For a generation or two, America’s favorite Christmas movie was Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) and it’s easy to see why. The movie stars Jimmy Stewart, the most all-American star in old Hollywood, and shows him at his best. He has a lovely family and his drama is the drama of self-government, the test of an American national character then still thought to be defined by small town life.
The movie is much harder to recognize today, in a country not only urbanized, but also globalized. For one thing, taste has changed from earnest to cynical. Society has also changed. The “traditional” family is no longer the shared ideal. Women rather than men dominate higher education and the job opportunities that follow from it. Neither the situation in It’s A Wonderful Life nor its protagonist, George Bailey, could be called all-American.
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