Since he went off to serve, Hollywood had found new leading men, such as Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck, who both were seven years younger than he was. Some of “Life’s” early scenes called for the now graying Stewart to be just a few years out of high school. He felt ridiculous and considered plastic surgery, then thought better of it. But Jim was helped greatly by his co-star Donna Reed (Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland, and Ginger Rogers were among several actresses considered for the role of Mary Baily).

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Before the romantic scene where George and Mary tearfully and sensuously declare their love for each other, Reed encouraged her leading man to do it in only one unrehearsed take. Capra later joked that Stewart was so nervous during the tender sequence he was forced to wrap a phone chord around the celluloid couple so Jim wouldn’t run away.

“The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” — German Philosopher Immanuel Kant

Stewart was also helped by the actor who played the film’s villain, the wheelchair-bound Lionel Barrymore, who reminded him that movies had the power to make people happy around the world. The old man’s pep talks helped Jim regain his confidence in his acting chops, and Capra gave the Indiana, Pennsylvania-born Stewart great latitude in playing the role of the small town resident whose big dreams would never be fulfilled. Just before filming the sequence where the Bailey’s Bedford Falls neighbors came to take their money out of the building and loan, Capra advised the future grandma on TV’s “The Waltons,” Ellen Corby, to ask Stewart for $17.50, half the amount that the script called for. The leading man responded by staying in character and impulsively kissing Corby on the cheek.

In one of the films darker moments Stewart, who during the war was no stranger to nearly overpowering fear and had often prayed for the safe return of himself and his men before bombing missions, started sobbing on camera when he turned to God for help. As the show continued, some of Stewart’s cast mates, who at first were questioning the rusty movie star’s professionalism, became convinced that he and George Bailey were one and the same; Jim went on to deliver an Oscar-nominated performance.

“It bears out my feeling of the picture business, that it’s not a production line business—but magic” – James Stewart, on “It’s a Wonderful Life”

A brief aside: The 66-year-old Barrymore, who for years famously played Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio and suffered from crippling arthritis, showed no sign of his legendary ferocious temper on the Wonderful Life set. A few years earlier Lionel, had been directing a movie in which the actors kept blowing their lines, which resulted in several retakes; Barrymore had felt an explosion coming on. Still smiling, the enraged filmmaker excused himself, went upstairs to the sound control room and let loose a barrage of foul language. None of the cast members were spared his wrath. When he finished, he felt better and calmly returned to the set. To Lionel’s delighted surprise, his performers excelled for the rest of the day. Later a jubilant Barrymore told a crew member that patience always wins. The man replied, “That little broadcast from behind the glass booth didn’t hurt any either.”

In the 1930s director Capra had toiled at Columbia Pictures, which was ruled by the autocratic Harry Cohn, considered by some to be the meanest man in Hollywood. The mogul kept the entire studio electronically bugged, displayed a huge portrait of Mussolini in his office, and used an electrified chair to give unsuspecting victims sudden jolts.

Capra had sat in it once, received a shock, and angrily smashed the chair to bits. Yet the Sicilian-born director and the rough-and-tumble former streetcar conductor from New York mostly got on along well. They had made several classic hits together including the 1934 Academy Award winner It Happened One Night (1934) starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, before Columbia’s decision to cancel a biopic about the composer Chopin had led to the frustrated Capra leaving the studio. When filming began on “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Capra was excited to have his independence but nervous with his own money on the line. Known for making movie sets fun places to work, Frank was at first crabby and irritable with his cast and crew.

Filming a snowy Christmas movie in over one hundred degree heat in Encino did not help morale; many of the heavily dressed actors fainted. But there were nice moments. One scene required Donna Reed as Mary to throw a rock through an old mansion window and make a wish. Capra had a marksman ready off camera, but to his delight Reed shattered the glass on her own. She turned to him and said,” Why so surprised? Don’t you think an Iowa farm girl would know how to play baseball?”

“The importance of the individual is the theme – and no man is a failure. If he’s born, he’s born to do something, he’s born not to fail.”
– Frank Capra

As the shoot progressed, Capra regained his confidence. He disdained special effects when Clarence Oddbody the angel (Henry Travers) did his magic, preferring to tell the story through his actor’s faces. The director started to believe he was making the greatest movie ever. Eventually “Life” became a joyous project to work on; like earlier Capra films, the company went on picnics and sang in between camera setups.

“It was the most gentlemanly way of going broke, and the fastest way anybody ever devised.” – Frank Capra, on Liberty Films

Too dark; the country wanted to watch comedians such as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Too dated; “Life” came off like a Depression film rather than a post-war movie. Cinema attendance dropped drastically in 1946 overall, as re-united couples often preferred spending quiet evenings at home. For whatever reason, unlike Capra’s blockbuster hits in the 1930s, the three million dollar production failed to make a profit.

Capra made one more movie under the Liberty Films banner “State of the Union,” 1948, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn), and then chose to fold his entrepreneurial tent, opting instead for the security of a Paramount Studios contract. Years after the sale, Capra mourned the loss of his artistic independence and admitted he was never again the same man or talent that he had been.

The newly energized Stewart, with his acting confidence restored, hinted to his agent that Reed was to blame for the movie’s disappointing box office performance (“Wonderful Life”’s trailers had emphasized the love story instead of the Christmas theme) and superstitiously turned down the opportunity have her as his leading lady again. Donna Reed, who later said she’d never worked harder on a movie, felt completely exhausted after “Wonderful Life” and wondered if her career was finished.

“What is remarkable about ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is how well it holds up over the years; it’s one of those ageless movies, like ‘Casablanca’ or ‘The Third Man,’ that improves with age” – Roger Ebert, 1999

“Wonderful Life” got mixed reviews in its initial release and like any classic movie was continuously reexamined. Some critics found the film terrifying, citing moments where Stewart’s George Bailey, seeming barely to be able to restrain himself from committing physical violence, verbally abused his wife, children and their teacher.

Salon.com critic Rich Cohen expressed the view that the nightmarish Pottersville, which displaces the more idyllic Bedford Falls after the angel grants George Bailey’s wish to have never been born, was actually the real world that we all live in. Others saw the film as a damning statement on capitalism, ignoring that fact Mr. Potter harms George Bailey by resorting to thievery, while George’s friends make a free market, charitable decision to bail him out. (Socialism was arguably on display during the scene in which a dressed-to-the-nines Reed and Stewart fall into a pool after doing the Charleston; the retractable floor which a jealous Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer used to sabotage the two future newlyweds’ dance was a real-life Franklin Roosevelt New Deal project built for Beverly Hills High School.)

“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.” –Frank Capra

Years passed. From that point on Capra, unwilling to either risk his own money or work for somebody else, directed only a handful of movies after “Wonderful Life.” He grew frustrated both by the rising power of movie stars combined with studio-imposed budget restrictions. In his 1971 autobiography, the always sentimental Capra, who forty years before had talked the foul-mouthed, tough-minded Harry Cohn into distributing Mickey Mouse cartoons, publicly despaired about the lack of wholesome movies coming out of Hollywood.

Although he continued to take on a variety of roles, James Stewart deliberately set out to create a stronger screen image. He shared Capra’s disdain for unrealistic war movies, preferring instead hard, gritty Westerns like “The Man From Laramie” (1954), which helped to make him rich and surpass John Wayne as the nation’s number one box office star. Donna Reed restored her career by winning an Academy Award for playing a prostitute in “From Here To Eternity” (1953) and then became one of television’s most wholesome mothers. She became a staunch anti-Vietnam War activist, putting her politically at odds with her more hawkish former leading man. In 1966, Brigadier General James Stewart flew on a non-publicized bombing mission, suffered the loss of his son Ronald killed in action two years later, and later publicly expressed contempt for those opposed the Vietnam conflict.

Meanwhile, “It’s a Wonderful Life” fell into the public domain in 1974 because no one renewed its copyright. The almost forgotten film, considered by many to be old-fashioned in it’s time, was shown repeatedly on cable television stations during the holiday season, achieved an enormous following, and became a perennial Christmas classic.

“It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra told the Wall Street Journal in 1984. “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. I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.”

“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) began as a short story called “The Greatest Gift.” Pennsylvania-born writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who said that the heartwarming tale had come to him in a dream, was unable to sell it to a publisher, so he sent the story out as a long Christmas card to friends. His agent subsequently sold the fable to RKO pictures, where it went through several transformations.

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In one version a losing political candidate contemplated suicide, only to have an angel convince him to stick around and do good works. Finally it fell into the hands of director Frank Capra, who said it was the story he had been looking for all his life. He purchased it to be the first project for his new venture, Liberty Films (started by Capra in 1945 along with Producer Samuel J. Briskin, and directors William Wyler and George Stevens). With movie attendance booming during the Second World War II, a new independent film company for big name directors seemed like a can’t-miss idea.

