Christmas With Capra: Classic Films for Our Troubled Times

If you want your children to know how one can discern his God-given purpose and calling in a self-centered world, be a patriotic American in a corrupt world, and be a man or a woman in a genderless world, then you need look no further than these three Frank Capra masterpieces.

Frank Capra

This Christmas, in addition to putting presents beneath a glowing tree, why not give your family the gift of your presence with them before a glowing screen. No, not to watch an action movie or binge a Netflix show or simply pass the time. Watch, and discuss, with them a classic Hollywood film that was made to entertain and edify parents and children alike but that does not shy away from struggle, heartache, and pain.

Particularly, since we live in troubled and confusing times, select films that can speak to our unique historical moment with the kind of maturity, wisdom, and clarity too often lacking in modern Hollywood fare. Thankfully, the Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s produced hundreds of such films. Among those, many of the best were directed by a Sicilian immigrant who understood the fullness of the American dream—with all its joys and sorrows, successes and failures—better than any politician living today: Frank Capra.

For Christmas 2021, I suggest a Capra movie marathon for the whole family that will thrill and awe, even as it guides and instructs. If you want your children to know, and yourself to know as well, how one can discern his God-given purpose and calling in a self-centered world, be a patriotic American in a corrupt world, and be a man or a woman in a genderless world, then you need look no further than these three Capra masterpieces.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

The best place to start is with Capra’s best film, which also happens to be the best Christmas movie ever made and one of the ten or fifteen best films of all time. It concerns a bright, honest, hard-working young man named George Bailey who dreams of leaving his small town of Bedford Falls, traveling the world, and building bridges and airfields and skyscrapers a hundred stories high. But he never does those things because his father dies, he takes over the Building and Loan, and marries the girl next door.

For the next decade, George carries on a one-man crusade against Potter, a cruel, joyless miser who has milked the townspeople dry, forcing them to pay exorbitant rents to live lives of quiet despair in his broken-down tenements. Only Bailey’s Building and Loan provides the means for the working people of Bedford Falls to afford a home of their own. Then, the first Christmas Eve after the end of the WWII arrives and disaster strikes.

Eight-thousand dollars meant to square the books of the Building and Loan accidentally end up in the clutches of Potter, causing George to fall foul of the bank examiner. Things quickly spiral out of control, driving our innocent hero to suicidal despair. Only the intervention of a bumbling angel named Clarence saves George from taking his own life. But it is not enough! In order to restore George’s faith and hope and prevent him from a second attempt, Clarence is forced to take drastic measures.

To prove to George the value of his life, Clarence allows him to see what the world would have been like had he never been born. Without the ministry of the Building and Loan, Bedford Falls becomes the twisted creation of slumlord Potter, a dark, hopeless, soul-crushing world of smoky bars and seedy dance halls, pawn shops and peep shows. As for George’s family, without him there, his mother becomes a bitter old woman, his wife an old maid, his uncle an inmate in an asylum, and his brother, whom George had saved from drowning when he was a boy, a corpse.

One life, George learns, touches so many other lives. Far from a failure, his life was the glue that held together his family, his business, and his community. In the end, George embraces life, and the people of Bedford Falls gather around him in love, donating the money to restore the Building and Loan that had helped them to achieve their own simple dreams of freedom, independence, and dignity.

I hope you will discuss with your family what It’s a Wonderful Life teaches us about the value of life, service, and community. But this Christmas, I would urge you to focus on something else, something our society, especially the young, desperately needs to hear.

When George Bailey gets to see what the world would be like had he never been born, he becomes, for a moment, what a growing number of people in our society would like to be: a radically autonomous person with no obligations to bind him or social expectations to define him. He can brush the dirt of old-fashioned, bourgeoise Bedford Falls off his feet and live the individualistic dreams he has always had for himself.

But he doesn’t. He goes back to the life which he had come to believe was a cage, but which he now sees was both a calling and a blessing. He never got the chance to build skyscrapers a hundred stories high; instead, he provided the means to build countless homes for real people living real lives. He built no grand bridges over mighty rivers; instead, he united an entire town, empowering them to rise above the destructive flood of Potter’s all-consuming greed.

I can think of no more important message in an age where behavior that would once have been deemed selfish, narcissistic, and self-destructive is praised as an expression of “healthy” individuality. George Bailey neither does that which feels good nor asserts his own narrow vision of himself and his role in society. He accepts the responsibility that is placed upon his shoulders and allows himself to be shaped and defined by the needs of others around him. Rather than change the world to suit his own self-centered desires, he changes himself to adapt to the true calling that is upon him.

George Bailey does more than delay gratification. He embraces his true and essential identity and purpose and is strengthened to perform the work for which he was created.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

Seven years before he played George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart took on the role of another innocent, hard-working, selfless young man: Jefferson Smith. Through a political fluke, Smith becomes the junior senator of his state and is sent off to D. C. Brimming over with idealistic dreams of serving his country, Smith proposes a bill to build a boy’s camp that will train up young Americans in the democratic values of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Instead, he runs head on into backroom deals, political expediency, and graft.

