AFI Top Ten

Week 6

 

 

It’s a Wonderful Life

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bedford_Falls_on_Christmas_Eve_1946.jpg

 

For this assignment, I watched film director, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Right from the start, I was taken with the look and feel of the movie, so I decided to explore these aspects, especially since it was filmed in black and white. I was happy to see that the DVD contained some reference material: an exclusive documentary entitled The Making of It’s a Wonderful Life and a special tribute to Frank Capra: A Personal Remembrance, narrated by Frank Capra Jr. Both biopics contain interviews with Capra and Jimmy Stewart, the film’s leading man.

The first frame of the film shows the front of a Christmas card; the opening credits are set within the subsequent pages of the card. This is significant because It’s a Wonderful Life originated as a short story entitled “The Greatest Gift,” written by Phillip Van Doren Stern in 1943. When he couldn’t get the story sold, Stern had 200 copies printed and stuck them in Christmas cards to friends and family. Three months later, RKO Studios bought “The Greatest Gift” for $10,000 with the intention of making it into a Christmas movie for Cary Grant. RKO commissioned three different writers (which resulted in three different scripts) to adapt the story into a screenplay. The scripts gathered dust on the studio’s shelves until Frank Capra bought and transformed them into It’s a Wonderful Life. At the time, Capra had several box office hits under his belt, but critics labeled his films “Capra-corn” because he had a penchant for making positive, wholesome, sentimental movies. It’s a Wonderful Life is no exception. In a nutshell, the story is about a man who thinks he’s a failure; however, with the help of a little divine intervention, he’s given the chance to see how the world around him would have been had he not been born.

Capra took particular care to make the town in which the story is set, Bedford Falls, believable. The set was built and erected at the RKO Ranch in Encino, California. It was constructed in three separate sections which spanned 4 acres when put together. Main Street alone was 300 yards long (approximately 3 city blocks), sporting twenty full grown Oak trees. This decision, opposed to shooting at different locations, gives the audience the feeling of practically being citizens of the town. I daresay that the set is a dominating factor in the film’s massive appeal to audiences some 56 years later.

Capra also loved movie weather. In particular, there are many winter scenes throughout the film. In fact, our first glimpses of Bedford Falls are through falling snowflakes. In those days, snowflakes were cornflakes painted white. The cornflakes made realistic looking snow, but their loud crunch made it impossible to record dialogue. Capra charged his Special Effects team with the task of creating realistic snow scenes that worked for the film. Special Effects accomplished this by using 3000 tons of shaved ice, 300 tons of gypsum, and 6000 gallons of a mixture made of fomite, soap, and water. The result: genuine representations of wintry scenes.

The infamous first kiss between Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed is a testament to Capra’s skill as a director. Story has it Jimmy Stewart was quite nervous to shoot the kissing scene and kept putting it off. When Capra finally convinced Stewart to do the scene, he restaged it a bit – having Reed and Stewart share the telephone – to insure that Stewart wouldn’t back out. Well, the kiss was so hot and passionate; they only had to do one take. At the end of the scene, the script girl pointed out that an entire page of dialogue had been left out. Capra replied, “With technique like that, who needs dialogue? Print it!”

It’s a Wonderful Life opened at the Globe Theatre in New York on December 20, 1946. Thanks to a blizzard that year, people stayed home and listened to the radio; consequently, the film was soon retired into obscurity. In the early 1970s the movie’s copyright expired, and television stations began to play the picture because it was royalty free. Through word of mouth, It’s a Wonderful Life became a holiday sensation. To many folks, Christmas wouldn't be the same without it.