What he doesn’t expect is to fall in love with her. Maggie too, is smitten with him, but is frustrated by their distance, and that she truly doesn’t know him. The more she learns about him, the more she pushes away from him. Seth realizes he has a choice, between living as a human or staying immortal. When he does take the plunge, he finds her and their love story begins.

Ryan and Cage convincingly play soulmates, but by the time they find each other and can be together, is very short lived, and near the end of the movie. It made the movie all that more sad, but I think the underlying theme is that time is so precious and shouldn’t be taken for granted. The movie was very well made, I was slightly disapointed that their happiness together was very short lived. Ultimately, it was well worth watching and I would reccomend it.

What they meet does not meet their expectations either. They see a guy who is a beer guzzling lazy slob. The only angelic thing about him is that he does have a large pair of wings. As far as anyone can tell, they are genuine. That means, angel or not, there is a scoop to be had for the tabloid. All they have to do is get the winged man safely back to HQ for photos.

As they make their way across the country, some very odd things happen. One would almost call them miracles. In time, the reporters begin to believe that they are traveling with a real angel.

They are and the angel has something on his agenda besides posing for a few pictures. In fact he has several things on his agenda and nothing is going to stop him from getting them done. That will not stop him from have as good a time as possible along the way, however. And wings seem to really be chick magnets.

This is a fun comedy. It is much better than my low expectations led me to believe it would be. It was fun and inlightening.

Cast

• John Travolta – Michael
• Andie MacDowell – Dorothy Winters
• William Hurt – Frank Quinlan
• Bob Hoskins – Vartan Malt
• Robert Pastorelli – Huey Driscoll
• Jean Stapleton – Pansy Milbank
• Teri Garr – Judge Esther Newberg
• Wallace Langham – Bruce Craddock
• Joey Lauren Adams – Anita, Brown’s Waitress

But, experienced as they are in laying waste to whole nations, they lack man’s capacity for true evil and need to find the darkest human soul to show them the way to win. Viggo Mortensen’s Lucifer isn’t too keen on the situation, fearing a victory for Gabriel’s side will result in Heaven becoming another Hell – and two Hells is one Hell too many for him. Stuck in the middle is Elias Koteas’ priest-turned-cop, who lost his faith not because Heaven showed him too little but because it showed him too much.

The similarities to writer-director Gregory Widen’s Highlander screenplay are apparent, although this boasts a much lower budget but infinitely superior direction, a good visual sense and some great locations. Much of the film’s strength is in its ideas and its dialogue: the plotting is at times perfunctory, Virginia Madsen’s schoolteacher takes little convincing of the Angelic threat and Walken probably has a little TOO much fun as Gabe, whether letting schoolchildren blow his horn or gleefully explaining “I’m an angel.I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.” The ending too is more than a little awkward. But the good points outweigh the bad.

Bobby is a cool Fonz-style greaser who dies in a racing accident sometime around 1968. Once in the afterlife he’s is informed that he cannot get into Heaven unless he accomplishes an assignment. Bobby agrees and 17 years later he returns in Ft. Lauderdale assigned to help a “spazolla” named Lenny. Kinda sounds like an episode of “Highway to Heaven” doesn’t it?

Filled with funny moments, a good story and some unbelievably bad clothes this is a great 80′s time capsule that the entire family can enjoy. My favorite moment is right after his makeover when he goes out trying to impress girls. God, I laughed for two minutes when he shot those cigarettes across the room.

The film takes place in the fictional town of Bedford Falls shortly after World War II and stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve gains the attention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers) who is sent to help him in his hour of need. Much of the film is told through flashbacks spanning George’s entire life and narrated by Franklin and Joseph, unseen Angels who are preparing Clarence for his mission to save George. Through these flashbacks we see all the people whose lives have been touched by George and the difference he has made to the community in which he lives.

The film is regarded as a classic and is a staple of Christmas television around the world, although, due to its high production costs and stiff competition at the box office, financially, it was considered a “flop.” The film’s break-even point was actually $6.3 million, approximately twice the production cost, a figure it never came close to achieving in its initial release. An appraisal in 2006 reported: “Although it was not the complete box-office failure that today everyone believes … it was a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the populist features that made his films the must-see, money-making events they once were.^“

It’s a Wonderful Life was nominated for five Oscars without winning any, but the film has since been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made, and placed number one on their list of the most inspirational American films of all time.

Production

Background

The original story “The Greatest Gift” was written by Philip Van Doren Stern in November 1939. After being unsuccessful in getting the story published, he decided to make it into a Christmas card, and mailed 200 copies to family and friends in December 1943. The story came to the attention of RKO producer David Hempstead, who showed it to Cary Grant’s Hollywood agent and, in April 1944, RKO Pictures bought the rights to the story for $10,000 hoping to turn the story into a vehicle for Grant. RKO created three unsatisfactory scripts before shelving the planned movie with Grant going on to make another Christmas picture, The Bishop’s Wife.

