It's a Wonderful So-Called Life

NBC presented its annual rendition of the perennial Christmas special It's A Wonderful Life recently. It wasn't that long ago that you could see this movie pretty much 24/7 during December on various channels; then NBC got exclusive rights to show it once a year. Apparently NBC doesn't think that people have VCR's, let alone DVD players.

Anyway, a good enough movie with some memorable performances, but I find it hard to watch because, like several of Capra's other pictures, the conclusion just isn't complete. Why does Mr. Potter have to keep the money and go from the hard-core, aggressive businessman he has been throughout the film to a downright crook? If Potter had given the money back -- and he clearly knew he had it and where it had come from and that it wasn't his -- maybe after the wild rally at the end, that might have made sense.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, unfortunately, isn't much better -- the last ten minutes make absolutely no sense at all, as if Capra knew he had to get the thing done within 129 minutes?

In both cases, the overall themes are solid (what life would be if you'd never been born; political corruption), but the sequences are contrived and the endings are unsatisfactory. Fortunately, both Capra and Stewart gave us plenty of solid work elsewhere. It's just odd that these two pictures get most of the notoriety. I must be missing something...