Year: 2013
Writers: Michael Carlisle & Ehren C Clarke
Editor: Ehren C Clarke
The film “Sullivan’s Travels” makes a compelling yet hollow case on the state of moral affairs in 1942 America. The assertion, after the lead character, a Hollywood director, goes through a series of misadventures for the sake of the “art film,” is put to a harsh reality check by prisoners, not an ideal test group, that America doesn’t want realism, substance and meaning, they want to laugh. The “art film” is thus derided and the comedy and the lighter side of life applauded as the formulaic cinema to cure the aching ills of an ailing America. Here the message is clear, but groundless. Four years later, Frank Capra’s 1946 “It’s A Wonderful Life,” conveys a message that is like in meaning yet cryptically hidden in a story meant to warm and please the heart of America hearkening back through nostalgia and looking ahead through the “American dream.” We, the audience, the same one given to the brighter side of things as seen in “Sullivan’s Travels,” are easily passed off as convinced of George Bailey’s idealism and all that he stands for that is patriotic in the “small guy” making the happy life for his family and that there really can be a happy ending as, “the angel gets its wings.” But the reality we see greet Bailey is nothing like he intended. It is more the case that frankly, all of his dreams are shut out, squashed, by this “American dream.” Is the “American dream” then some playing second fiddle to the actual hoped for manifest destiny of those countless many who dreamed a dream? According to George Bailey, apparently so. Just who is this dubious character who has done such a magnanimous job in stealing the hearts of viewers, typically each Christmas when the sentiments flow most readily, and the heart strings are pulled with more naiveté.
Considering that “It's a Wonderful Life” did not hold water in Post War British Cinema, understandably, the British were recovering from the same brutal war, but one in which they lost many more citizens and had cities still left in rubble- the British public was in the mood for a darker kind of film. This is the time when Ealing comedies like “Kind Hearts and Coronets” and “Ladykillers” were at their peak. Considering anti-heroes were all the rage, here is a time when a character like George Bailey, with naive American sensibilities, would not have fit in at all. In fact American characters in the UK were either portrayed as fools or villains; the following are two very popular examples. “Night and the City's” Harry Fabian is the only American in Jules Dassin's classic film noir. He has big dreams, the same "American dream” and he wishes to cash it all in, during post WWII UK. Unfortunately, his youthful optimism gets him nowhere. Often he steals from his wife's purse just to pay off the money he owes. Eventually Fabians finds living the "American dream" means screwing everyone over & then dying in the gutter like a rat. In the UK, would have Capra's film ended so blissfully? Certainly not. The British were angry and needed a cinema that expressed their outrage. Their George Bailey would have shot himself and then died in the river!
Another anti-hero is found in Carol Reed's “The Third Man.” Joseph Cotton plays Holly Marins, an American who has come to search for his best friend. He writes pulp westerns and acts like the many heroes he writes about. However time and time again he is proven to be a fool by a UK detective. He eventually finds his friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but learns that life is not all fine and dandy. Lime uses his ideal of the “American dream” to make money by poisoning children. In the end, friend is forced to kill friend. A community is shattered. Post WWII British cinema was not a community, it was anarchy. It was destruction, gritty and grimy reality. “It's a Wonderful Life” had no place with that audience because it relied too heavily on following rules that the UK knew were completely shattered by the war.
The rules for the American public rested on the realization of a dream, or so Capra intended, and purportedly, George Bailey should exemplify this. The character of George Bailey played by James Stewart was the ideological measure upon which the entire film rests. For post WWII institutionalized American core principles and weighty moral issues the film intended to propagate, the character of George Bailey must likewise possess such traits and manifest them as a source for their perpetuation in the film, galvanizing those around him to that which is this high standard set. Unfortunately, Capra creates a character in Bailey that is hollow and not like the one found in Gary Cooper’s character of Alvin C. York in 1941 and “Sergeant York” whose attributes were sustainable enough to support the morality and ideology of the entire film, as he would do again in his role in 1952 and “High Noon.” Here are fully realized, fully dimensional characters of gravitas. This is not the case for George Bailey. The character is elementally obtuse amounting to very little other than a banner for the ideals that Capra pins to Bailey’s lapels. The character may represent ideals, wearing them like the latest fashion, but is of itself of an almost arbitrary figure that might be substituted for or whom one might see substituting for another, such as the entomologist played by Eija Okada in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 Woman in the Dunes, an ideal match of an ineffectual subject. In short, Stewart’s portrayal of Bailey was enough to “wear” the signature characteristics of the post-WWII idealism of the day: duty, honesty, long-suffering, dependability, but emanating these qualities from within, in a role that demonstrated the kind of singularity to be the post WWII American role model required; he was simply inadequate and might have been any “shade” in “Hell,” “Purgatory” or “Paradise,” any in this, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” just as he, as empty as was the dream that was to be his sole motivation throughout the entire film, never to be realized, was a character too insignificant to be believed.
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