While watching the new colorization of “It’s a Wonderful Life” on DVD – this time they got it right; no longer do you get the feeling you’re watching a black-and-white film through stained glass – I thought: you know who would love this? Why, that visionary American innovator Henry F. Potter.
That’s right, Mr. Potter – the unsung hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the canny businessman who tried (and, alas, failed) to turn boring, repressed Bedford Falls – a town full of drunks, child beaters, vandals and racial and sexual harassers – into an exciting new destination nightspot called Pottersville.
Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey accurately calls Bedford Falls “this crummy little town” and spends the movie trying to get away. He nearly kills himself because even suicide looks pretty good compared to upstate New York.
Bedford Falls is where Mr. Gower the drunken pharmacist beats young George until his ear bleeds. George’s brother Harry sexually harasses his employee, the Baileys’ maid – a black woman named Annie – and when Annie, while serving dinner to the Baileys, tries to listen in on a dinnertime conversation that could change her future, George says to her sarcastically, “Annie, why don’t you draw up a chair? Then you’d be more comfortable.” Yeah, keep black women in their place, George.
When George and Mary (Donna Reed) dance the Charleston, oblivious to the danger of the chasm that has opened behind them, they risk cracking their heads on the yard-thick flooring if they fall – backward, a distance of maybe 12 feet. No one in this supposedly big-hearted town warns them. They just stand back and watch.
George and Mary are vandals who throw rocks through the windows of the old Granville house, and even the cops are criminals. On George and Mary’s wedding night, Bert and Ernie (not the fuzzy longtime companions of “Sesame Street” but the cop and cabbie) decorate the place with stolen posters of travel destinations. “This is the company’s posters and the company won’t like this,” grumbles Bert as he works. Yeah, companies generally disliked being robbed by the police.
You know who doesn’t commit any crimes in this movie? Mr. Potter. Everyone keeps saying he’s rotten but it’s smart and ethical for him to offer to buy out the shareholders of the wobbly Building and Loan.
True, it’s unethical for Potter not to return the money that Uncle Billy literally drops into his lap, but Potter’s right in accusing George of gross negligence. Entrusting anything more important than a broom to a drunken fool like Billy (he loses track of the money while taunting Potter) makes George an unfit fiduciary.
In the Pottersville scene, the movie stacks the decks by putting a cemetery in the place of the Bailey Park development. Sorry, George, but without you, people still would have died in Bedford Falls – of boredom. That’s because Bedford Falls lacks most of the bars, pool halls, bowling alleys and dance clubs that make Pottersville a lively city instead of a drab hamlet where the only entertainment is to see “The Bells of St. Mary’s” at the local monoplex.
Are we supposed to be outraged that Nick the Bartender, in Pottersville, says, “We serve hard drinks in here for men who like to get drunk fast”? What barman would say anything else when asked, as Clarence the Angel does, for “mulled wine, heavy on the cinnamon and light on the cloves”? Remember, the guy who slugs George in the bar does so in Bedford Falls, not Pottersville.
Without George, Mary winds up in a place worse than the cemetery – “she’s just about to close up the library!” – where she wears glasses and dresses like Paula Poundstone. It’s an insult to working women. Anyway, Mary wouldn’t have been an “old maid.” More likely, she would have married the millionaire Sam Wainwright, the guy she was seeing when George stole her away.
George may be a nice guy, but he’s also plain stupid. He turns down Sam’s offer to make a fortune in plastics; later, after he’s been libeling Mr. Potter for the entire movie, the latter offers him a $20,000 job. George, who is making $45 a week, declines. On $20,000 a year, George could have fixed that broken knob on the bannister, gotten a better piano teacher for his daughter and sent Uncle Billy to rehab. He could have put his family first instead of his town. What did the town ever do for him? When the folks empty their pocket change and lint on the Baileys’ table at the end, it doesn’t look like nearly enough to cover an $8,000 shortfall. Not that it matters, since Sam Wainwright agrees to wire $25,000. In the end, the moral is: better to know one rich guy than a lot of losers.