At the suggestion of RKO studio chief Charles Koerner, Frank Capra read “The Greatest Gift” and immediately saw its potential. RKO, anxious to unload the project, sold the rights in 1945 to Capra’s production company, Liberty Films, which had a nine-film distribution agreement with RKO, for $10,000, and threw in the three scripts for free. Capra, along with writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett — with Jo Swerling, Michael Wilson, and Dorothy Parker brought in to “polish” the script— turned the story and what was worth using from the three scripts into a screenplay that Capra would rename It’s a Wonderful Life.

Filming

It’s a Wonderful Life was shot at the RKO studio in Culver City, California, and the RKO Ranch in Encino, where “Bedford Falls” was a set covering four acres, assembled from three separate parts with a main street stretching 300 yards (three city blocks), with 75 stores and buildings, a tree-lined center parkway and 20 full grown oak trees. For months prior to principal photography, the mammoth set was populated by pigeons, cats and dogs in order to give the “town” a lived-in feel. Due to the requirement to film in an “alternate universe” setting as well as during different seasons, the set was extremely adaptable. RKO created “chemical snow” for the film in order to preclude the use of dubbed dialogue when actors walked across the earlier type of movie snow, made up of crushed cornflakes. Filming started on April 15, 1946 and ended on July 27, 1946, exactly on deadline for the 90-day principal photography schedule.

The RKO ranch in Encino, the filming location of Bedford Falls, was razed in the mid-1950s. Because of this there are only two remaining locations from the film. The first is the swimming pool that was unveiled during the famous dance scene where George courts Mary. It is located in the gymnasium at Beverly Hills High School and is still in operation as of 2008. The second location is the Martini home in fictional Bailey Park. This home is located at 4587 Viro Road in La Canada Flintridge, California.

During filming, in the scene where Uncle Billy gets drunk at Harry and Ruth’s engagement party, George points him in the right direction home. As the camera focuses on George, smiling at his uncle staggering away, a crash is heard in the distance and Uncle Billy yells, “I’m all right! I’m all right!” Equipment on the set had actually been accidentally knocked over — Capra left in Thomas Mitchell’s impromptu ad lib.

The full extent of Mr. Potter’s deviousness is never revealed to the other characters in the film, and he is never brought to account for sequestering the $8,000, although Capra filmed an alternate ending that was subsequently cut wherein Potter receives a “comeuppance”.

While George sees what life would be like without him, Harry’s would-be grave displays the dates 1911–1919, contradicting Clarence’s statement that Harry died at the age of nine.

Reception

It’s a Wonderful Life premiered at the Globe Theatre in New York on December 20, 1946 to mixed reviews. While Capra considered the contemporary critical reviews to be either universally negative or at best dismissive, Time magazine said, “It’s a Wonderful Life is a pretty wonderful movie. It has only one formidable rival (Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives) as Hollywood’s best picture of the year.… Director Capra’s inventiveness, humor and affection for human beings keep it glowing with life and excitement.”^[18] Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, complimented some of the actors, including Stewart and Reed, but concluded that “the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it — its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities.” One motion picture industry source reported to the FBI in 1947 that the movie resembled Communist propaganda in its making a banker the most despised person in the story.

The film, which went into general release on January 7, 1947, placed 26th in box office revenues for the year (out of more than 400 features released), one place ahead of another Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street.

In 1990, It’s a Wonderful Life was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.

In 2002, Britain’s Channel 4 ranked It’s A Wonderful Life as the seventh greatest film ever made in their poll, “The 100 Greatest Films” and in 2006, It’s A Wonderful Life reached #37 in Channel 4′s “100 Greatest Family Films” poll. It’s A Wonderful Life currently ranks 30th on the IMDB‘s top 250.

In June 2008, AFI revealed its “Ten top Ten” — the best 10 films in 10 “classic” American film genres — after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. It’s a Wonderful Life was acknowledged as the third-best film in the fantasy genre.

A more iconoclastic viewpoint was expressed by Wendell Jamieson in a 2008 New York Times article, which posited that the film “is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife.”

Cast

• James Stewart     George Bailey
• Donna Reed     Mary Hatch Bailey
• Lionel Barrymore     Henry F. Potter
• Thomas Mitchell     Uncle Billy Bailey
• Henry Travers     The angel – Clarence Odbody (angel 2nd class)
• Beulah Bondi     Mrs. Bailey
• Frank Faylen     Ernie Bishop
• Ward Bond     Bert
• Gloria Grahame     Violet Bick
• H. B. Warner     Mr. Gower