For instance,
Nick the bartender, played by Sheldon Leonard, works in a
family restaurant in the real Bedford Falls, but slings booze
and cracks wise in a rough joint in Pottersville. The
(34:31):
marvelous H. B. Warner, a star from the Silent film era,
plays the kindly town pharmacist in Bedford Falls, but a
drunken ex Cohn in Pottersville. Ward bond played Bert the
cop in both towns, but shaded his portrayal wonderfully to
fit the character of the two different places. And there
are lots of others. I want especially to mention Beulah Bondi,
(34:54):
who plays missus Bailey, George's mother. The way she handles
the transformation from the kindly family matriarch at Bedford Falls
to the bitter old owner of a boarding house in
Pottersville is masterful. Bulabondi appears only briefly in three or
four scenes in the film, but each time the acting
is perfect. In fact, she was one of the most
(35:15):
successful and prolific character actors in Hollywood. Her career started
with the nineteen thirty one film Street Scene and ended
with an Emmy Award winning performance in the popular Walton's
series on television in nineteen seventy six and Get This.
She played Jimmy Stewart's mother in four different films, between
(35:35):
of Human Hearts in nineteen thirty eight, two It's a
Wonderful Life in nineteen forty six, including the Capra classic
mentioned earlier, Mister Smith Goes to Washington of nineteen thirty nine.
It is essentially Beula Bondi as Missus Bailey in Bedford Falls,
who first tells George in his twenties that he's living
(35:56):
a wonderful life and should open his eyes to what's
in front of them. Pushing him off to go visit
Mary Hatch plate by Donna Reid, was her way of
trying to make him see what was right there waiting
for him.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Did you know that Mary Hatches back from school? Came
back three days ago? Nice girl, Mary? Kind that I'll
help you find the answers George h stop them grunting.
Can you give me one good reason why you shouldn't
(36:31):
call on Mary? Sure?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Sam Waynwright?
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Yes, Sam's crazy.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
Oh she's not crazy about him? Well, how do you know?
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Why?
Speaker 4 (36:38):
What'd she discussing with?
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (36:41):
My god, eyes, haven't I She lights up like a
firefly whenever you're around. Besides Sam Waynwright's away in New York,
and you're here in Dedford, falls An.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
All's fair and love and war. I don't know about war.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
More than nine.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I can see right to throw you right to your
back collar, but trying to get rid of Yeah, here's
your hat?
Speaker 1 (37:09):
What's your hurt?
Speaker 2 (37:11):
All?
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Mother?
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Old building and loan pal. I think I'll go out
and find a girl and do.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
A little passionate necking.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Now, if you don't, just point me in the right direction.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
This direction.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
And now here. She is in Pottersville as a weary
and suspicious boarding house owner confronted by a panic George
telling her that he's her son.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Well, mother, what do you want?
Speaker 4 (37:55):
Mother?
Speaker 1 (37:57):
This is George.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
I thought sure you'd remember George.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
If you're looking for a room.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
There's no vay can see.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Please help me. Something terrible has happened to me. I
don't know what it is. Something's happened to everybody.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Please let me come in and keep me here until
I get over.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
It, get over what I don't take in strange as mess.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
They've said here by somebody I know, well, I know everybody.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
You know what your brother in law, Uncle Billy, you
know him.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
What's sure I do?
Speaker 4 (38:25):
And you see him last today over at his house.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
It's a lie. He's been the insane asylum ever since
he lost his business.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
And if you ask me, that's where you belong.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
You'll see her mastery of the range of emotions more
clearly when you watch the movie again this year. By
the end of It's a Wonderful Life, George realizes that
dreams aren't necessarily what makes a good and happy life.
He learns that too much time spent with your eyes
looking over the horizon and wondering what's over the next
hill risk keeping you from appreciating what's right in front
(38:59):
of you. And what's right in front of you may
indeed be the fulfillment of your dreams. You just didn't
realize it. That's what my mother told us at the
end of the film Each Christmas, and so it's with
a shout out to my mother, the Duchess of Buzzkill,
that I say, okay, old Buzzkill Dynasty, mother of mine.
I'm off to concentrate on what's right in front of me,
(39:21):
the dishes. I have to do. The dishes. They're there
because I have buzzlings to take care of in what
I now realize is my wonderful life. And I'll say
to you, Buzzkill is out there, that I'll talk to
you next week, but right now, I'll let you join
the party of the Bailey extended family and friends already
in progress.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Right, dear Arnie, a toast to my big brother George,
the richest man in town. What's sah?
