It’s little known that the movie It’s A Wonderful Life was a box office flop. It bankrupted the producing studio and basically ended the otherwise impressive career of Frank Capra. The copyright holder let the copyright lapse which allowed widespread availability of the film, which in turn led to it being blasted all over television for generations. Cheap programming is always in fashion. But today none of this matters because we’re going to focus in on one of the major flaws of this film. No worries that when Mr. Gower slaps George’s “bad ear” it bleeds for some reason. What sort of deaf ear bleeds because you hit it? I think my one ear is starting to get a little incapable but I’m rather certain bleeding is not one of the symptoms of hearing loss. And this isn’t about the fire extinguisher foam they used as snow, which glops and runs all over everything, most notably and annoyingly in the scene where George crashes his car into that tree. Onward.
When Clarence is ferrying George around showing him all of the things that wouldn’t have happened if George hadn’t ever been born, the supposedly stunning climax of this exercise is when George asks about Mary. Mary, for the uninitiated, is played by a rather beautiful Donna Reed. George, with his grasp on reality fading, asks Clarence to see Mary. Where’s Mary, he says in his particular way. At first, Clarence refuses to tell him. The truth of what she became is just too dastardly to share. Clarence knows it’ll ruin George. Where’s Mary!? The most cruel and terrible outcome the writers could imagine is this: “She’s an old maid and she’s just about to close up the library!” Queue the sinister music. The terror.
When George finds her she’s wearing glasses, which is the sure fire way to make an otherwise attractive woman appear homely. Glasses AND a library job! Imagine the horror. George tries to convince Mary that he’s her husband and she passes out. The end of that scene. We’re supposed to feel bad for George? George is so upset that his wife decided to pursue a chaste life as a library director? I scoff at the concept.
If the writers had really wanted to mess with George, they should have had Mary living in New York City with Sam Wainright. George should have had to hop on the train to NYC, where he’d find a sultry Mary sitting on Sam’s lap in the penthouse of some magnificent mid-town skyscraper. George could have looked in through the glass to see Sam sitting in his leather chair near a roaring fireplace in a dimly lit den lined with rich mahogany, barking into his phone about plastics, all the while Mary kisses him. George would pound on the glass but no one would listen. Security would drag him away and throw him onto the snowy NYC street. Now that would have been a terrible thing. Mary and Sam, hee-haw. Gross.