As it turns out, the senior senator (Paine), who had been friends with Smith’s crusading father and whom Smith idolizes as a man of integrity, has long been colluding with Taylor, a corrupt businessman who owns all there is to own in Smith’s state. When Smith’s boy’s camp threatens a lucrative political deal that Taylor has made with Paine, Smith is bribed to drop his bill. When he refuses, Taylor’s machine crushes him, falsely accusing him of the very graft of which Paine and Taylor are guilty.

With the help of his secretary, Clarissa Saunders, whose cynical shell is punctured by Smith’s honesty and sincerity, Smith mounts a filibuster in the Senate to expose the lies. Alas, Taylor’s web of deceit proves too thick and strong for Smith to wrestle himself out of. Exhausted by his seemingly fruitless struggle, Smith drops in a swoon to the cold, stony floor of the Senate.

And that is when the miracle happens. Smith’s courageous zeal and willingness to give all he has for truth and justice wakes up Paine from his moral slumber, and he confesses publicly before the Senate that Smith is innocent and that he is the guilty one who should be expelled.

Once the full weight of this timeless and timely film sinks into the minds and hearts of your family, you can begin a much-needed discussion about patriotism. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is no sentimental work of naïve optimism and primitive jingoism. It looks reality square in the face and uncovers the two truths about man on which our Founding Fathers built our political system: we were made in God’s image and thus possess inherent worth and dignity; we are fallen and depraved and thus need laws and limits.

Because they believed the first truth, they believed that we had the ability and the right to govern ourselves. Because they believed the second—because they believed, to borrow a key line from The Federalist Papers, that men are not angels—they believed that checks and balances had to be inscribed deeply into our constitution.

Capra’s paean to our great experiment in self-government is one of the most patriotic, pro-American films ever made. It also offers a searing critique of political corruption in the very heart of our nation. The film does not teach us to deny the truth of man’s depravity (political or otherwise), but to meet that depravity with decency, integrity, and a willingness to fight with all the means at our disposal. Innocence, it teaches us, need not mean weakness. To the contrary, it provides clarity, hope, and the strength to endure.

And it teaches one more thing that every American who cares about the future of our country must hear: though there are many ideologies out there that are wholly corrupt, there are very few individuals who are. Yes, there are a handful of Taylors out there, but most of the people who serve in our democracy are like Paine and Saunders. They may have compromised, they may have acquiesced to business as usual, but they are redeemable. They can be won back by citizens who will stand up for truth and justice and who will appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

Cynicism, polarization, and demonization are not the answers to the political corruption of our day. We need Smiths with the courage to filibuster—but only if their ultimate motivation is to build rather than tear down, redeem rather than slander, restore rather than lay waste.

It Happened One Night (1934)

Capra would become most famous for his movies with a message, but the one that made him a household name—the first film to win Oscars for best picture, director, actor, actress, and script—was a far lighter film, a screwball romantic comedy that would establish the conventions for hundreds of movies to come.

The film concerns Ellie, a run-away heiress escaping her constrictive, artificial life, and Peter, a cynical, down-on-his-luck reporter fed up with the artificiality of his own career. They meet by accident on a bus and cut a deal: Peter will help Ellie get to the ne’er-do-well playboy she wants to marry, while Ellie will allow Peter the exclusive story of her elopement. Though they are as opposite as two people can be, they manage to fall in love.

I won’t recount all the wonderful adventures they go on, but as they make their way through the heart of America, they each learn to let down their masks and be vulnerable before the other. Ellie learns that she is a spoiled, sheltered brat cut off from the real sufferings of depression America, while Peter learns that he is not as much in control as he would like to think: that he is, in fact, a know-it-all who knows very little about himself and who is out of touch with his feelings, his needs, and his desires.

It Happened One Night, for all its entertainment value, is a film that all families in America should be watching and discussing together this holiday season. This generation of young people has been forced to grow up in a world of rampant gender confusion where no one seems able or willing to acknowledge the differences between men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Masculinity and femininity themselves are under attack as nothing more than social-political-economic constructs.

Capra’s romantic comedy is about the age-old battle of the sexes, but not in the way that misunderstood phrase is used today. The real battle of the sexes—as it manifests itself, for example, in Shakespeare’s comedies—is not over jobs or salaries, political power or educational opportunities. It concerns, rather, the radically different ways that men and woman communicate, prioritize, perceive, and interact with themselves, with the other sex, and with the world.

With great energy, drive, and humor, It Happens One Night lays down the rules and dynamics of seduction and courtship, but in such a way as to promote real understanding between the sexes. While modern films and television shows offer either no or false

insight into the complementary nature of masculinity and femininity, Capra conjures up for our amusement and instruction a dual journey of enlightenment that simultaneously teaches his hero and heroine the uniqueness of their male and female natures and the greater strength and wholeness they can achieve when they join together as one flesh.

That enlightenment brings reconciliation to the lovers and to their respective sexes. It brings reconciliation as well to the wider society, bridging the gulf between rich and poor, haves and have nots, the leisured class and the working class. Our age, fueled by politicians and media people who use hate to exacerbate differences and bring further division, desperately needs such visions of enlightenment and reconciliation.

So dim the lights, break out the snacks, and let Capra’s films light the way to a future driven by gratitude rather than envy, integrity rather than the bottom line, the celebration of difference rather than the enforcement of a dull and unnatural sameness.

This essay was first published here in December 2021.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The images from It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It Happened One Night are courtesy of IMDb. The image of Frank Capra is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.