Speaker 4 (40:12):
That's a Christmas present form a very dear friend.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Look goody, can't yourself every kid of now rings and.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
Then you'll get his wings.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
That's right, that's right. The boy climbed. Don't give you
(41:07):
at p
Yes, it's Professor Buzzkill here with a special holiday episode
about the classic Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life. Imagine
being tortured by wartime memories, explosions, death, mutilated bodies, some
of them friends of yours, all the screaming. Now, imagine
(00:54):
them coming from a very confined and dangerous place. I've
always thought that being in a warplane or a submarine
would add the extra stress of being trapped and not
being able to contemplate running away from the situation.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
If you leave a.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Submarine, you'll drown. If you leap out of an airplane
without first having put on a parachute, you'll fall to
your death. You're trapped. Of course, even the most vivid
and active imagination can come close to the horrifying realities
of war and having to live with those images forever.
And if I'm right about the added submarine and airplane stress,
(01:31):
it's entirely possible that if you survive a war with
those experiences, the memories could affect almost everything you do
for the rest of your life. That's one of the
things that war induced post traumatic stress disorder can do
to people. Not all veterans of battle get PTSD, it
can vary in intensity, and in the most extreme cases,
it can ruin lives and lead to suicide. Well, Professor,
(01:55):
I can hear you saying this is a grim introduction
to a podcast episode about what is Why? Lee regarded
as one of the most uplifting, heartwarming, and life affirming
Hollywood films of all time. It's a Wonderful Life, starring
Jimmy Stewart, Donn Reed, and a host of other character actors. Yes,
I suppose it is a great introductor to a podcast
episode about It's a Wonderful Life, But you'll soon see
(02:16):
what I mean. This nineteen forty six Frank Capra film
is a holiday classic played every year at this time
in the United States and Canada and in some other countries.
It's the story of a man whose dreams never came true,
who thinks his life has been worthless, and who contemplates suicide.
He's then shown by his guardian angel what life in
(02:37):
his town and among his friends and family would have
been like if he had not lived. This helps him
realize that individuals have value, and that it's a great
gift to be shown just how much one's life can
affect the lives of other people. It's a Wonderful Life
is routinely listed among the greatest films of all time.
It makes almost every film organization's top one hundred list
(02:58):
and is often in the top ten. The Library of
Congress has listed it among the quote culturally, historically, or
esthetically significant works of art in American history, thereby giving
it special preservation status. The American Film Institute ranks it
number one in the category Most Inspirational American Films. And
(03:19):
more about its critical legacy later. The basic plot is
well known. George Bailey is a very personal young man
with big dreams of international travel and an interesting career
quote building things, planning, modern cities, and all that stuff
end quote. As he says early in the film, circumstances
that seem to be largely beyond his control conspire, however,
(03:40):
to keep him in his small hometown of Bedford Falls,
New York, and keep him working in the small family
business that bores him. His opportunities to go away to college,
to travel to see the world get sidetracked by relatively
random events that thwart those opportunities just on the brink
of him being able to take advantage of them. All
(04:01):
the while his friends and perhaps most gallingly, his younger
brother go off and do other things, leaving George to
stew in Bedford Falls. Now, George seems to handle all
these frustrations relatively maturely, with a reasonable amount of understanding
and calmness. In the background, though we know that his
(04:22):
relatively pleasant life has also prevented him from fulfilling his aspirations.
In essence, George is trapped like a pilot in a
wounded plane. His nemesis in the movie The Town Banker,
mean old mister Potter tells him exactly that, and here's
the clip.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
But George Bailey is not a common, ordinary yokul. He
is an intelligent, smart, ambitious young man who hates his job,
who hates the building and loan almost as much as
I do. A young man who's been dying to get
out on his own ever since he was born, A
young man, honest, one of the crowd, mind you, A
(05:01):
young man who has to sit by and watch his
friend go places because he's trapped, yes, sir, trapped and
defrittering his life away. Playing nurse maid to a lot
of garlic.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
He dos.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
George's troubles reach their peak when a serious business crisis
threatens through an even the little amount of dignity and
self worth he's built up over the years. In the
space of more or less one day, George goes from
being a relatively content man more or less resigned to
the fact that, while never being able to go adventuring
and living the life of his youthful dreams, his life
(05:35):
has been more or less as good as one can hope.
He goes from that to becoming convinced that his life
has been worthless, and that he's actually worth more dead
than alive because of his life insurance policy. As he
explains to Clarence, the guardian angel who's sent from heaven
to stop George from killing himself, I guess it would
have been better if I'd never been born. And here's
(05:57):
the original line delivered by Jimmy Stewart, butter, if I'd
never been born at all?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Like you say, I said, I wish I'd never been born.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Clarence the Angel is shocked, but then he sees an opportunity,
an angelic teaching moment in the parlance of our times.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, that's an idea. Where
do you think? Yeah, I'll do it all right, you've
got your wish, you've never been born.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Clarence arranges it with the heavenly higher ups to give
George a glimpse of what life and his hometown of
Bedford Falls would have been like if he had never
been born. The town has become Pottersville, named after the
greedy banker and major landlord mister Potter. Clarence then leads
George through the town to show him how Bedford Falls
slash Potterville had developed and what had happened to his
(06:50):
friends and his family in a world where he had
never existed. As you might expect from a Hollywood script,
things weren't so good in the George Bailey free world.