Capra had long been an admirer of Amadeo Pietro Giannini, the founder of the Bank of Italy in 1904, renamed the Bank of America in 1928. Giannini earned a reputation for lending money to people other financial institutions had considered bad risks, including immigrants whose property had been destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A.P. only required a handshake and was proud to say later that he was always paid back. Giannini also believed strongly in the hopes and dreams of some of the street merchants who gravitated into the fledgling film industry, and put his bank’s money behind their ventures.

Based on Giannini, Capra’s 1932 drama, “American Madness,” told the story of a bank president (Walter Huston) who makes lending decisions based more on character than collateral, which causes his board of directors to try and ruin him. The money man is bailed by his less well-to-do friends,who personally benefited from his past generosity. A movie about a bank run had proved too topical to be a big hit in 1932; now, fourteen years later, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would allow Capra to once again tackle a similar theme.

To play the unassuming savings and loan clerk in “Wonderful Life,” Capra wanted Jimmy Stewart, who had previously worked with him in “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” (1939). Coming back from World War II, the 37-year-old Stewart was no longer the easy going man-about-town he had been in the thirties. The former Academy Award winner for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) had led a thousand men on bombing missions in the European theater in hard-to-maneuver B-24s. The loud plane engines damaged Jim’s hearing; in later years when people would greet him in public he would sometimes fail to respond. Some would mistake his partial deafness for a cold personality.

Stewart had displayed a great sense of humor when he’d first been inducted into the army; his salary had dropped from the hefty $1,500 a week he was being paid by MGM Studios to twenty-one dollars a month, and he earned his keep as a Buck Private whose duties included peeling potatoes. Upon receiving his first payment Jim immediately sent a check for $2.10 to his agent.

The actor was uncertain after five years away from the screen whether he still wanted to be in the movies; his life in the military at times made him feel like his old profession was insignificant. In 1943, when Stewart had tried to stay in one the best hotels in Madrid, he was turned away because he was an actor. Jim returned back to the military base, changed into his Lieutenant Colonel’s uniform, returned to the resort and was allowed to stay.

“Frank called me one day and said, ‘I have an idea for a movie, why don’t you come over and I’ll tell you?’ So I went over and we sat down and he said, ‘This picture starts in heaven’. That shook me.” James Stewart

When he returned to Southern California in 1945, Stewart took things easily. He refused to re-sign with MGM, despite tearful requests to do so from Metro’s hammy head honcho Louis B. Mayer. Like many World War II veterans, Jim had trouble sleeping and would instinctively duck down whenever a plane would fly overhead. He was content to spend time flying kites, building model planes and going bobcat hunting with Henry Fonda. Fonda had also been up for the George Bailey role; the two war veterans remained lifelong friends despite political differences which had once caused a fistfight between them in 1947. The liberal Fonda and conservative Stewart had promised, and kept their word, never to discuss politics again.

When Frank Capra made his pitch Stewart looked bored, out of it, which caused the director to lose confidence. “Well Jim, it’s about a savings and loan clerk who wants to commit suicide. There’s an angel named Clarence who shows him what life would have been like without him… aw forget it, it’s a stupid idea.” Capra was turning to leave when Stewart put his hand on his shoulder. “Frank, if you want me, I’m your man.” At least that’s how the film’s publicists told it.

“I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn’t care what he believed.” –Lionel Barrymore

In Part 2 (which publishes tomorrow), we learn why “It’s a Wonderful Life” star Jimmy Stewart fought a bad case of nerves while shooting the film and how director Frank Capra got along with his dictatorial studio boss.

“Mr. Smith” is not only one of the greatest films ever made, but it also shows the love that Mr. Capra had for his adopted country.  For those of you that do not know, Frank Capra was an Italian immigrant.  He came to this country with his family as a young man and somehow ended up in Los Angeles during the early years of the motion picture industry.  He started in silent films as basically a gopher and eventually became one of the top five directors of the Golden Age of Motion Pictures.  Some would even argue today that he is one of the top five directors of all time.

In addition to “Mr. Smith,” Capra is also responsible for some of the great motion pictures of all time.  Among them are “It Happened One Night,” “Meet John Doe,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take it With You,” and, of course, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  From 1933 to 1946, Capra was nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Director and won three.  “It Happened One Night” was the first movie to sweep the Oscars in all five major categories.  This did not happen again until “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” in 1975.  It has only happened once since.

Capra single-handedly kept Columbia Pictures afloat.  He was the first of the star directors and one of the first to have his name about the title.  His movies were not just movies, they were Frank Capra movies.  And, they were basically all the same.  It was the little man taking on the establishment and usually winning.  Many of the current Hollywood stars love Capra and emulate him.  In fact, Adam Sandler has already remade two of Capra’s films, one directly and one indirectly; “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” and “Click” was basically a remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

In “Mr. Smith,” Jefferson Smith, as portrayed by Jimmy Stewart, is appointed to the Senate from a small western state as a result of the death of the sitting Senator.  He is appointed with the intent of the political machine in his home state to maintain the status quo and to protect the illicit dealing of those in charge.  He is not supposed to upset the apple cart.

However, the machine in power underestimates Smith.  They see him as a dumb patriotic man who could be manipulated and controlled.  But, his patriotism and his love for the people create just the opposite.  He believes in the “city on the hill,” as did Ronald Reagan.  He believes that good will always triumph and that the evil and greedy will be defeated.

When he uncovers a scam within his state to further enrich the machine at the expense of young boys, he takes the machine on.  The machine fights back with all its force and attempts to destroy Smith.  But, Smith uses the rules of the Senate to his advantage and begins a 24-hour filibuster in an attempt to save himself and destroy the machine.  This last 15 minutes of the movie contains some of the most patriotic speeches ever put on film.  Smith quotes the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible.  And, each of these quotes and dialogue in between show both Smith (and Capra’s) love for this country and its ideals.  It is without a doubt one of the most powerful 15 minutes in any movie ever made.

Another very poignant point of the film occurs when Smith first arrives in Washington.  Instead of going to his office and being controlled by his handlers, Smith wonders off and begins a tour of historical Washington.  The tour takes him to all of the major sites in the nation’s capital.  This sequence reaches its climax at the Lincoln Memorial where Smith sees a little boy reading the Gettysburg Address out loud to his dad.  During the sequence, Capra cuts to Smith and various other bystanders at the memorial including a black man.  Every line of the Address takes on a new meaning and leads us to an emotional high.  It is film making at its best.

In closing, I recommend that every one watch this movie and many of other Capra films.  You should also look up the series of war films that were made by Capra in response to WWII.  These films, known as the “Why We Fight” series, were made at the request of the War Department to educate the public on the reasons the US entered the conflict.  They too are very patriotic and full of Capra’s love for his country.

I just wonder, why doesn’t Hollywood show it’s love for America anymore?  Why does the product coming out of my industry only show the bad and not the good?  I just cannot answer that question!

It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about.

After a Clift/Holden combo fell through for budget and scheduling reasons, Stevens ended the debate by taking a look at Paramount’s listing of contract players. Within minutes, he chose Ladd for Shane, Oscar-winning character actor Van Heflin for Joe, and Jean Arthur for Marian, Joe’s wife. All three choices were risky for various reasons.

Alan Ladd was a box-office draw, yes, but as a pretty face rather than as a solid actor. Critics judged him as a lightweight, someone more famous for smiling on magazine covers than for sinking his teeth into the meat of a genuinely dramatic role. Known throughout Hollywood for his self-abasing nature, he was hardly the guy one would expect to rise to the occasion of becoming a gunslinging, two-fisted hero for the ages.

Yet Stevens, his ultimate artistic intentions fully in mind, believed Ladd could provide a shining light at the center of the storm. “You know, it’s against the formula,” he said about his choice, “but Ladd seemed to have a decency on the screen even in violent roles like this one. He always seemed to have a large measure of reserve and dignity.” It was that, and not the silky deadliness, that Stevens most wanted to carry over from Schaefer’s novel.

Unlike so many other directors, Stevens even saw Ladd’s diminutive 5’4” stature as a cup half-full. “It was an interesting thing for the picture,” he said, “because he didn’t tower above the others — the mountains did. We kept him as high off the ground as possible so he wouldn’t be dwarfed by people.” With Ladd’s lithe, genial masculinity now defining the role, Stevens changed Shane’s black silk shirt and matching hat from the book into a buckskin outfit that toned down the character’s more sinister overtones.

