Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Frank Capra’s classic Hollywood movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is going the art-house cinema rounds. It is a gloriously schmaltzy movie in which George Bailey (James Stewart), a thoroughly decent man is brought so low by a malevolent small town capitalist that he contemplates a Christmas-time suicide. However a portly guardian angel intervenes and shows him how badly Bedford Falls would have turned out without his good deeds.
The cinemas are trumpeting James Stewart’s performance in what they describe as a “sentimental testament to homely small-town moral values”. Sentimental it is, but I think its values are rather more universal. The film belongs to 1946 and is in a sense a reflection on America’s experience of recession in the 1930s and the public values that imbued the New Deal era. Out of duty George Bailey has taken over a mutual building society that builds decent homes for local people who would otherwise have to rent the capitalist’s unfit housing. So here are values of mutuality and social concern. The portrait of the town bereft of Bailey’s good works is a garish neo-liberal nightmare in which everyday goodwill is extinguished in a society driven by greed and suspicion. I don’t want to over-egg the movie’s commitment to anything more than entertainment, and public policy in the US has certainly turned decisively away from the film’s values, homely or universal. But there are themes here for the UK as well as the US as we both enter a recession that is going severely to challenge our societies and what remains of our postwar values.