Rather than the sleepy and friendly Bedford Falls where he
had grown up, Pottersville is a relatively raucous and slightly
seedy place, and no one knows who he is. Of course,
(07:13):
the woman who would have been his mother doesn't recognize him,
and neither does the woman who would have been his wife. Eventually,
the shock of it all leads George to realize that
his life did have value and that he actually does
want to have been born. He begs Clarence to let
him live again.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Harsh bag, hel me, Clarence, get me back, Get me back.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I don't care what happens to me.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Get me back to my wife and kids, Helm Tires.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Please please, I want to live again. I wouldn't live again.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
I wouldn't live again.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Please God, let me live again.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
His wish is granted, and George returns to his house
with his friends and family there, all of them having
worked together to help solve the business problem that nearly
drove him to suicide, and it's implied all things in
George's wonderful life remain happy ever after. Anyone who's seen
the film recognizes and appreciates the wide range of emotion
(08:22):
that Jimmy Stewart had to command in order to be
able to play a character who goes through a lifetime
of frustration, peaks of happiness, canyons of despair, and perhaps
most difficult of all, he does it in a wonderfully
convincing way. Even the hard heart is cynic like yours,
truly sees the art and the talent and the skill
and what Stuart was able to do. But was it
(08:44):
all just art, talent and skill. Now here's where we
get to one of the big myths about It's a
Wonderful Life and where I explain why I started this
episode talking about war trauma and PTSD. A Facebook and
social media post flies around the internet at this time
of year about Jimmy Stewart and his experiences as a
World War Two aviator and bomber pilot. We've put a
(09:06):
link to this Facebook post in the blog post for
this episode on professor boskill dot com. The Facebook page
where that post appears more or less tells the stories
of American service members who have done extraordinary things during wartime.
Perhaps the most popular post on that page is the
one about Jimmy Stewart's World War II service and how
it might have affected his acting in It's a Wonderful Life.
(09:29):
The post tells the basic and very interesting story about
Stuart joining the Army in nineteen forty one, of him
pushing against the Army's attempts to have him make training
films and raise money by selling war bonds, and of
having Stuart more or less insist that he be given
combat assignments. All this is true. The American military routinely
(09:50):
used actors and celebrities in promotional and training roles, partly
because they were very good at these tests, and partly because, well, frankly,
having a a well known person die in combat might
have a dampening effect on wartime morale. And it's also
true that Jimmy Stewart worked very hard to get himself
posted to a combat unit. Stewart had been an accomplished
(10:12):
licensed pilot before the war and had longed enough hours
to make him an obvious choice to be a flight
instructor for new pilots, but he pestered his superiors to
let him transfer to the European theater to fly bombing missions.
As the Allies began heavy bombing of Germany in nineteen
forty three nineteen forty four, the Army Air Corps finally
relented and he was sent to England to command B
(10:34):
twenty four Liberator bomber squadrons in their devastating missions over Germany.
By all reliable accounts, Stewart was an excellent pilot, highly
effective commander, and was superb at squadron organization and management.
But the Facebook post then goes on to say, and
this is a long quote, but his wartime service came
(10:57):
at a high personal price. In the fire final months
of World War two, he was grounded for being flack
happy today called post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. When
he returned to the US in August nineteen forty five,
Stuart was a changed man. He'd lost so much weight
that he looked sickly. He rarely slept, and when he did,
(11:18):
he had nightmares of planes exploding and men falling through
the air screaming. In one mission alone, his unit had
lost thirteen planes and one hundred and thirty men, most
of whom he knew. Personally, he was depressed, couldn't focus,
and refused to talk to anyone about his wartime experiences.
His acting career was all but over. As one of
(11:40):
Stuart's biographers put it, every decision he made during the
war was going to preserve life or cost lives. He
took back to Hollywood all the stress that he had
built up. In nineteen forty six, he got his break.
He took the role of George Bailey, the suicidal father
in It's a Wonderful Life. The Rest is History. Actors
(12:01):
and crew on the set realized that in many of
the disturbing scenes of George Bailey unraveling in front of
his family, Stuart wasn't acting, his PTSD was being captured
on film for potentially millions to see. But despite Stuart's
inner turmoil, making the movie was therapeutic for the combat veteran.