Evan “Van” Heflin, like Ladd, was quiet and reserved in real life, a well-read Yale-educated man who shunned parties and kept a low profile away from the silver screen. He was, however, a more respected thespian than Ladd, having won a Best Supporting  Actor academy award for 1942’s Johnny Eager. The two had much in common (both did some growing up in Oklahoma), and soon they became fast friends on the set of Shane. “Alan was a far better actor than he would ever believe himself to be,” Heflin said in an interview many years later. “As with most of us, he needed a director who could bring out the best in him. With George he had it. He was a very sensitive person and he had a terrific inferiority complex. . . Alan later said he thought Shane was a fluke. . . although actors usually go their separate ways after a movie is completed, Alan and I remained very close. God, how I loved that man!”

If hiring Alan Ladd and Van Heflin were gambles — no John Wayne drawls, no lazy cowboy strides, no history of anchoring Western movies — Stevens’ choice of Jean Arthur for the part of Joe Starrett’s pretty, careworn wife bordered on outrageous. She was an actress known primarily for urbane comedies and love stories directed by Frank Capra. Her shyness meant that even in the best of circumstances she could be difficult to work with. “You had to treat her like a child,” Stevens explained, remembering her insecurities. “She was terribly anxious about everything.”

Even more troubling was that her heyday was long behind her. By the time she was considered for Shane Arthur was over fifty years old, her hair completely gray, and she hadn’t acted in a film in years. Why hire someone like that to play a pretty wife and mother figure, when there were many younger actresses from which to choose?

Because “people are always the instrument,” as Stevens was wont to say. “She was interesting,” he believed, “because she seemed to be rising above her personality. Anytime she has a charge to make against someone or a defense of something, it always seemed that she felt herself dangerously exposed, kind of heroic in the most ordinary circumstances — even if she had to put her left hand out in traffic in order to turn.”

It was that delicate brand of heroism that he wanted the character of Marion Starrett to epitomize. With a blond wig and makeup, Stevens believed that Arthur could still pass as an attractive woman in her thirties — after all, as recently as 1950 she had managed to play Peter Pan on Broadway to great acclaim. Thus he lured Arthur out of her self-imposed Hollywood retirement for what would be her last movie (and her only one in color).

Arthur, being the only one of the main actors who had worked with Stevens before, quickly noticed the deep change in the director’s post-war personality. “He was very serious,” she recounted sadly, “No jokes. It was like I never knew him before. He wanted me to look tired and worn. . . I felt kind of sorry for him.”

The last two actors to headline the film were more conventional selections, but no less effective.

Young Brandon de Wilde (pronounced duh-WILL-duh) was the only choice for Joey. He had made his name a year earlier by stealing scenes and charming audiences in a Broadway production of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. Hailed as a child prodigy, he soon became the best-regarded boy actor of the period. Alan Ladd’s step-daughter Carol Lee recalls the “infinite patience” Stevens displayed while directing De Wilde, saying that the kid “drove all the actors a little crazy because his idea of fun was jumping up and down in the mud — splashing mud all over everyone. But George Stevens knew how to work with him.”

When famed director (and, to his credit, reformed communist) Elia Kazan directed A Streetcar Named Desire for the stage, he had Marlon Brando playing the part of Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and Anthony Quinn performing the same role in Chicago. The understudy he hired to act as their backup in case of illness was, in Kazan’s opinion, “the most menacing, the most sinister, and the most frightening Stanley Kowalski ever to appear on the stage.”

The man was an ex-coal miner and ex-boxer, tough as nails, muscular and mean-looking. His face was bony and gaunt, marred both by numerous beatings endured in the ring, as well as by reconstructive surgery due to burns received while bailing out of an Air Force training flight during World War II. His name was Jack Palance, and in hindsight, the character of Jack Wilson in Shane was the role he was born to play.

When Stevens hired him, Palance was still largely unknown — Shane was lensed between June and October of 1951, and Palance’s first Oscar nomination for his memorably ominous role in the Joan Crawford noir vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) was still a year away. But such was Palance’s presence that Stevens didn’t need to be told that he was up to the job.

Unlike some of the other actors, Palance came from the then-new and novel Method school of acting. Before each take, he would make the cast and crew wait while he went off into a corner by himself and worked his emotions up to the proper temperature, burrowing deep into the role until the character of a bloodthirsty assassin infused his very being.

Woody Allen, of all people, is a big fan of Shane, and in a New York Times piece a few years back he aptly described Palance’s priceless contribution to the picture: “If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance. . . he’s so poetically evil. He looks like he’d gladly kill the guys who hired him if they looked at him wrong. He’s just bad news. Serpentine. In our minds, he’s set off against Shane, one particularly good, almost too good to be true, and the other is totally evil.” Allen’s right — it’s hard to imagine any other pair of actors pulling off this basic good/evil struggle in such mythic terms.

Of his director on Shane, Alan Ladd said that “I learned more about acting from that man in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then. Stevens is the best in the business. He knows exactly how to handle actors, how to relax them and win their confidence.”

That might sound like typical Hollywood butt-kissing, but go ahead: sit there at your computer and try to say some of Ladd’s now-famous lines with his combination of iron-clad conviction and mannerly grace. Try to mimic Palance’s equally famous lines with his deadly, gleeful hiss of ice-cold menace. Do that, and you’ll begin to understand what amazing acting truly is. The fact is that after Shane, neither Alan Ladd or Jack Palance would ever achieve a more perfectly tuned and modulated performance. Under the patient, guiding hand of George Stevens, the movie represents a high-water mark for the depictions of both implacable good and unfettered evil.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Woody Allen talks about Shane. The New York Times invited Allen to screen one of his favorite movies with them, and give a running commentary about why he considered it so great. Allen chose Shane, and gave some interesting reasons as to why he skipped all of his favorite foreign films to do so. Well worth a read.

A Short Biography of Van Heflin. A nice rundown of his life and career, showing what made him tick. Hard-working, unpretentious, and good natured, Van Heflin was one of Hollywood’s good guys.  

The “Low-down Yankee Liar” bronze. If you have some serious dough burning a hole in your pocket, you might blow it on this cool bronze statue depicting Jack Palance’s character of Jack Wilson from Shane. Wicked cool.

And while we’re talking Palance, here’s some fun YouTube items related to him.

David Carradine as Shane on TV. I’m not old enough to remember this, but if you were around in the 1960s perhaps you recall this ill-advised attempt to turn the character of Shane into a folk-rock hero. Did they substitute Peter, Paul and Mary for Victor Young on the soundtrack? Needless to say, it didn’t take off.

The artistic pinnacle of his work in Hong Kong are his collaborations with John Woo filmed between 1986 and 1992. Those of us who equate the modern action movie to elder tales of heroic bloodshed such as The Iliad and the Norse sagas find these films to be sources of endless delight, and much of the credit for this feeling must go to Chow. In John Woo: The Films, author Kenneth E. Hall makes a trenchant point when he writes that, “Not much is usually said, in connection with Woo, about Chow’s contributions to character studies, but his efforts in A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled have created at least three memorable and distinct characters who are yet all of a piece, men of an essential integrity and heroism who rediscover or reaffirm their humanity in struggles with evil.”

This thematic tableau is red meat to conservative film lovers, the same stuff I was talking about when I wrote a piece on Taken here at Big Hollywood last year. But even to give Chow Yun-fat credit for all of this is selling him short — unlike many more muscle-bound action heroes, those Woo classics by no means delineate the limits of his talent or appeal.  Bey Logan, the HK film fanatic who authored the entertaining volume Hong Kong Action Cinema, insists that, in the wake of his collaborations with Woo, Chow became not just Hong Kong’s greatest action star but its greatest acting star. “Chow was the first Hong Kong thespian,” he notes, “to attain boffo box-office with vehicles as disparate as the tragi-comic Autumn’s Tale, the action-packed A Better Tomorrow and the slapstick Eighth Happiness. Chinese audiences just adore Chow Yun-fat in any of his many guises.”

As do many Americans.

Poverty is a theme running through the lives of both John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Chow was born on Lamma Island, a blip in the ocean near Hong Kong, in 1955. He quit high school to get whatever work he could find to help support his family, and ended up auditioning for a place in the acting academy of TVB (Television Broadcasts Limited, a popular Hong Kong TV station). They ran a facility that performed the same task that the old studio system did in Hollywood: find new talent, whip them into shape, and put them under draconian contracts.

Chow’s contract made him an indentured servant of the studio for fifteen years, but it allowed him to build a following on TV in various soap operas and made-for-TV movies. A migration to feature films was inevitable, but like American stars like Tom Selleck, the movies didn’t quite know what to do with him, even after a performance in Hong Kong 1941 (1982) won him Best Actor at Taiwan’s version of the Oscars, the Golden Horse Awards. His even did a film with John Woo during these years, but as Woo was tied down to a formula their future magic failed to manifest itself.

