*Illustration by Celia Jacobs.
How It's a Wonderful Life Seized on an Urbanizing America's Nostalgia for the Small Town
As Mid-Century Americans Moved to Cities, Capra’s Film Helped to Idealize Isolated White Communities
It’s a Wonderful Life can be read through multiple prisms—as a Christmas movie, a family movie, a love story, an existential journey, and a celebration of the everyman. But Frank Capra’s movie invites audiences to consider it, first and foremost, as a small-town film. …
Why George Bailey Is the American Jesus
Reflecting a Postwar Religious Revival, the Long-Suffering Hero Played by Jimmy Stewart Lives a Life of Self-Sacrifice and Resists Temptation
In the 15 years after World War II, a religious revival swept through America. Records were set for church attendance and new church construction, a succession of religious books made the best-seller list, and religious leaders like Billy Graham became prominent figures in public life. Looking back, the 1940s and 1950s resemble other great revivals or “awakenings” that have punctuated American history.
In part, this particular awakening was a response to the war and its aftermath. America’s Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had worked together to defeat Hitler in the name of decency and civilization. …
What George Bailey's Building and Loan Company Can Still Teach Us About Banking
In His Time and Ours, Big Lenders Often Get a Pass, While Small Banks and the Communities They Serve Are Left Vulnerable
The bank run scene in It’s a Wonderful Life always makes me cry real tears. If you care about America, you should love the scene too—and not just because it is a brilliant piece of cinematic storytelling. …
Frank Capra’s Formula for Taming American Capitalism
It’s a Wonderful Life Prescribed Community and Empathy as the Remedy to a Callous Economic System
From the Gilded Age and until well into the Great Depression, Americans engaged in one of the most consequential debates in the country’s history: how best to address the economic inequities and societal problems stemming from …
There Is a Real Bedford Falls—It's My Upstate New York Town
An Uncanny Physical Resemblance and a Frank Capra Visit Connect Seneca Falls to His Holiday Classic
Bedford Falls, the town that is the real star of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, is a fictional place. But it closely resembles a real town.
I live there. …
Frank Capra Oversimplified the Italian-American Story
In His Life and Career, the Sicilian-Born Director Absorbed His Adopted Country’s Ambivalence Toward Italians
Frank Capra, the director of It’s a Wonderful Life, called the film his favorite, and even screened it for his own family every holiday season. The movie hit close to home in another way: Capra was attempting to represent the story of Italian-Americans like himself, who had a complicated path toward assimilation during the first half of the twentieth century.
Francesco Capra was born in 1897 in Bisaquino, near Palermo, Sicily, the youngest of seven children. (“Capra” means goat in Italian; the town’s name is derived from the Arabic “rich in waters.”) In 1903—at the height of Italian emigration—the family booked passage for America. …