He would go on to become one of the most
(12:22):
accomplished and loved actors in American history. As many of
us watched the classic Christmas film, It's a Wonderful Life.
It's also a fitting time to remember the sacrifices of
Jimmy Stewart and all the men who gave up so
much to serve their country during wartime. We will always
remember you end quotation. Now we can all agree with
(12:43):
the final sentiment, that is, we should always remember in
honor the sacrifice that military veterans made during World War Two.
But we should also be careful not to jump to
conclusions or make unproven statements about the specifics of someone's
service and how it affected their later life. To do
so is not only historically dicey, but it risks overlooking
(13:04):
and undervaluing the actual trauma that other service people suffered
and still suffer. You can tell by the trajectory of
what I'm saying here that I'm about to tell you
that the story of Jimmy Stewart having PTSD that was
induced by war trauma is untrue, but in doing so,
I want to stress the difficulties in actually determining such things. Yes,
(13:25):
undoubtedly Jimmy Stewart must have seen horrific stuff during his
bombing missions, even if at a distance. And it is
certain that combat flying, especially when you're in a relatively
slow airplane like a bomber, which is kind of an
easy target for anti aircraft fire, is incredibly stressful and
wearing on a pilot's nerves and broader psychology. So I
(13:46):
don't want to discount any of that. But essentially, like
so many social media history stories, there's no good evidence
that Jimmy Stewart suffered from battle fatigue from shell shock,
or that he became flack happy because of his bombing
runs over Germany, apart from normal war weariness. There is
(14:08):
also no good evidence that he suffered PTSD after the war,
or that the effects of PTSD came out during the
filming of some of the more distressing and emotional scenes
in It's a Wonderful Life, And there is absolutely no
evidence that the quote actors and crew, as the Facebook
post has it on the production set of It's a
Wonderful Life. And again I'm quoting here realized end quote
(14:32):
that Stuart's acting in the more disturbing scenes came from
war trauma. Again, this is not to say that it
definitely didn't happen. Remember, when analyzing history, it's almost impossible
to prove a negative. But I am saying there's no
good evidence that it ever did happen. There are no
Army Air Corps medical records to suggest that Jimmy Stewart
(14:54):
suffered from these things or that he was grounded because
of them. And there's plenty of good evidence to show
that Jimmy Emy Stewart's very effective and convincing performance in
It's a Wonderful Life came from his talent, from his
acting experience, and from Frank Kapper's direction. It's easy to
dismiss the ptst acting story by an examination of Stuart's
(15:14):
performances in his early career. From his first supporting roles
in various theater productions in the early nineteen thirties, critics
quickly noticed his abilities to play a variety of parts,
from the upsetting to the comical. He broke into motion
pictures in nineteen thirty four, first as an uncredited extra
and then working in various supporting roles throughout the mid
(15:34):
nineteen thirties. Critics of the time usually ignored actors in
smaller parts, but several writers who had also seen him
perform in plays wrote that their initial assessments of him
as an excellent theater actor were born out in his
first films. In fact, the New York Harold Tribune complained
that he was being under used as a side character
(15:55):
in his first big film, nineteen thirty five's The murder Man.
Better roles eventually followed, and by the late nineteen thirties,
Stuart was a leading man, usually playing average people whose
extraordinary talents and gifts and determination are revealed through the
various plot devices and challenges in any good movie plot.
Even a cursory glance at his filmography and the critical
(16:18):
reception of his work in the nineteen thirties shows a
very talented young actor working his way up the Hollywood
ladder and sharpening his skills with each new picture. By
the time he appeared in Mister Smith Goes to Washington
in nineteen thirty nine, it was very clear that Stuart
was a major Star And if you haven't seen Mister
Smith Goes to Washington, by the way, I recommend it
(16:39):
very highly. It's a Capra film. Like It's a Wonderful Life.
Stuart's part as Jefferson Smith and every man sent to
Washington whose backbone prevents him from being eaten up by
the various political machines and graft going on there, is excellent.
The emotional range required to play mister Smith was handled
admirably by Jimmy Stewart, even if the lot of the
plot was corny, and it was exactly the type of
(17:02):
emotional range that Stuart had to draw upon for It's
a Wonderful Life, filmed seven years later. In between those
two movies, Stewart appeared in eight major Hollywood films, ranging
from gritty westerns to feel good stories to outright comedies
and farces. And of course he had grown older and
undoubtedly his wartime experiences helped shape his overall character and work.
(17:25):
So how did the story about wartime PTSD appear? Well?
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that
the heavy lifting for this episode was done by other
historians and investigative journalists. Their work and links to it
are provided in the blog post for this episode. But
Dan mcguill, a international journalist and noted fact trigger, wrote
an excellent summary of this myth in his Snopes article.