But Chow’s screen presence stuck in Woo’s mind, and when Tsui Hark finally gave him the chance to follow his muse and make A Better Tomorrow, he fought hard to include Chow in a supporting role. His reasoning was simple: “Chow represents everything I value in a person: morality, friendship, honor, love. He is like an ancient Chinese hero who really cares about people.” This would seem to be a strange type of person to cast in the role of a death-dealing gangster, but Woo was working on a whole different level that the average action director. Samurai codes of honor, Christian elements of forgiveness and faith, and chivalric notions of brotherhood and honor were the coin of this realm, and as Chow puts it: “John Woo wanted someone who looks like a typical family man, but can really do all these things when he must. Not the typical kung-fu hero.”

Of course, turning the ordinary-looking Chow into a leaping, twirling, operatic knight-errant took some work. He didn’t possess the impressive acrobatics of a Jackie Chan or the kung-fu mastery of a Jet Li, but he did have a presence and a grace of movement, almost like John Wayne’s, that Woo could amplify with his unique editing style. Soon Woo discovered he was giving Chow a breathtaking dance of death all his own, and the effect was wonderful. Seeing the kind of film that A Better Tomorrow was becoming, Chow tore into the script and gave the part every bit of the emotion and passion Woo was striving for. “[Woo is a] very romantic and sensual director,” Chow says, “who puts a lot of himself in his films: love, human dignity, but also anger about the loss of tradition in the cities.” So just as John Wayne became John Ford’s mythical archetype and James Stewart became Frank Capra’s, so too did Chow Yun-fat allow himself to be molded into Woo’s image of a hero for the ages. As the director warmed to Chow’s portrayal, his part in the film grew exponentially until it had become a star-making turn to rival Wayne in Stagecoach and Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

A Better Tomorrow hit theaters as more than a movie — it was a grand coming-out party for a long-hidden talent that was destined to dominate the industry. Film Comment magazine put it best in a review that commented on Chow’s on-screen introduction in the film:

No scene exemplifies. . . star power more eloquently than A Better Tomorrow, when, simply by his way of eating street food, Chow tells us all we need to know about his character — we see this crook’s warmth, his cocksure humor, and the careless joie de vivre that will get him in the dutch later on. It’s a brilliant piece of screen acting — the kind that people emulate when they walk onto the streets after the movie.

Emulate they did — young men all over Hong Kong took to wearing Chow’s long Armani duster jacket, his dark sunglasses, and his suave mannerisms (the whole lighting-your-cigarette-with-a-$100-bill thing, strangely enough, failed to catch on in the same fashion). At the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards Chow stood on the podium to accept the award for Best Actor, and the thirty-one-year old was soon in ferocious demand. He was now a bonafide superstar — but a Hong Kong one, not a Hollywood one. There’s a big difference between the two, as Chow discovered:

We don’t have very large budgets for the production, so the studio won’t pay a lot of money for hiring the star. So everybody wants to work hard for more money before 1997. Sometimes I’m so jealous that the stars here [in the USA] can take two, three years [between] movies. In Hong Kong, if you take three, four years [off], you die. You cannot survive like that. It’s tough, but it is the way that we treat ourselves to be a star. Sometimes everyone is proud of themselves when they make twelve films in a year, but on the other hand, there is a sadness, I feel shame that we have been working like a dog.

He had become, in his words, an “acting machine.” Hong Kong director King Hu remembers the frenzy that surrounded Chow in those years: “I was trying to get film financing from the Taiwanese distributors. All they wanted to know was: ‘Is there a part in your film for Chow Yun-fat?’ When I said there wasn’t, they asked: “Can you write in a role for Chow Yun-fat?’” In the wake of A Better Tomorrow, Chow made an insane ten films a year in an attempt to capitalize on his success. “My record was three days working without sleep,” he said at the time. “I know if I don’t slow down I’ll die.” It got so bad that, as Bey Logan tells it, “During his heyday, there was a joke that Chow was in demand by so many producers that, when he arrived at the studio, a crew from one film would shoot his face, another his hands, another his back. . . all for different movies!”

On the bright side, Chow was able to expand his artistic reach far beyond his breakthrough role in A Better Tomorrow. He experimented with a wide variety of genres, and found to his relief that audiences liked him in all of them. Chow’s Hong Kong box office during those years was nearly double what Jackie Chan earned in the same period, and in any given year he had no less than three films sitting in the Top Ten. A part of me wishes that we could get back to the same work ethic in modern-day Hollywood, with actors shooting far more movies but on lower budgets, where more artistic chances could be taken, and hence more movies like Hard Boiled could manifest themselves.

During these years of high-octane production and overwhelming success, Chow continued to make the films that would serve as anchor-points for his career — his collaborations with John Woo. The first order of business was a sequel to A Better Tomorrow. Chow’s character perished in the original, and yet it was unthinkable to forge ahead with a sequel without him. Woo solved the problem by making Chow’s new character the twin brother of the former hero. In 1989’s The Killer, Chow was back as another criminal with a code of honor and a heart of steel-tipped gold, in a film with a tragic and elegiac tone underlying the mind-boggling action set-pieces. “Intrinsic to the creation of this mood,” writes Michael Bliss in Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, “is the acting of Chow Yun-fat, whose calm demeanor and soulful looks convince us that John has emotional depths that go beyond what is suggested by the film’s dialogue.”

It took their last team-up together, Hard Boiled, for Chow to finally appear on the right side of the law in a John Woo film, but even then his previous expressions of deeply conflicted morality were still in play. According to Kenneth Hall, Chow’s role as the rogue cop Tequila combines “basic integrity and compassion masked by a show of indifferent callousness,” as well as “a soulfulness expressed in his love of jazz music; an easy rapport with his fellow officers, making him especially popular with his subordinates. . . and, contrastingly, a kind of calculated but heated, almost out-of-control viciousness.” This is the stuff of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taken and other American classics of the genre.

“Tequila suffers guilt and fear throughout the film,” Hall notes. “Like ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan or Wes Block, the Eastwood cop in Tightrope, Tequila is in danger of becoming his own worst enemy, of turning into the worst of what he pursues.” This subtext feels thoroughly American, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the later Woo-Chow films were far more successful in the States than in Hong Kong itself. “It’s the violence,” Chow maintains. “A lot of the [Hong Kong] audience can’t stand it. I, myself, don’t like violence. I don’t like gunfire. John Woo does. He loves the sound of the bullets. On the set, he never wears earplugs.”

Unlike so many other high-profile collaborations in the ego-drenched movie industry, the one between Woo and Chow developed into a warm relationship filled with mutual admiration. As Hard Boiled was wrapping up principal photography, both men were planning on making the jump to Hollywood, and so the picture was taking on the emotional resonance of their last hurrah in Hong Kong. Emotions were high, and Chow tried to think of a way to thank his friend for changing his life in so dramatic a fashion. He decided that the most fitting way to immortalize their sense of brotherhood was to recreate it on film.

“While working on Hard Boiled I never intended to appear in it,” says John Woo. “Chow Yun-fat is a very good friend of mine. On the last day of shooting he came to me with the idea that I do a cameo appearance. He wanted to create a scene between he and I that showed our true friendship to the audience. We made up dialogue and a character for me.” Woo was to portray a grizzled ex-cop turned bartender who, Obi-Wan Kenobi style, would offer advice and support to Chow’s Tequila. Woo says that “Chow Yun-fat wanted to show his respect so we made my character his mentor, someone who cared about him and gave him direction.”

Hard Boiled marked the end of the fruitful collaboration between the two men. As with most American director/actor teams you care to name, neither has been nearly as good alone as they were together. In Hollywood, Chow’s The Replacement Killers did OK, as did Anna and the King. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a major hit, making over $200 million, and he had a part in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film. Yet other films failed to make much impact. In one now-legendary near-miss, he was even close to signing onto the first Matrix in the Laurence Fishburne role, a perfect match given the influence of A Better Tomorrow on the film’s look. But he bowed out, and thus let a major coup slip through his fingers.

It’s been almost twenty years since Chow Yun-fat and John Woo have worked together in the old style. These days, they aren’t the hot new thing in Hong Kong anymore, they are aging Hollywood players who get together at their homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles with their wives and families, where they quietly barbecue together and remember good times. “Many of my favorite of my own films are not popular in the West,” Chow laments, but he is loathe to complain too much. At least he no longer has to make ten movies a year and work like a dog to survive. And he always has those magical years between 1986-1992 to look back on fondly, even if he does often wince at the violence his characters deal out on screen.

