It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

"Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

- Clarence after showing how awful life would be without George

 is a film co-written for the screen, produced & directed by, and starring Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Henry Travers, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, and Lionel Barrymore. It was produced by Liberty Films and originally distributed by, and released on December 20, 1946. The film currently belongs to Paramount Pictures and is co-owned by Republic Pictures. It received five nominations, including  and, but lost in each category. However, it has since come to be regarded as a cinematic classic, particularly through annual television airings in December.

Although the film begins and ends on Christmas Eve, it is not a strict "Christmas movie." Most of the film is actually a straight dramatic story of the life of George Bailey, who keeps trying to get out of his small town of Bedford Falls, but keeps getting pulled back in for various reasons, most of them having to do with Henry F. Potter, the richest man in town. The film chronicles George's life from childhood, graduating from Bedford Falls High School, and his many battles with Potter, as he tries to take over George's family-owned bank, the Bailey Building and Loan.

Synopsis
In Bedford Falls, New York, on Christmas Eve, George Bailey is deeply troubled. Prayers for his well-being from friends and family reach Heaven. Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second Class, is assigned to save George and earn his wings. Franklin and Joseph, the head angels, review George's life with Clarence.

At the age of 12, George saved his younger brother, Harry, who had fallen through the ice on a frozen pond, though George lost the hearing in his left ear in this effort. Later, working in the local pharmacy, George luckily noticed that druggist Mr. Gower, despondent over his son's death, had mistakenly filled a child's prescription with poison and saved the poor man from irrevocably ruining his own life by inadvertently killing the child.

As he grows up, George repeatedly sacrifices his dream to travel the world. He waits for Harry to graduate from high school and replace him at the Bailey Building and Loan Association, vital to the townspeople. On Harry's graduation night, George, now 21, discusses his future with Mary Hatch, who has long had a crush on him. Later that evening, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy interrupts them to tell George that his father has had a stroke, which proves fatal. A few months later, Mr. Henry F. Potter, a slumlord and majority shareholder in the Building and Loan, tries to persuade the board of directors to stop providing home loans for the working poor. George talks them into rejecting Potter's proposal, but they agree only on condition that George run the Building and Loan. Giving his college money to Harry, George delays his plans with the understanding that Harry will take over upon graduation.

When Harry graduates from college, he unexpectedly brings home a wife, whose father has offered Harry an excellent job. Although Harry vows to decline the offer out of respect for his brother, George can't deny Harry such a fine opportunity and decides to keep full ownership of the Building and Loan, knowing that this will kill his dream to travel the world.

George calls on Mary, who has recently returned home from college. After several arguments, they reveal their love for each other, and marry soon after. As they depart for their honeymoon, they witness a run on the bank that leaves the Building and Loan in danger of collapse. The couple quells the panic by using the $2,000 earmarked for their honeymoon to satisfy the depositors' immediate needs. Mary enlists the help of George's two best friends, a policeman named Bert and a cab driver named Ernie, to create a faux tropical setting for a substitute honeymoon. The couple embrace while Bert and Ernie sing in the background.

George starts Bailey Park, an affordable housing project. Potter tries to hire him away, offering him a $20,000 salary, along with the promise of distant business trips, something that George always wanted to do. George, initially tempted, turns Potter down after realizing that Potter intends to close down the Building and Loan and take full control of Bedford Falls.

Time passes, and George and Mary raise four children: Pete, Janie, Zuzu and Tommy. When erupts, George is unable to enlist, due to his bad ear. Harry becomes a fighter pilot and shoots down 15 enemy planes, two of which were targeting a ship full of troops in the Pacific. For his bravery, Harry is awarded the.

On Christmas Eve morning, Uncle Billy is on his way to Potter's bank to deposit $8,000 of the Building and Loan's cash funds. He greets Potter (who has the newspaper reporting Harry's heroics) and taunts him by reading the headlines aloud. Potter angrily snatches the paper, but Billy inattentively allows the money to be snatched with it. Potter opens the paper, notices the money and keeps it, knowing that displacement of bank money would result in criminal charges for George. When a frantic search turns up with nothing, and with a bank examiner due that day, George takes his anger and frustrations out on his family.

A desperate George appeals to Potter for a loan. Potter mockingly and coldly turns George down, and then swears out a warrant for his arrest for bank fraud. George, now completely depressed, gets drunk at the bar owned by his friend, Giuseppe Martini. After crashing his car into a tree, George staggers to a bridge, intending to commit suicide, feeling he is "worth more dead than alive" because of a life insurance policy. Before he can leap, Clarence jumps in first and pretends to be drowning. After George rescues him, Clarence reveals himself to be George's guardian angel.