(17:47):
He concludes that the wartime PTSD is shown in Jimmy
Stewart's acting story is quote unproven. As I said earlier,
though I feel more strongly about this story, and that's
why I say not only is unproven, there's no good
evidence for it. The original Facebook post seems to have
been based on the book Mission Jimmy Stewart and the
(18:08):
Fight for Europe by Robert Matson. In that book, Matson
argues that Stuart became flack happy during the later stages
of the war and had to be grounded by the
Army Air Corps to prevent him from having some sort
of mental breakdown during a mission. While Matson had done
research about the combat conditions and experiences of American flyers
over Europe during World War Two, the evidence for Stuart
(18:30):
suffering from PTSD comes mainly from one source, the interview
that Matson conducted with a fellow American World War Two flyer,
Lieutenant Barry Shillito. According to Shiloto, Stuart changed visibly in appearance,
lost weight that a lanky man like him couldn't afford
to lose, and that he quote went flack happy there
for a while end quote. But that's where the direct
(18:51):
connection with Jimmy Stewart and suffering from war trauma ends.
The stories about Stuart being plagued by nightmares about exploding planes,
body parts hitting his aircraft, and the sound of airmen
screaming as they fell from the skies were based on
the general and over all reports of nightmares and the
trauma that happened to some American pilots. Undoubtedly, as I
(19:15):
keep saying and implying, Jimmy Stewart suffered during his wartime experience.
Given the types of missions he flew and the claustrophobic
nature of flying a bomber, any pilot must have been
seriously affected. But that is specifically why the Army Air
Corps routinely stopped pilots from flying after a specific number
of missions. After reaching a certain number of missions over
(19:36):
enemy territory, Stuart was rotated out of combat assignments and
given a promotion. He moved to the position of operations Officer,
planning and supervising missions including deciding which flyers needed rest
and when they should take it. More reliable work done
by military historian Starr Smith, who had served with Stuart,
and by Michael Munn, the film historian, shows that but
(20:00):
this was more or less standard procedure, and that Stuart's
range of abilities, which included on the ground organization and leadership,
brought about his promotion, not fear of him losing it
behind the controls, and at any rate, Stuart wouldn't have
had much of a choice. These types of assignment, rotations
and promotions were required after certain number of missions had
(20:22):
been flown. He couldn't have lobbied against it because it
was actually an Army Air Corps procedure and regulation, unlike
the informal practice of using celebrities mainly for pr work. Again,
according to Smith, the military historian who served with Stuart
during World War II, quote, when the appointment was announced
nothing was said about flying too many missions. The official
(20:43):
word was that the four hundred and fifty third needed
an operations officer, and Major Stuart had been promoted to
the job. Further, there is no direct evidence of Stuart
being flack happy or having nightmares either during his war
years or afterwards about aviators falling from the sky. Again,
both of these things were technically possible, and Stuart could
(21:05):
have done a good job of hiding them for the
rest of his life. It's also very unlikely that war
trauma would have gone unnoticed by Stuart's commanders. The diagnosis
of PTSD didn't exist in the nineteen forties, but doctors
and medical researchers had been studying war induced psychological trauma
for decades. In the nineteenth century, it was called battle fatigue,
(21:26):
and then with the enormous increase in the mechanization of
war and the power of explosives, it became known as
shell shock, mostly during World War One, and the study
of it only improved during World War Two. PTSD is
a much newer term. Diagnostic methods have gotten much better
in the last half century, and so as treatment, but
the knowledge of this kind of trauma had been with
(21:48):
us for a long time. It's not as if this
trauma was unknown during World War Two. Still, the Jimmy
Stewart World War two PTSD to It's a wonderful life
story is a very hearty one. It's impossible to do
an exhaustive study across all social media, but Buzzkill Institute
researchers tell me that close to seventy thousand Facebook users
(22:12):
have read the story and clicked like, and the number
of shares is impossible to determine. It's also very common
to see it on Twitter and Instagram, especially this time
of year. Now, unless and until there's some reasonably hard
evidence for it, this story remains just that, a story.
(22:34):
Like so many stories we've analyzed on the show over
the years, it's truth, and I'm putting truth in quotation marks.
Here relies on a number of fallacies. The first is,
as I mentioned before, reasoning from the very general to
the highly specific, that bomber pilots and crews sometimes witnessed
horrific scenes of battle, and that therefore Jimmy Stewart must
(22:55):
have seen such things as quote bodies falling through the
air end quote, and heard quote screams of falling airmen
end quote, even though there's no good evidence that he did.