Next week, the production of Hard Boiled, and the innovative techniques that immortalized it as one of the greatest action movies of all time.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Chow Yun-fat receives the AZN Lifetime Achievement Award: American stars like Quentin Tarantino offer an overview of his career, and Chow gives a nice acceptance speech in English:

A 1993 Interview with Chow Yun-fat: A bit stilted in English (although his accent is surprisingly good), but contains a lot of interesting information that I hadn’t heard anywhere else:

A few more books on the films of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Here’s a pair of titles that contributed to the material in this installment. Both contain profound looks at the thematic subtext of what many might see as outrageous yet shallow action movies:

John Woo: The Films by Kenneth E. Hall

Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo by Michael Bliss

But before I get into the stomach-churning details of the Hollywood Left’s shattered moral compass vis-a-vis directors Polanski and Panahi and other Iranian film artists, I would like to take a moment to honor more of the true heroes who have spoken out loudly on Mr. Panahi’s behalf and signed petitions for his release. The National Society of Film Critics. The Boston, L. A. and  Toronto Film Critics Associations. Arin Paul of the New York Times. Filmmaker Ken Loach. Rutger Wolfson, director of the Rotterdam Film Festival. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Human Rights Watch. French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand. Iranhumanrights.org. The list really is long.

Of course, noticeably absent from those petitioning and publicly calling for the release of Mr. Panahi from his unjust tomb-like captivity in Tehran are all of the prominent Hollywood A-List petitioners for Polanski. So Mr. Polanski’s arrest for child rape is worthy of international pressure and outrage, but famed director Jafar Panahi being tossed into a crypt in Tehran on “unspecified charges” is not? Welcome to Lefty Hollywood. And it only gets worse. The most tragic case of Jafar Panahi is yet one more sorry, perplexing and infuriating chapter in leftist Hollywood’s incredible blind side to any human rights violations in Iran, never mind only those perpetrated against Iranian filmmakers today.

Gay rights zero Sean Penn’s PR jaunt for the Mad Mullahs in Tehran in 2005, praising the Islamists even as then president-elect Mahmoud “No Gays in Iran” Ahmadinejad was jacking up the regime’s barbaric anti-gay pogrom. The sordid and embarrassing Team Oscar trip to Iran in March 2009, in which actress Annette Bening praised the regime’s women’s rights record even as Roxana Saberi rotted in Evin prison across town, and as Iranian-American filmmaker Esha Momeni awaited an Islamist kangaroo court for the crime of filming a women’s rights documentary. She awaits trial still.

The Academy’s posting of the self-aggrandizing Road to Isfahan promo last summer, with no mention that many of the Iranian filmmakers featured in it had been blacklisted by the regime. In essence, the Academy profited from their McCarthyite misery. AMPAS knew, in the same way that you now know. I told them. The Academy’s emailed response? They don’t get into politics, don’t you know. Same with the AMPAS Iran film seminar in L.A. last October. Two blacklisted Iranian film artists, including renowned actress Fatemeh Motamed-Aria, were barred from leaving Iran to attend.

The show went on, the blacklisted whitewashed from the Academy’s program in Orwellian fashion. Also noticeably absent from Hollywood’s list of cause celebres’ is renowned Iranian director and President of the Asian Film Academy Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who now serves as official spokesman for Mir Hussein Mousavi and the Greens outside Iran. Who in Hollywood has invited Mr. Makhmalbaf to speak on the plight of the Greens and Iranian film artists? None I can find. How can you explain any of this to where it makes any sense at all? Why not any peep out of Hollywood on Iran at all?

Theo Van Gogh

Is it the Islamist Fear Factor? Are they just too enamored of blood-drenched dictators like Chavez, Castro and Ahmadinejad that they can’t find it within themselves to say a bad word about them? Or is it just plain endemic Hollywood racism? Polanski is white, after all. Panahi and most Iranians are not. I’d like to believe that, but I don’t really. I just believe leftist Hollywood is so morally corrupt that child rape and cop killing are morally defensible, yet dissent in a fascist dictatorship is not. Perhaps if Mr. Panahi had drugged and raped a tween, he would be getting the rabid and unqualified support of the lefty Hollywood establishment today. How I only wish to God that were a sick joke.

For those of you who do still have some shred of morality and human decency left in your souls (unlike some people), here are two petitions for the release of entombed director Jafar Panahi. One is at Facebook, the other at Petitions Online. Thank you, on behalf of Mr. Panahi and his family. And thanks to the many worldwide voices who have NOT remained silent in the face of this abomination of justice for a cutting-edge director, whose only crime is being cutting-edge in a fascist dictatorship where such innovation is rewarded with the death of a thousand cuts. I can think of many lefty Hollywood film types more deserving of that fate than the brave Jafar Panahi.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we petition the Iranian government and work out a trade? They send us Jafar Panahi and all their blacklisted film artists, and we send them all the signatories to Roman Polanski’s petition. Let’s Make a Deal! And no, I’m not joking. I would make that trade in a heartbeat. I am at my wit’s end with Lefty Hollywood, people. For over a year now I have been pressing the case of Iranian film artists, and they were all just as dead silent on the subject then as they are toward Jafar Panahi and other persecuted filmmakers in Iran today, some of whom they once called friend.

I have even tried to shame them into action. But how do you shame the shameless? How do you explain morality to moral reprobates who equivocate the drugging and anal rape of a child? Who believe critics of dictator Hugo Chavez should be thrown in jail? Who believe that we were as racist and terrorist as the genocidal Imperial Japanese in the Pacific War? Who believe America is evil and everything it stands for sucks, even as they lead lives of freedom and luxury not possible anywhere else on earth? What happened to the Hollywood heroes of old who made fun of fascist dictators, often at risk to their own lives, instead of jaunting off to run PR campaigns for them?

Maybe it’s time for a new and revolutionary tack, people. Maybe it’s time to found a new Hollywood built on the principles of the old. The Hollywood in which the brave Victor Laszlo was a hero, not the murderous Che Guevara. In which America’s greatness and heroism was praised, not vilified. In which the American people were enlightened with great film stories that made them proud to be Americans, not browbeat with leftist anti-American propaganda. There is a great hunger in America for that brand of storytelling in film. A market of hundreds of millions just waiting to be tapped.

A huge undertaking, no doubt. But nowhere near the task faced by our Founding Fathers, and look at the miracles that ragtag band of rebels wrought. We Americans can do anything we put our minds to. But that is a piece for another time. For now, forget those useless leftist Hollywood idiots. We can deal with them later. Right now, Jafar Panahi and his family need each of us to speak out on his behalf. His life is hanging in the balance. Please sign the petitions at Facebook and Petitions Online linked above. As I have said in Part One, concerted voices raised in outrage have saved lives in Iran before, and can do so again. To save one life is to save the world entire. That is all that matters now. Hollywood lefties can go fuck themselves. History and their silence will damn them for all time.

Hillsdale Feels a Lot Like Yeshiva

Growing up in Brooklyn, I attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, an Orthodox elementary school. Every morning, we solemnly recited the Pledge of Allegiance and then sang the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, thus affirming our loyalty to America and our love of Zion.

At Hillsdale College, before every lunch and dinner, I am delighted to report, we recite the Pledge of Allegiance and then a student leads us in a prayer.

Hillsdale is a non-denominational college, but the spirit of Judeo Christianity is alive and well.

I am more than comfortable here at Hillsdale, I feet right at home.

And the films of 1939 that are screened, though I have seen every one of the films many times, take on a new meaning for me, aided immeasurably by the fine lectures delivered by David Thomson, Dan Ford, Scott Eyman and Peter Bogdanovich.

Ernst Lubitsch.

Lubitsch Touches Me

Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas, and directed by Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is, for my money, the best and most effective anti-Communist film ever made. The reason is simple: Lubitsch was far more concerned with making breezy entertainment than mind bending propaganda.

Working from a pitch perfect script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, the anti-Communist zingers come fast and furious. It’s a wonderful sleight of hand, pointing out that Communism is, literally, a genocidal machine, but doing it with wit and elegance.

For example.

Ninotchka: “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”

Scott Eyman, the distinguished film historian and author of the excellent, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, explains that Ninotchka was not really a film Lubitsch wanted to make. But he agreed to direct the Garbo vehicle if MGM would allow him to direct The Shop Around the Corner. In short, for Lubitsch, Ninotchka was primarily a bargaining chip.

The Shop Around the Corner is a lovely and touching film, but it’s a bit too precious for my taste. We can be thankful that L.B. Mayer practically forced Lubitsch into Ninotchka. Though Lubitsch was one of the most commercial of directors, even he didn’t always realize which material was best suited to his talents.

Early in my career, actually before I had a career, and before I wrote Body Double for Brian De Palma, the great screenwriter and frequent Lubitsch collaborator, Samson Raphaelson offered to read one of my spec scripts and give me his feedback.

Excited and frightened at meeting the legendary screenwriter, I sat in Raphaelson’s New York apartment and waited for his notes. He was, at the time, quite old, but his mind was exceptionally sharp and before discussing my script Raphaelson told me a bit about working with Lubitsch.