George does not believe him, but when he bitterly wishes he had never been born, Clarence shows George what the town would have been like without him. Bedford Falls, named Pottersville, is home to sleazy nightclubs, pawn shops and amoral people. Bailey Park is never built. Mr. Gower was sent to prison for poisoning the child and is a despised derelict. Martini does not own the bar. George's friend Violet Bick is a strip-dancer and gets arrested as a pickpocket. Ernie is helplessly poor with his family having left him. Uncle Billy has been in an insane asylum for years. Harry is dead as a result of George not being there to save him from drowning, and the servicemen he would have saved also died. Ma Bailey is a bitter widow, and Mary a single spinster librarian.

George runs back to the bridge and begs to be allowed to live again. His prayer is answered, and he runs home joyously, where the authorities are waiting to arrest him. Mary, Uncle Billy, and a flood of townspeople arrive with more than enough donations to save George and the Building and Loan. George's friend Sam Wainwright sends him a $25,000 line of credit by telegram. Harry also arrives to support his brother, who is now "the richest man in town". George finds a copy of  with the inscription, "Dear George: Remember no man is a failure who has friends. P.S. Thanks for the wings! Love, Clarence." As they sing "Auld Lang Syne", Zuzu notices that one of their Christmas tree's bells is ringing. She tells George that every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. George agrees, and looks up to Heaven, winks, and says, "Atta boy, Clarence!"

Soundtrack
A CD, featuring excerpts from the film's soundtrack, including music, dialogue and sound effects, was released in 1997 under the Nick at Nite Records label, distributed by.

Television airings
When the original copyright expired in 1974 due to a clerical error by National Telefilm Associates, the rights holders at that time, the film went into, meaning anyone could broadcast the film without the copyright holder getting paid. Ironically, it was during this period, when frequent broadcasts during anytime of the year became a staple of off-hours broadcast, that the film enjoyed a huge resurgence - albeit with copies that were of continually lesser quality, both on TV and on VHS.

laid claim to a copyright on the unique music of the film in the 1990s, and is the current rights holder, and since 2002, granted broadcast rights to air the movie twice a year, including Christmas Eve in the USA. In the UK,, the owners of NBC, who in turn are owned by , holds the rights. Oddly enough, Paramount held the rights to the movie from 1951 until 1955 when they bought Capra's production company, Liberty Pictures. They sold the right to U.M. and M. Company in 1955, then were purchased by NTA several years later.

A colorized version of the film exists, but it is a subject of controversy for many fans, who feel the process was tampering with a film masterpiece. The colorized version has not been shown on TV in years, but is included on the 2007 2-disc DVD release and the subsequent Blu-ray release.

Musical
In recent years, a stage musical called simply A Wonderful Life was produced. Aside from the songs, much of the story remained the same, with some exceptions.


 * Every instance of water playing a role in the story (George saving his little brother, the school dance, George's attempt at suicide) is reworked due to the constraints of a stage play.
 * George is more openly an agnostic verging on unstated atheist prior to his encounter with Clarence.
 * George and Harry feud bitterly when Harry reneges on his promise to take over the Savings & Loan.
 * Potter is depicted as a younger man, nearly George's contemporary.
 * Again owing to the absence of water in the plot, young George saves Harry from an oncoming train, and this also served as his method of contemplated suicide, till Clarence intervenes.