The story takes that as a given, and from there
it makes the assumption that Stuart's war trauma came through
in his post war acting, especially in the scenes of
(23:15):
suicidal desperation in its wonderful life, Once you believe that
there's enough evidence for the trauma in the first place
that everything else that follows in the story just seems
to make sense. In this chain of reasoning is not
surprising at all. In fact, it seems inevitable that Jimmy
Stewart would draw on his emotional experience of being flack
happy to make George Bailey's desperation seem more believable. As
(23:38):
I've said, however, there's lots of good evidence that the
range of emotion shown in Stuart's work on It's a
Wonderful Life was built on two decades of increasingly sophisticated
practice of his craft. Again, you'll only have to look
at the climactic scenes in nineteen thirty nine's Mister Smith
goes to Washington to see exactly the same display of
(23:59):
acting skills and nearly the exact same emotions that would
show up in It's a Wonderful Life. Certainly, being in
the war affected Stuart like it did everyone else, and
it probably contributed to the maturity and subtlety displayed in
the second half of his career. Despite the fact that
all this makes me sound like an uber buzzkill bordering
(24:21):
on being a misanthrope. I do so because I think
it's crucial to read the things you come across on
social media and in emails with a skeptical eye. If
the story sounds too good to be true, or if
has all the right answers pat down, it's probably weak
on the evidence side, and the real full story is
(24:42):
certainly more complicated. If you can believe this story about
Jimmy Stewart or trauma and It's a Wonderful Life, given
how thinly sourced it is, no wonder people believe crazy
political stories that fly across social media. Okay, now that
I've ruined a part of your holiday warmth regards that
aspect of It's a Wonderful Life mythology, let me quickly
(25:03):
address some of the minor myths and offer some other
observations about the film. Despite being one of the most popular,
highest ranked, and best loved movies of all time, It's
a Wonderful Life was not an immediate hit when it
was released on December twentieth, nineteen forty six, competing with
the Best Years of Our Lives, another brilliant, absolutely brilliant film,
(25:23):
and with the Christmas feel good movie Miracle on thirty
Fourth Street. It's a Wonderful Life didn't seem to find
a place or a niche with the public or with
the critics. You'll often hear that the film was panned
by the critics. It was another dose of capricorn, a
play on Capra, the director's name, and his tendency to
make the same sorts of heartwarming, corny films about individuals
(25:47):
overcoming hardship for the good of their fellow citizens over
and over again. But that's only partly true. The film
reviewers who didn't like it concentrated on what they saw
as shalloonist in the plot and characters. For instance, Bosley
Crowther wrote in The New York Times on December twenty third,
nineteen forty six, which is three days after the film's release,
(26:08):
and I quote, mister 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. End quote.
And there were many similar criticisms leveled at the film,
(26:29):
But it's a myth that this was the universal reception.
Time magazine loved it. It's a Wonderful Life. As a
pretty wonderful movie, it has only one formidable rival, Goldwin's
The Best Years of Our Lives as Hollywood's best picture
of the year. Director Capra's inventiveness, humor, and affectionate human
beings keep it glowing with life and excitement. Incidentally, published
(26:53):
on the same day as The New York Times as
a critical New York Times review, I just read It's
a Wonderful Life. One only one Academy award, a special
one for the technical achievement of creating artificial snow in
a new and improved way. I know, Yon Yon. And
then for the most part, the film just went into
the Hollywood back catalog with so many others. It was revived, however,
(27:15):
in a very interesting way, during the holiday season of
nineteen seventy six, Yes, nineteen seventy six. Over the years,
the television syndication rights to the film had passed from
Liberty Films, its original owner, to Paramount to National Telefilm Associates.
But in nineteen seventy four, the correct filing forms for
(27:35):
continuing the copyright on the film got screwed up and
the copyright wasn't renewed, so television stations were able to
play it at a considerable savings in copyright fees, and
it was aired frequently in the second half of the
nineteen seventies. It was watched by millions and became more
popular than it ever had been. And oh, by the way,
the copyright story has become a legend in itself, but
(27:56):
there's a teeny tiny mini myth associated with it. The
film and its images slipped out of copyright and entered
the public domain, but the copyright on the original story,
called the Greatest Gift by author Philip van dorn Stern,
upon which the film had been based remained. So it's
a myth that the reason It's a Wonderful Life became
(28:18):
so widely seen was that television stations could play at
quote for free. In fact, they still had to pay
admittedly less for the copyright fees for the original story,
so the slipped into the public domain thing was not
the real reason why it was shown so often. It
became a much cheaper film the show starting in nineteen
seventy six, but it wasn't technically free, but its popularity
(28:41):
was such after nineteen seventy six that It's a Wonderful
Life became a Hollywood classic starting in the late nineteen
seventies because, again after being shown at a discounted rate
if you will, so often, people started to watch it
a lot and value it for its own sake, and
it became commonplace for TV stations to air it. By
the early ninetheen eighties, it had become so popular during
(29:02):
the holiday season that no station management in its right
mind would quibble over the pittance they had to pay
for the original story copyright. From then it took off.