Said Raphaelson, “The Lubitch touch is all about what you don’t show, what you leave to the imagination. It’s about restraint.”

Finally, Raphaelson handed me my script. Great blocks of dialogue and description were thickly crossed out. And one word was repeatedly scribbled in the margins: “Too much!”

As Eyman beautifully summarizes, a Lubitsch film is the equivalent of Cartier jewelry or a Faberge egg.

A Definite Rabbi Vibe

I’m scheduled to interview Dr. Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, for about ten, fifteen minutes, but something clicks and we end up shmoozing for about an hour.

Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, is a leading authority on Winston Churchill, having served as director of research for Churchill’s biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, now an adjunct professor at Hillsdale.

Dr. Arnn is charming and brilliant, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with his intellect. He smiles a lot, laughs easily, and even when he’s quoting Dewey or Hegel, he does it in such a way that yours truly does not feel like a complete moron.

But more than brilliant, Arnn is wise, and when describing Dr. Arnn to my wife Karen, I say: “He’s got that definite Rabbi vibe.”

Primarily, I want to know what happened to American education. At what point did American universities turn into petri dishes for radical leftist thought and action.

Dr. Arnn has obviously given this matter a great deal of thought and he launches into a discussion of German political philosophy—why am I not surprised?—and its belief in the State over the individual, redistribution of wealth, and the use of government to control all aspects of society. Under the influence of European style statists, Dr. Arnn explains, American intellectuals of the left and their home universities are no longer satisfied with learning and understanding, but determined to undertake the role of creators, inventing political models that are in direct conflict with the Constitution and American values.

We move from German philosophy to the movies.

“What’s your favorite movie,” asks Dr. Arnn.

“The Seven Samurai,” I immediately reply, “it’s the perfect action movie and a moral fable that is eternally relevant.”

I ask Dr. Arnn about film programs at Hillsdale and he tells me that it’s something he’s been thinking about establishing for quite a while.

“It’s important, ” I say with fanatic/lunatic conviction, “Movies are the most powerful propaganda tool in the history of the world. In fact, if Hollywood does not support an American war, well, you can be sure America will lose that war. Most important, movies—even the dumbest horror film—is a moral landscape and Hillsdale students must be given the proper tools so they can go to Hollywood and make an impact.”

“Where should we start?” Asks Dr. Arnn.

“In the beginning was the word, isn’t that in the Christian bible? You start with the script, everything flows from the screenplay.”

And before I know it, I agree, at some future date, and depending upon availability, to conduct an advanced screenwriting workshop at Hillsdale.

Did I mention that Dr. Arnn is most persuasive?

Peter Bogdanovich Isn’t Interested in Blue People

The final film in the Hillsdale program is, quite appropriately, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a classic fable of American ideals in conflict with political corruption.

The great American director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich—The Last Picture Show, (1971) Paper Moon, (1973) and They All Laughed (1981) are masterpieces—delivers a sublime lecture on The Art of Frank Capra.

Frank Capra, 1897-1991.

Bogdanovich loves the movies and his affection for classic Hollywood is infectious. Bogdanovich started out as an actor, but “when I realized that I could never be a big star, I switched to writing and then directing.”

Over his long career as film journalist and director the 71-year old Bogdanovich knew and interviewed almost every important Hollywood star and director. He was close with Hitchcock and his imitation of the droll master of suspense is, well, masterful.

On directing: Capra told that Bogdanovich that the essence of directing is making decisions. “Half the time you’ll be wrong, but the important thing is to make the decision.”

On pacing: Capra explained that for some mysterious reason film has a tendency to slow things down. So to make action in a film appear normal, it’s necessary to pick up the pace.

It Happened One Night, 1934, the film that catapulted Capra, and Columbia Pictures into the Hollywood stratosphere, is where the fast Capra pace works in perfect harmony with the story. The scenes between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert crackle with energy and sexual tension. The lightning fast exchanges feel absolutely natural, but there’s nothing normal about the pace. It’s total artifice and it works.

Like Bogdanovich, I prefer It Happened One Night and It’s a Wonderful Life to Capra’s more socially conscious movies. There’s something quite pure about these two movies. Capra does not hammer you over the head with a message. Instead, he probes life, love and the quirks of his very human characters.

In the question and answer period—he’s a great raconteur—Bogdanovich  admits that he’s not interested in special effects, CGI, or movies about blue people.

“That stuff bores me silly,” he says.

The Hillsdale audience applauds.

A few years ago, Ellen Burstyn asked me to write Within These Walls a television movie in which she would star.

On location, I told the Oscar winning actress the first time I ever saw her was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

“You were brilliant,” I said. “Totally knocked me out.”

Ellen, generous as well as hugely talented, said: “Yeah, well, Peter’s a pretty great director.”

Indeed, Peter Bogdanovich will go down in the history books as not only a very great director, but one of our most important and perceptive film historians.

Marieke van der Vaart, a Hillsdale student, interviewed Bogdanovich.

Against the Grain

In my last dinner at Hillsdale, a young woman, a student, sits next to me and we fall into easy conversation.

“What prompted you to come to Hillsdale,” I ask.

“The funny thing is, I wanted to go to a big University in Chicago, but a friend told me about Hillsdale and I came here for a visit. Pretty soon, I realized that I didn’t know what I wanted, out of college, out of life. It became clear to me that Hillsdale was the place where I could discover the truth.”

“You do realize that Hillsdale goes against the grain of contemporary intellectual fashion?” I say.

The young student, just a freshman, smiles and says: “Not only do I realize it, but I’m proud of it.”

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections:

(1) Rebecca and Suspicion are the same film, not Notorious and Rebecca; (2) the Orlando Bloom reference was to Black Hawk Down, not G.I. Jane, and I apologize for the obvious mix-up. 

Now, to the real question: the top-ten greatest directors of all time.  This is truly a rough decision – there are at least two score great directors who could make this list.  Here is my one basic criteria: directors who provide me the most viewing pleasure over the course of their career.  That means telling a great story in the best possible way.  Subjective?  Sure.  Deal with it.  I’ll admit that this list skews toward older directors, not because older movies are generally better than newer movies (though I think they are), but because directors in the period 1920-1960 generally made more movies, which means more opportunities for directors to shine. 

I’ll start by explaining why certain directors are not in the top ten. 

Francis Ford Coppola:  He had a period of unbelievable creative magic.  Within a ten year period, he made Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a charming musical; The Godfather (1972), which requires no commentary; The Conversation (1974), perhaps the creepiest movie ever made; The Godfather: Part II (1974), which matches its predecessor in quality; and Apocalypse Now (1979), a mad journey into the heart of darkness.  Then he was done.  How this talented filmmaker went from The Godfather to the atrocity that was Jack (1996) is utterly bewildering.  It was tough to keep him off the top ten list. It was even harder to boot someone from that list to make room for him. 

Peter Jackson:  I believe Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the finest directorial effort of all time, surpassing even Citizen Kane.  That said, Jackson hasn’t done anything else.  King Kong was overlong and CGI-obsessed.  He has shown that he can produce with the best of them – District 9 is brilliant – but he needs to direct more great movies before he belongs in the top ten. 

Christopher Nolan: I believe Nolan will one day make the top-ten list.  He’s that talented.  Watch one of his early efforts, Following (1998) if you don’t believe me – on a budget of $6,000, he creates a taut thriller.  His last five movies have all been terrific: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight. He is one of the few modern directors for whom I check the IMDB calendar to see when his next movie comes out.  I look forward to Inception with bated breath.  For now, however, it’s too early to chart his trajectory with certainty. 

Orson Welles:  Citizen Kane requires no explication – it is justifiably seen by many as the greatest directorial job ever.  His Othello is similarly creative and inspired.  The Magnificent Ambersons follows the pattern.  But Welles destroyed himself and his career, and the fates should never forgive him for wasting his unparalleled talent. 

Peter Weir:  I love Weir.  He is always creative and interesting.  Although I didn’t enjoy Master and Commander as much as others, The Truman Show, Fearless, and Gallipoli are all minor masterpieces.  As far as the top ten, my heart says maybe, my brain says no. 

Stanley Kubrick:  Overrated.  Yes, he directed the wonderful Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is an abomination, A Clockwork Orange doesn’t hold up, The Shining is made a parody by Jack Nicholson’s scenery-chewing. He’s inconsistent, and that’s what knocks him off the list, as it should. 

Vincente Minnelli:  The best director of musicals of all time came close to making the list, too.  Meet Me in St. Louis is delightful.  An American in Paris is a joy for the senses. The Band Wagon is the best parody of Broadway ever made; Brigadoon is pretty if unfaithful to the source material (they cut a couple of the best songs from the Broadway version); Gigi is gorgeous; Lust for Life is well-done.  Few directors have Minneli’s grasp of the music that film can be, the vibrancy that film can create.  Again, this is just a case of ten being too few to fit him. 

