Check out the first article on It’s a Wonderful Life here!
In the year after the release of It’s a Wonderful Life, things weren’t looking good for Frank Capra’s story of hope, humanity, and the holiday season – it had failed to break even at the box office, and, despite a handful of award nominations, the critical response had been lukewarm at best. But, in May 1947, the movie would face scrutiny Capra could never have imagined: an investigation by the FBI, on the suspicion that it might constitute communist propaganda.
Following the end of the Second World War in America in 1945, political tensions stretched into all corners of American society – and, for J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, one of the most pernicious thorns in their side came in the form of the movie industry. Both the films themselves and the people behind them came under scrutiny from the Bureau, perhaps most famously in the blacklisting of the Hollywood 10 in 1948 – but, a year before that, an unnamed agent would sit down to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, and they’d return with some serious concerns.
There was, on paper, at least, some reason behind the scrutiny aimed at Wonderful Life. While Capra and James Stewart, the movie’s star, were both staunch Republicans, they had previously worked together on 1939’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington, which satirized the workings of the American government. Writers (well, some of them) Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich had been a little too friendly with some members of the Communist Party for the Bureau’s liking (eating lunch with “known communists” during the production of a movie with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer) and Dalton Trumbo, who would later go on to be attacked as one of the Hollywood 10, had worked on an early version of the script that ultimately went unused.
But, in a report on the movie released in May 1947, amongst a collection of reviews intended to track the “communist infiltration into the motion picture industry”, the contents of the movie itself were interrogated through the lens of a potential communist subtext. The redacted author of the comments on the movie remarked on “a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a “scrooge-type””, apparently a “common trick used by Communists”. Additionally, the film was accused of “attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters” in a deliberate maligning of the upper class.
Perhaps most entertaining, however, are the suggestions that the anonymous author of this report gives to potentially improve the film and remove all question of its potential Communist intentions from the Bureau’s mind. He suggested that he would have had Lionel Barrymore’s character explicitly depicted as following the rules “as laid down by the State Bank Examiners in connection with making loans”, and as ” a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money”. He concluded by insisting that it had been unnecessary to make the banker such an unpleasant character (apparently misunderstanding the concept of a “villain” in cinematic storytelling), and, rather poutingly, insists that, given the chance, he “would never have done it that way”.
The report was passed on to the official investigative body House Un-American Investigative Committee (HUAC), but, ultimately, it was decided that It’s a Wonderful Life did not pose enough of a risk to warrant further investigation. But it’s still a fascinating (and telling) detail about the movie’s history, and the state of Hollywood and the American film industry at large at the time.
That’s us here at No But Listen for our 2024 programming! We’re taking the rest of the festive season to relax, unwind, and binge-watch all the movies we missed over the course of the last year – whether you celebrate anything at this time of year or not, we hope you have a safe, fun, and decidedly cinematic close to 2024. See you in a few weeks for our best and worst of the year lists!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Lee Zachariah)
No But Listen 