It's been colorized a couple of times, and has been
produced on stage across the country certainly since the nineteen
nineties and early two thousands. A couple of other misinnurban
legends about It's a Wonderful Life remain, However, It's not true,
(29:24):
for instance, that the popular characters Bert and Ernie on
the children's program Sesame Street were named after two important
characters in the film, Bert the cop and Ernie the
cab driver. This is a coincidence, even though Sesame Street
has had fun slipping in references to the film during
some of Burt and Ernie's sketches over the years, and
even though Seneca falls in upstate New York has held
(29:45):
and It's a Wonderful Life festival every December for years,
and the town has claimed that it was the inspiration
for Bedford Falls, the setting of the movie. There's no
evidence for that either. In fact, the author of the
original story The Greatest Gift I said in nineteen forty six,
long before the film became a classic, that this story
and film were set in Westchester County, just north of
(30:07):
New York City. There's a town called Bedford in Westchester County,
but Van Dornstern said quote the town I had in
mind was Califon, New Jersey, near to where he grew up.
These places are two hundred and fifty miles from Seneca Falls.
A larger myth, and perhaps a longer standing myth, is
that the film has been universally admired for its positive
and life affirming message over the decades. In nineteen forty
(30:29):
six forty seven, as I said earlier, those who didn't
like the film called it shallow, and then said that
the emotions on the display were merely cardboard cutouts of
genuine emotion. In more recent decades, It's a Wonderful Life
has been characterized as dark and claustrophobic, with a depressing
plot about how the vagaries and the sort of bad
luck chaos involved in life can grind an individual down
(30:52):
and drive him to near suicide. A critic for The
New York Times wrote in two thousand and eight that
It's a Wonderful Life was far more complex than a
simple feel good tale about realizing your own value. It
was also quote, a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up
and relinquishing your dreams of being trapped. There's that word again,
of compromising, of watching others move ahead, and a way
(31:16):
of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse
your children, their teacher, and your oppressively perfect wife. Other
critics have called it quote the most terrifying Hollywood film
ever made, end quote, and quote one of the most
profoundly pessimistic tales of human existence ever to achieve a
lasting popularity. End quote and again. The citations for all
(31:37):
these things are on the blog post. Now you know
what a glory hound I am. I want to take
some credit for this late twentieth century early twenty first
century take on the film. I remember very clearly that
it hit me one day out of the blue, in
the early nineteen nineties. Wait a minute, Sure, George Bailey's
short term business and financial problems are solved in the
(31:57):
film's climax, but he's more or less still back where
he started, trapped in Bedford Falls, with daily reminders of
his abandoned dreams all around him. Unfortunately, I wasn't smart
enough to record these revelations in print back then in
order to prove that they originated with me, so I
just started mythbusting, heart unwarming podcast instead. Now I don't
(32:21):
know for sure, and my parents aren't telling and the
family archives and records are silent about this. But if
my memory is correct, we've been watching It's a Wonderful
Life in the family buzzkill for a very very long time,
maybe even before the increase in airing after nineteen seventy six.
My mother more or less insisted that we watch it
when we were young, and then she'd tell us what
(32:43):
a good story it was, and that the story had
a good moral. But I can't resist saying this. There's
another important thing about It's a Wonderful Life that fits
in well with the aims of this podcast, and that's
asking people who to recognize that It's not just the
stars of history who make it such a rich and
important subject of study. It's not just Jimmy Stewart Donna Reid.
(33:06):
We spend an awful lot of time on this show
talking about how people overlook and undervalue the vast numbers
of lesser known historical figures who deserve our attention. You
know what I keep complaining about. Winston Churchill gets painted
as the sole victor in the Battle of Britain. Franklin
Roosevelt ended the Depression single handedly. John F. Kennedy put
(33:27):
a man on the Moon practically all by himself. And
although I sound like a cranky old mister Potter every
time I go on about this, the stars are given
far too much credit. There are countless people who are
overlooked who shouldn't be. And so I'd like to wrap
things up by asking you to watch the fantastic performances
by all the other actors in the film, note especially
(33:50):
how well they accomplish the multiple transformations that they must
undertake during the plot. First of all, there's a simple
passage of time during the story, from George getting ready
to go to college in the early nineteen twenties to
the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine to the
end of World War Two. That's a common demand placed
on actors. Not so common is to be asked to
(34:10):
play the same character in completely different versions of reality,
Bedford Falls at one point and Potterville at another. For instance,
Nick the bartender, played by Sheldon Leonard, works in a
family restaurant in the real Bedford Falls, but slings booze
and cracks wise in a rough joint in Pottersville. The
(34:31):
marvelous H. B. Warner, a star from the Silent film era,
plays the kindly town pharmacist in Bedford Falls, but a
drunken ex Cohn in Pottersville. Ward bond played Bert the
cop in both towns, but shaded his portrayal wonderfully to
fit the character of the two different places. And there
are lots of others. I want especially to mention Beulah Bondi,
(34:54):
who plays missus Bailey, George's mother. The way she handles
the transformation from the kindly family matriarch at Bedford Falls
to the bitter old owner of a boarding house in
Pottersville is masterful. Bulabondi appears only briefly in three or
four scenes in the film, but each time the acting
is perfect. In fact, she was one of the most
(35:15):
successful and prolific character actors in Hollywood. Her career started
with the nineteen thirty one film Street Scene and ended
with an Emmy Award winning performance in the popular Walton's
series on television in nineteen seventy six and Get This.