Fritz Lang:  M is the best foreign language film ever made.  Period.  It is tight and tense and incredibly driving.  Metropolis is fantastic too.  Perhaps if I’d seen more Lang, I’d put him up in the top ten (the only other films I’ve seen of his are Fury and The Big Heat), so I’ll claim ignorance here. 

Fred Zinneman: Perhaps the best conventional director of all time – a man who simply puts on camera what needs to be there.  He’s not the artist that any of the top ten are, but he did create The Day of the Jackal, A Man for All Seasons, Oklahoma!, From Here to Eternity, and High Noon, a list to be reckoned with. 

Victor Fleming:  How hard was it to come up with this list?  I had to leave off the guy who directed Captains Courageous, The Good Earth, The Wizard of Oz, some of Gone with the Wind, A Guy Named Joe, and Treasure Island.  He also directed lots of films that ain’t quite as great, so his percentage is what keeps him off the list. 

Stanley Donen: Stylistically, Donen was tops.  He directed On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Charade, Damn Yankees!, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Two for the Road.  The pure fun that is Seven Brides could put him on the top ten list.  But Donen just can’t knock anyone else off. 

Robert Rossen: His resume is simply too short.  Three fantastic movies: Body and Soul, All the King’s Men, The Hustler.  A great career.  Not a top ten one. 

John Huston: The best adventure director of all time, responsible for The Man Who Would Be King, Moby Dick, The African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon.  Again, not enough versatility to put him over the top. 

George Stevens:  Tough to keep off the list, tough to make room.  The Diary of Anne Frank, Shane, A Place in the Sun, I Remember Mama, Gunga Din – versatility, certainly, brilliance, certainly, sweetness, certainly.  Off the list?  Hesitantly, yes. 

The Top Ten Greatest Directors of All Time

10.  Steven Spielberg:  This will be the most controversial pick on the list, to be sure.  He’s got big hits, and he’s got big misses.  His hits are clearly terrific – Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan.  His misses are pure awfulness – A.I., 1941, The Terminal, and the misery that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Of late, far more misses than hits.  Still, that early canon of films, plus Schindler’s and Saving Private Ryan puts him over the top.  No better popcorn filmmaker has ever been born.  Yes, I hate his politics.  But his artistry, when he’s at the top of his game and when he’s comfortable with the script, is unmistakable.  Watch this scene again: 

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Nobody – nobody – directs action better.  And Schindler’s List proved he can do drama, too.  Is he the deepest guy on the list?  Nope.  Does he belong here?  I say, yes.  

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9.  Michael Curtiz:  How can I possibly put the man who directed the monstrous farce that is Mission to Moscow on this list?  Because he also directed Casablanca, the best movie of all time; White Christmas and Yankee Doodle Dandy, two of the best musicals; The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of the best adventure movies; Mildred Pierce, one of the best melodramas.  Other films: The Sea Wolf, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Captain Blood.  Renting his film canon, Mission to Moscow aside, is almost entirely wonderful. 

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8.  Ingmar Bergman:  No one made images like Bergman.  The Seventh Seal is easily the darkest movie ever made, and it’s got some of the most stirring pictures ever put on screen.  His version of The Magic Flute is a delight.  Then there are his others, like Fanny and Alexander, Through a Glass Darkly, The Virgin Spring.  Do you watch Bergman for a laugh?  Not unless by laughter you mean suicidal depression.  But no finer image-maker has ever stood behind a camera. 

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7.  Billy Wilder: Nobody ever mixed drama and comedy like Wilder.  And he was a master at getting great performances from his actors.  Jack Lemmon was his muse, and he used him to the fullest: he made the ultimate Matthau/Lemmon comedy in The Fortune Cookie, the ultimate Lemmon comedy, Some Like It Hot, and the beautifully understated The Apartment.  If Lemmon wasn’t his muse, William Holden was – and he’s got masterpieces like Sunset Blvd. and Stalag 17 to prove it.  Or maybe it was Audrey Hepburn – Sabrina, and Love in the Afternoon.  And that isn’t even looking at Witness for the Prosecution and Double Indemnity. The guy was a classics factory.  And all of them are fast-moving and fun to watch. 

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6.  Charlie Chaplin:  It would be a crime to leave Chaplin off this list.  Watch him toss around the globe as Hitler in The Great Dictator and tell me who you’d put in his place.  The Kid is as affecting as any movie ever made.  Modern Times is chock full of amazing sequences, and so are Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and many of his others.  The silent movie era was never so magnificent. 

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5.  Frank Capra:  In my review of the top ten most overrated directors of all time, I wrote this about Martin Scorsese: “In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: ‘You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!’  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.”  If Scorsese is the epitome of the heartless director, Capra is the embodiment of heart on screen.  It’s a Wonderful Life is simply the most heartfelt movie ever made (and it’s Jimmy Stewart’s best performance).  From It Happened One Night to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Meet John Doe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, nobody made movie magic like Capra.  If you can sit through all his films without crying and smiling simultaneously, I’m betting there’s something wrong with your tear ducts or your cheek muscles. 

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4.  Elia Kazan:  Reviled by the Hollywood left, Kazan was also one of Hollywood’s greatest directors.  His IMDB reads like a top ten list of films: A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!, A Streetcar Named Desire, Gentleman’s Agreement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  The performances Kazan elicited from his actors are groundbreaking and astonishing.  Unlike some others on this list, Kazan’s films do not date (other than Gentleman’s Agreement, perhaps) – they remain timely and prescient.  And they’re quick-moving and entertaining, which is tough to do with heavy drama.  He does it with ease. 

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3.  John Ford:  The man revolutionized movie making, and is worshipped widely for all the right reasons.  First off, the Western is the American genre, and Ford was the best.  Name the best Westerns of all time, and you’ll be sure to come up with Stagecoach, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The Informer is an early masterpiece, and there’s no movie more fun than The Quiet Man (plus, the cinematography is enough to bring a tear to your eye).  Mister Roberts is a chock full of great performances (Lemmon and Cagney stand out, of course).  How Green Was My Valley is a beautiful film.  The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln are rightly credited with making Henry Fonda the quintessential American actor. 

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2.  Akira Kurosawa:  Nobody plumbed the depths of human emotion like Kurosawa.  Ikiru is known by few outside the film buff community, but it is a masterful expression of human hope and tragedy.  Ran is exciting and thrilling and brilliant.  Throne of Blood is a wonderful adaptation of Macbeth.  The Seven Samurai is tremendous, an adventurous expose of the best and worst mankind has to offer.  Rashomon is a groundbreaking exploration of perspective.  I could keep going, but there’s no point – few will argue with Kurosawa’s placement on this list.

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1.  William Wyler:  Underrated beyond all rationality, Wyler was a master of all genres.  He covered gothic romance (Wuthering Heights), period pieces (Jezebel) light comedy (How to Steal a Million and Roman Holiday), film noir (The Desperate Hours and Detective Story), epic (Ben Hur), morality tale (Friendly Persuasion), horror (The Collector), western (The Westerner) and wartime drama (Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives).  His first tier films are unmatched (Dodsworth, Ben Hur, and The Best Years of Our Lives deserve to make anyone’s top ten list), and his second tier films (The Big Country, The Heiress) are better than most first-rate directors’ first-tier films.  If you don’t believe Wyler’s range, watch these three scenes back to back:

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That’s not even the best scene from The Best Years of Our Lives (the movie contains perhaps the most beautiful love scene in screen history, between Harold Russell and Cathy O’Donnell – and, in a lesson to Aronofsky and Lynch, he didn’t need to show T&A to do it).

Whom would you put on the list?

I have been asked that question repeatedly over the course of seven years of book-signings for Sparrowhawk at Colonial Williamsburg’s Booksellers by eager patrons who have read the series and wish to see it on the big screen.

“Not any time soon,” I usually answer. “If it is ever produced, it won’t be by Hollywood. And if Hollywood in some episode of hubris thought it could tackle it, it would attempt to maul and dismember it, just out of sheer, doctrinaire meanness, coupled with incompetence. I would likely disown the result. After all, Hollywood hates America.”

I borrow the title of film critic Michael Medved‘s book-long critique of Hollywood (Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Neither he nor his book is the subject here, but rather the culture that cannot produce Sparrowhawk or any other nominally pro-American, pro-freedom film — including the “traditional” ones which Medved has championed in his book and in various conservative and religious columns (promoting family, God, and other, non-intellectual, non-fundamental values — “Leave It to Beaver“ style, with Ward Cleaver taking questions from the audience).

