Hollywood legend James Stewart and flop movie that became a Christmas classic

Historian GORDON LUCY on the perennial festive family favourite ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and its star
James Stewart as George Bailey in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ with  Donna Reed who played his wife Mary and Karolyn Grimes who played their youngest daughter  Zuzu. Stewart was nominated for an Oscar for his role and although he didn’t win the film acted as a springboard for the rest of his careerJames Stewart as George Bailey in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ with  Donna Reed who played his wife Mary and Karolyn Grimes who played their youngest daughter  Zuzu. Stewart was nominated for an Oscar for his role and although he didn’t win the film acted as a springboard for the rest of his career
James Stewart as George Bailey in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ with Donna Reed who played his wife Mary and Karolyn Grimes who played their youngest daughter Zuzu. Stewart was nominated for an Oscar for his role and although he didn’t win the film acted as a springboard for the rest of his career

Of overwhelmingly Scottish and Ulster-Scots descent, James (Jimmy) Stewart was born on May 20 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, to Elizabeth Ruth (née Johnson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store.

As a high school student, he was a keen athlete (football and track), musician (singing and accordion playing), and sometime actor.

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In 1929, he won a place at Princeton where he studied architecture and became involved with the University Players as a musician and actor.

After graduating, engagements with the University Players took him around the north-eastern United States, including a run on Broadway in 1932. But work dried up as the Great Depression began to bite, and it was not until 1934, when he followed his friend Henry Fonda to Hollywood, that things began to look up.

His first screen appearance was an uncredited role in ‘Art Trouble’ (1934), after which he worked for MGM as a contract player. In the second half of the 1930s, he began to make a name for himself in Frank Capra’s ‘You Can’t Take It with You’ and ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’.

Tall and gangly, he spoke with a distinctive drawl. In early roles, he played naive idealists to perfection. For example, in ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’, a naive young man is appointed to fill a vacancy in the US Senate where he promptly comes into collision with political corruption, but he does not back down. The film was a box office success and significantly raised Stewart’s profile.

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Distinguished service in the Second World War interrupted his acting career. He had learned to fly in the mid-1930s and was drafted into the US Army in 1940 as a private and rose to the rank of colonel (a truly stunning achievement), first as an instructor in the United States, and subsequently on combat missions in Europe.

He remained involved with the US Air Force Reserve after the war and officially retired in 1968 (when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 60) with the Distinguished Service Medal. In 1959 he had been promoted to brigadier-general, becoming the highest-ranking actor in US military history. In 1988 President Reagan promoted him to major-general on the Air Force retired list.

His first post-war film was ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in 1946 which was not a success at the time, a point to which we will return shortly.

Thereafter his career resumed its upward trajectory, taking on roles in some of Hollywood’s best-remembered films, starring in a string of Westerns, like ‘Winchester ‘73’ (1950), ‘The Man from Laramie’ (1955) and ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), biopics such as ‘The Glenn Miller Story’ (1954) and ‘The Spirit of St Louis’ (1957), and a series of collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, including ‘The Rope’ (1948), ‘Rear Window’ (1954), ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ (1956) and ‘Vertigo’ (1958). ‘Vertigo’ attracted mixed reviews at the time but is now too regarded as a work of genius.

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‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a heart-warming, feel-good Christmas film.

It was inspired by a short story entitled ‘The Great Gift’ by Philip Van Doren Smith, an American author, editor and Civil War historian. It could be described as very loosely based on Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’.

The plot of the film revolves around George Bailey, a man who has sacrificed his dreams to help others in his community, and who is in deep despair because $8,000 of the funds of the building society, of which he is the manager, has been mislaid by his uncle. He is on the brink of committing suicide (by jumping off a nearby bridge) on Christmas Eve 1945.

This prompts the intervention of George’s guardian angel Clarence Odbody. Clarence demonstrates to George how he has touched the lives of others and how different life would be for his wife Mary and his community of Bedford Falls if he had not been born.

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Capra had no doubt that Stewart was best suited for the role of George Bailey. The film earned Stewart an Oscar nomination and Capra received his sixth Oscar nomination as best director.

Despite this, the film was a flop. The film’s break-even point was $6.3 million, about twice the production cost, a figure it did not even come close to achieving on its initial release. Because of the film’s disappointing sales, studios sadly concluded Capra no longer had the ability to produce popular and financially successful films.

The intention was to release the film in January 1947, but the release date was brought forward to December 1946 to make it eligible for the 1946 Academy Awards. This proved to be a mistake because the competition in 1947 was nothing like as intense as it was in 1946.

However, between 1946 and 1976 the film went from being a box office failure to a Christmas classic. As a result of a clerical error in 1974, copyright was allowed to lapse, and it became a television staple during the Christmas season in 1976.

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In the 1980s it became a perennial holiday favourite. In 1990, the film was designated as ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’ and added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. It is now considered by the American Film Institute to be ‘one of the greatest films of all time’, an evaluation widely shared.

Despite its original lack of success, Frank Capra confessed that it always remained his favourite among the films he directed and that he screened it for his family every Christmas.

In 1984 Capra told The Wall Street Journal: “The film has a life of its own now, and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I’m proud ... but it’s the kid who did the work.”

President Harry Truman famously observed that ‘if [my wife] and I had a son we’d want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart [in this film].’

It was also Jimmy Stewart’s favourite film.

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