She played Jimmy Stewart's mother in four different films, between
(35:35):
of Human Hearts in nineteen thirty eight, two It's a
Wonderful Life in nineteen forty six, including the Capra classic
mentioned earlier, Mister Smith Goes to Washington of nineteen thirty nine.
It is essentially Beula Bondi as Missus Bailey in Bedford Falls,
who first tells George in his twenties that he's living
(35:56):
a wonderful life and should open his eyes to what's
in front of them. Pushing him off to go visit
Mary Hatch plate by Donna Reid, was her way of
trying to make him see what was right there waiting
for him.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Did you know that Mary Hatches back from school? Came
back three days ago? Nice girl, Mary? Kind that I'll
help you find the answers George h stop them grunting.
Can you give me one good reason why you shouldn't
(36:31):
call on Mary? Sure?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Sam Waynwright?
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Yes, Sam's crazy.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
Oh she's not crazy about him? Well, how do you know?
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Why?
Speaker 4 (36:38):
What'd she discussing with?
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (36:41):
My god, eyes, haven't I She lights up like a
firefly whenever you're around. Besides Sam Waynwright's away in New York,
and you're here in Dedford, falls An.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
All's fair and love and war. I don't know about war.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
More than nine.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
I can see right to throw you right to your
back collar, but trying to get rid of Yeah, here's
your hat?
Speaker 1 (37:09):
What's your hurt?
Speaker 2 (37:11):
All?
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Mother?
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Old building and loan pal. I think I'll go out
and find a girl and do.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
A little passionate necking.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Now, if you don't, just point me in the right direction.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
This direction.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
And now here. She is in Pottersville as a weary
and suspicious boarding house owner confronted by a panic George
telling her that he's her son.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Well, mother, what do you want?
Speaker 4 (37:55):
Mother?
Speaker 1 (37:57):
This is George.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
I thought sure you'd remember George.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
If you're looking for a room.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
There's no vay can see.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Please help me. Something terrible has happened to me. I
don't know what it is. Something's happened to everybody.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Please let me come in and keep me here until
I get over.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
It, get over what I don't take in strange as mess.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
They've said here by somebody I know, well, I know everybody.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
You know what your brother in law, Uncle Billy, you
know him.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
What's sure I do?
Speaker 4 (38:25):
And you see him last today over at his house.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
It's a lie. He's been the insane asylum ever since
he lost his business.
Speaker 4 (38:31):
And if you ask me, that's where you belong.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
You'll see her mastery of the range of emotions more
clearly when you watch the movie again this year. By
the end of It's a Wonderful Life, George realizes that
dreams aren't necessarily what makes a good and happy life.
He learns that too much time spent with your eyes
looking over the horizon and wondering what's over the next
hill risk keeping you from appreciating what's right in front
(38:59):
of you. And what's right in front of you may
indeed be the fulfillment of your dreams. You just didn't
realize it. That's what my mother told us at the
end of the film Each Christmas, and so it's with
a shout out to my mother, the Duchess of Buzzkill,
that I say, okay, old Buzzkill Dynasty, mother of mine.
I'm off to concentrate on what's right in front of me,
(39:21):
the dishes. I have to do. The dishes. They're there
because I have buzzlings to take care of in what
I now realize is my wonderful life. And I'll say
to you, Buzzkill is out there, that I'll talk to
you next week, but right now, I'll let you join
the party of the Bailey extended family and friends already
in progress.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Right, dear Arnie, a toast to my big brother George,
the richest man in town. What's sah?
Speaker 4 (40:12):
That's a Christmas present form a very dear friend.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Look goody, can't yourself every kid of now rings and.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
Then you'll get his wings.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
That's right, that's right. The boy climbed. Don't give you
(41:07):
at p
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