I don’t think a list of films is necessary that proved Hollywood’s anti-Americanism. I could go as far back as some of Frank Capra’s films (which were not so much anti-American as pro-collectivist), and, working forward, see the list of movies grow exponentially (with a short hiccup in the 1950’s and early 1960‘s), ending with stuff like “Avatar” or “Little Big Man” or “Jarhead.”

The worst film critics happen to be conservative ones. They call for a moral cinema and constantly pine for one that does not now exist. Leftist critics have a near monopoly in the press and mainstream media, but their influence and popularity poll are hard to measure. But, as the Republicans in politics are bankrupt of ideas and cannot (or will not) offer a credible antidote to the leftist ideology of the current administration that does not include God, conservative critics like Medved cannot offer a credible antidote to the leftist mantra that America is an evil country, and an evil empire, and evil in its material comfort and achievements.

Leftists are beholden to the great ghost society; rightists are beholden to a ghost of indeterminate gender and appearance in the ether (or perhaps He’s a resident of the constellation Orion, no theologian in history has been able to pinpoint his whereabouts on the map). The leftists have been able to put over their ghost because society is ostensibly tangible: it’s you, and me, and our neighbors all over the country. The rightists can only cite belief that the creator of individual rights and freedom exists — somewhere, as an entity of semi-infinite dimensions, armed with the contradictory powers of omniscience and omnipotence — and that everything good emanates from Him, including that incidental, unimportant thing called capitalism.

In terms of metaphysics and epistemology, the leftists have a leg up on the rightists. They can “prove” their ghost exists, and why everyone should defer to it today, in personal relationships on up to coercive legislation, while all the rightists can trot out is a tooth fairy on steroids who mandates selflessness and self-sacrifice in the name of life after death.

David Brooks, writing in The New York Times, has written about “Avatar” and the Haitian earthquake. Brooks is a specter himself, materializing here as a progressive, there as a disgruntled conservative. His advice on why the Haitian earthquake was so destructive is nearly spot-on. Haiti has been the recipient of billions in especially U.S. aid to reduce its poverty, yet its infrastructure collapsed and vanished like sand castles at the onset of high tide. Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Why?

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

Here he implies, but does not identify, that it is freedom that allows countries that have not received aid (extorted from productive men in freer countries) to increase the wealth and standard of living of their citizens. China, even though it is a repressive dictatorship, allows its citizens a modicum of freedom in order to produce wealth (to better tax and expropriate). Countries that receive aid become addicted to it and never develop the morality or political institutions that promote wealth-creation. They remain on welfare, and are not encouraged to break free of it by the “humanitarian” programs of the West, which has a vested interest in being altruistic, altruism being the only virtue it boasts (and which is destructively addictive in its own right). Altruism, after all, is the enemy of selfishness and self-interest. Why would a tax-paid alms-giver want to see a country like Haiti become free of his generosity?

Brooks shows the other side of his spectral being when discussing James Cameron’s “Avatar.” (Avatar: incarnation of Hindu deity, an incarnation of a Hindu deity in human or animal form, especially one of the incarnations of Vishnu such as Rama and Krishna.) In “The Messiah Complex,“ he rightly points out that the film is a 3-D rehash of cinematic shibboleths from the last few decades of Hollywood America-bashing: colonialism is bad, the white race is bad, capitalism is bad, and so they’re doomed to be defeated by the primitive natives. He mocks the film better than I could.

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Avid moviegoers will remember “A Man Called Horse,” which began to establish the pattern, and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” More people will have seen “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai.”

Kids have been given their own pure versions of the fable, like “Pocahontas” and “FernGully.”

John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard, whom Brooks cites, is even more severe:

What they didn’t tell us is that Avatar is blitheringly stupid; indeed, it’s among the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen. Avatar is an undigested mass of clichés nearly three hours in length taken directly from the revisionist westerns of the 1960s-the ones in which the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys. Only here the West is a planet called Pandora, the time is the 22nd century rather than the 19th, and the Indians have blue skin and tails, and are 10 feet tall.

They’re hunters and they kill animals, but after they do so, they cry and say it’s sad. Which only demonstrates their superiority. Plus they have (I’m not kidding) fiber-optic cables coming out of their patooties that allow them to plug into animals and control them. Now, that just seems wrong-I mean, why should they get to control the pterodactyls? Why don’t the pterodactyls control them? This kind of biped-centrism is just another form of imperialist racism, in my opinion.

(I especially appreciated Podhoretz’s remark about the natives apologizing to the animals they kill. That politically-correct and probably fictive Indian practice was in the opening scene of the last remake of “Last of the Mohicans” (1992), another turned-inside-out mess which partly moved me to begin work on Sparrowhawk.)

Podhoretz writes, observing the anti-Americanism in the movie:

You’re going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie’s politics-about how it’s a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq, and so on. The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of.

But while Brooks and Podhoretz justly explode the story and dwell on the suffocating political correctness and second-handedness of “Avatar,” they don’t defend or advocate anything. Neither of them contends that our civilization is not rotten, that it ought to be defended and preserved, and that it is superior to Pandora’s and even Haiti’s. Neither counters the charge that big corporations are inherently evil, and that its employees are necessarily avaricious monsters capable only of destruction.

Most conservatives are too cowed by their own apologetic philosophy to advocate the superiority of Western culture over Islamic or any other pre-industrial or anti-reason culture. They would be reluctant to take Voodooism to task, for fear of offending a cultural “tradition.” When was the last time Britons heard that British culture was superior to that of the Muslims who want to establish Britain as a suburb of Riyadh? And where, except on Internet blogs, do Americans read that their civilization is superior to the Indians’? It is such ’sensitivity” to Muslim culture that freed Major Nidal Hasan to open up on American soldiers at Fort Hood, in the same way that “sensitivity” to Pandoran culture freed neo-Na’vi Jake Sully to open up on his fellow humans in “Avatar.”

It is this crucial omission (or evasion) by conservatives which allows them to agree with their rivals for political power, the leftists. As the leftists cannot bring themselves to champion individual rights, private property, and selfishness, neither can the rightists. They meet on a middle ground, as they have done for decades in Congress, and agree to an alleged compromise that simply paves the way for the more consistent of them to go whole-hog. As the Obama administration has done.

The Republicans are as anti-American as are the Democrats. As Hollywood. The film that defines America is neither “Wall Street” nor “The Ten Commandments,” but, to date, “The Fountainhead.”

Fifteen-years ago it was all the rage to worship It’s A Wonderful Life, and then the inevitable backlash began by the contrary-is-cool crowd and those offended by spiritualism and sentiment. Whatever. All I know is that after dozens of viewings each new one is like the first and without fail the story stays with me for days. 

And who are we to argue with time? Like Beethoven and Sinatra, the story of a good man blinded by disappointment, driven to suicide, and saved by God’s grace will live for as long as there’s a civilization. Because the message is about the simplest and yet most important of things — it’s about why when things are at their worst that’s the most important time to step outside the hurly burly of life’s setbacks and inventory our blessings. 

It’s A Wonderful Life is about perspective. 

George Bailey wants to shake the dust of Bedford Falls off his shoes and stake a place in the world in order to validate his existence through the building of bridges and monuments. Constantly thwarted by his own decency and love for a beauty who looks just like Donna Reed, he never goes anywhere, and instead grudgingly spends his life engaged in a bitter war of attrition with Old Man Potter to keep a crummy old savings and loan afloat. So blinded is George Bailey by life’s misfortunes, he never notices the monuments he’s erected inside those around him through the trust and dignity and friendship he offers in the small homes he builds. And that blindness nearly costs him his life. 

Imagine a man like George Bailey; a man with a town full of faithful friends eager to show their gratitude for his lifetime of decency and generosity of spirit… Imagine how blind he must be to think he has nowhere to turn other than to the bottom of that cold black river. 

You can watch the film and marvel in its perfect script, unrivaled series of iconic scenes, and the towering performance given by Mr. Stewart… And you can watch the final scene set in a modest living room filled with family and loved ones and realize, just like George finally does, that it’s all up to us, that a chance at a wonderful life is almost always within our own grasp. 

George Bailey’s dark and desperate path to that realization is a reminder that our own blessings are not found in the world or given to us by others, but rather in who we are and what we’re capable of as God’s creatures. Everything that matters and that is beautiful in life costs nothing more than what we’re born with: our ability to be decent and gracious and kind to one another.

There’s nothing wrong with building monuments and bridges and having goals and ambition, but what does any of that matter if you can’t fill a living room with family and loved ones?

God sent Clarence to give George a long slow look around, and in that respect It’s A Wonderful Life is our own guardian angel… Making it the greatest Christmas movie of all time by a pretty wide margin.

Merry Christmas.

Read the full countdown here.