Other parodies

 * wrote a special Donald Duck comic story for the character's 60th birthday, titled "The Duck Who Never Was", in which Donald, who feels that he is as much of a nobody as George, meets a genie who grants wishes to whoever rubs his lamp on their birthday (which in Donald's case is June 9th) and wishes he were never born. Donald is then thrown into an alternate reality where, because of him never being born, everyone he cares for is much worse off than they were with him around (except his irritatingly lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, much to Donald's dismay). After seeing all this, Donald immediately wishes things were back to the way they were.
 * The  episode "Chuckie's Wonderful Life" parodies this movie. After Angelica steals Chas' favorite CD and gets Chuckie in trouble for it, Chuckie decides to run away, but his guardian angel then shows him the horrible consequences of what life would be like if he was never around.
 *  did a parody in a U.S. Acres segment in which Wade Duck, after failing to guard the farm's vegetable crop, rescues an angel who, like Clarence, takes people into fantasy sequences to show what the world would be like without them ("like that movie they show seven million times every Christmas"). Ironically, the alternate Wade-less reality is not very different from the regular one, but Wade does find out how Orson's brothers stole the vegetables he was trying to guard earlier.
 * The  cartoon had an episode parodying the movie (and even having the same title), in which Donkey Kong gets everybody upset with him and decides to run away, but falls unconscious during his trek. He has a dream where Eddie the Yeti, as his guardian angel, shows him an alternate version of Kongo Bongo Island where he does not exist, in which Diddy is an evil dictator, Candy is married to Bluster, and K. Rool is protecting a papier-mache lilypad.
 * An episode of the 1987  cartoon, titled "Shredderville", has the Turtles thinking the world would be better off without them, and then having a dream where they wake up in a world in which they never existed and Shredder succeeded in his plans to taking over the world. The whole city is a mess, and not even Shredder is happy with it.
 * Issue #19 of the  comic book did this as a story titled "It's a Wonderful Narf". After accidentally messing up Brain's latest plan and getting a massive chewing-out for it, Pinky runs away, thinking Brain would be better off without him. However, he is then shown by his guardian angel (actually a disguised Brain) how much worse off the world would be if he was never born.
 * Issue #16 of the comic book Cartoon Network Presents featured a Top Cat story, "It's a Wonderful Strife", in which both T.C. and Officer Dibble, tired of putting up with each other, wish they had never come to the city. The both of them are then shown alternate realities by their guardian angels, played respectively by Huckleberry Hound and Snagglepuss. Huck shows T.C. that, without guidance from a crafty leader, his gang has to resort to crime for sustenance, and Snagglepuss shows Dibble that if he never became a police officer, T.C. is an anarchist bossing around the entire police force.
 * Issue #18 of The Flintstones and the Jetsons features a treatment of the movie's story given to The Flintstones, titled "It's a Wonderful Prehistoric Life", in which Fred finds that he had not received a Christmas bonus. He gets depressed about this and starts going on a walk without knowing where he is headed - toward a tar pit. The Great Gazoo then yanks Fred out of time at the last minute and shows Fred what things would be like if he never existed (Fred protests along the way that he did not wish that he was never born, Gazoo retorts saying Fred posed an interesting "what if" and did not want to pass it up). They arrive in a world where Bedrock is a lot larger and is now known as Slaterock, Barney has an administrative position at Mr. Slate's business, and Wilma is married to Mr. Slate. Gazoo then shows that all is not as it appears to be. Slaterock grew up "too big, too fast" and crime is now way up. Betty is single and homeless because she never met Barney (because Fred introduced her to him), and Barney is quite lonely and spends his nights in the office depressed. Pebbles is a spoiled brat and Wilma is unhappy with her marriage. Gazoo then takes Fred back to his own time, where he declares that he is alive... and in pain having fallen into the tar pit. He returns home now more appreciative of his family, and Mr. Slate arrives with Fred's bonus, saying his secretary forgot to put it in his pigeonhole.
 * A two-part story in Captain Planet and the Planeteers, titled "Two Futures", lets Wheeler, who was chosen by Gaia to possess the ring of Fire, see what Earth would be like in the future, had he never joined the Planeteers. In the end, he discovers just how important his role in the team really is.
 * The Fairly OddParents did an episode titled "It's a Wishful Life", in which Timmy is shown what life would be like if he had been born as a girl. Controversially, everyone is shown to be better off in the alternate reality.
 * In 1986,  did a sketch called "The Lost Ending of It's a Wonderful Life," with portraying George Bailey. It depicts Potter receiving quite the violent confrontation when it is discovered he has withheld the lost $8,000.
 * In the  episode "Yumi Goes Solo", Yumi wishes she never joined the band. In her dream, Yumi becomes a rich solo rock star while Kaz and Ami's lives are miserable (Kaz has a unhappy job of working for a cat food commercial in a studio, and Ami is a homeless accordion player).
 *  comic book featured a story titled "She's A Wonderful Wife", in which both Ralph and Alice, after a heated argument, see a world where they never married. It breaks the fourth wall, as the writer and artist get stuck, realizing that they never had both of them storm out of the house before at the same time. After an awkward encounter with the immigrant family living there in the other world, the two find each other again, and to boot, one of Ralph's money-making schemes actually works.
 * The  Christmas episode, "iChristmas", involves Spencer making a magnetic Christmas tree that catches on fire destroying all the presents. An infuriated Carly makes the mistake of wishing that Spencer were born normal.
 * In the  short "It's a Miserable Life", a spirit appears to Butt-Head, showing that if he was not born, Highland would have been a better place. However, even here, his influence strikes this world, causing Beavis to start his trademark laugh and Principal McVicker being driven into his trademark shudders and stuttering.
 * In the fourth season premiere of , also titled "It's a Wonderful Life", Eric breaks up with Donna and wishes that they had never kissed (which started their relationship). An angel then comes and shows him what life would have been like if they had not gotten together, and Eric would be off worse.
 * The  episode "It's a Wonderful Afterlife" features the title character being shown what life in both the Neitherworld and the real world would be like if he was not around.
 *  episode "Wishful Thinking" has a mistletoe showing Orange what the world would be like if he was not born. At the end, it turns out the mistletoe is actually Liam the Leprechaun, who tried to make all of Orange's friends ignore him after they did not invite him to their Christmas party.
 * An episode from the second season of the PBS Kids series  titled "It's a Wonder-Four Life" featured the character Four being shown by his guardian angel what the world is like if he was the only sibling of his family.