In 1951, a young man walked into his local bank to ask for a loan. After six years fighting in Europe during the Second World War, he worked with his father in a small food brokerage business and recently married his dream girl. A month after the wedding, his father died, leaving him to support his new wife, widowed mother, and younger brother. He needed money to do that. The loan officer glanced briefly at the application, then looked up and asked, “Are you Ben’s son?” Yes. “The money’s yours. When do you need it?” the banker said, reaching across the desk to shake my father’s hand. That loan officer wasn’t George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, but thanks to him, my dad went on to have a wonderful life.
Every Time a Bell Rings: The Legacy of It’s a Wonderful Life, America’s Most Beloved Holiday Film tells the story behind the film that mirrored my dad’s life in more ways than one. Authors Emily St. James and Lauren Theisen compare the film’s setting (the fictional Bedford Falls) to a Christmas village lovingly set up on a display table by the tree, a comparison that will resonate with many; for today’s audiences, the classic is more an object of ritual than a cinematic event. Organized as essays that highlight the film’s components and characters, the book reveals how director Frank Capra and his cohorts created the iconic film, along with new, perhaps surprising ways to view its enduring impact.
The Story About the Story
The film is based on the short story, “The Greatest Gift”, by Philip Van Doren Stern. When he finished the story in 1943, he couldn’t find a publisher, so he self-published it and sent the printed pamphlets as Christmas cards. One pamphlet found its way into Hollywood, and the rest is history, though history never follows a smooth path.
Along the way to becoming It’s a Wonderful Life, screenwriters Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets, and Frank Capra himself made several significant changes to the narrative. In the timeline where George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) is never born, for example, the short story has his wife, Mary Hatch (Donna Reed), marry a brute strongly implied to be abusive – a slightly worse outcome than being a spinster librarian.
The most significant change concerns George’s father, Peter Bailey (Samuel S. Hinds). In Van Doren Stern’s story, Peter is alive when the Guardian Angel, Clarence (played by Henry Travers in the film), makes it so that George was never born; his son Harry’s death by drowning (because George was not there to save him) has made him a bitter old man. In the film, Peter dies suddenly much earlier, forcing George to put his dreams of travel and adventure on hold to take charge of the Building & Loan, while Harry (Todd Karns) goes off to college, marries well, and leaves town for a promising job.
Peter appears in just two scenes: once when George wants his father’s advice about delivering the bottle of poison the pharmacist, Mr. Gower (H.B. Warner), mistakenly mixed, and once at the dinner table on the night of Peter’s stroke. The conversation between father and son in that scene suggests the older Bailey may have had his own dreams deferred:
“Now you’ve got talent, son. I’ve seen it. Get yourself an education and get out of here. This town is no place for any man who isn’t willing to crawl to Potter.”
Yet isn’t that exactly what Peter Bailey has been doing his whole life? Why? As the authors note, “To have children is to put some other version of yourself on hold, possibly indefinitely.” Small wonder George soon finds himself in the same boat.
My father did, too. Despite his singular tenor voice, after his military service, he put his plan to study opera in New York City on hold to help his father run a food brokerage business that was under siege by the new grocery conglomerates that emerged after WWII. He married his sweetheart. When my grandfather died suddenly, Dad took over the business and expanded it with the loan described earlier. His wife had a daughter. Then another, and then a son.
It Takes a Village in This World
Both Jimmy Stewart and director Frank Capra served in WW II. In many ways, It’s a Wonderful Life reflects their experiences, and serves as a coda to Capra’s earlier war propaganda films. The authors of Every Time a Bell Rings describe the film as “a movie that looks at what sacrifices plenty of Americans had made for their family and friends overseas, and asks just what good those sacrifices were? After the war, Capra could still tell you why WE fought, but he was no longer sure why HE fought. The same went for Stewart.”
Though my father was so eager to sign up after Pearl Harbor that he lied about his age to get into the Army, his war experience changed him profoundly. He provided anti-aircraft support for the D-Day landing, his battalion later liberated the camps at Buchenwald, and he remained in the active Army Reserves for 20 years after his discharge. Yet he never spoke to his family about his war years.
Growing up, my only reminder that he fought in WWII came while I played doubles tennis with him. Mid-rally, a truck engine backfired as it drove down the road beside the court. My father threw his racket into the street, grabbed my arm, and pulled me down to the clay surface beside him.
George Bailey did not fight the same war as my father or Jimmy Stewart, though George’s brother Harry did. Instead, George spends his whole life sacrificing his deepest desires in service to others. What might George’s life have looked like after that climactic Christmas Eve? How wonderful would he consider it two, five, or ten years later, still consumed by a dead-end job, living in an eternal fixer-upper, and crawling to the businessman, Mr. Potter? Through that lens, his triumphant Christmas Eve redemption becomes just another episode in the life of “a warped, frustrated young man,” as Mr. Potter calls him.
Yet we are charmed nonetheless by George and the cast of characters who create the community he cares for, and that comes to his aid in need. Even casual fans of It’s a Wonderful Life can enjoy the most minor residents of Bedford Falls with their iconic quotes:
“I heard it. Bout time one of you lunkheads said it.”
“Hee-Haw!”
“This old thing? I only wear it when I don’t care how I look.”
“Get a load o’ me! I’m giving out wings!”
“Why don’t ya kiss her ‘stead of talkin’ her to death?”
Not to mention police officer Bert and taxi driver Ernie standing in the rain to serenade the newlyweds. The authors explain:
“Capra’s film puts care into sketching out every person…on screen because they all matter just by virtue of their humanity…The movie really can’t exist without all the other lives that surround George Bailey. The whole point is that each person affects everyone they come into contact with.”
This is the lesson Clarence delivers directly: “Every man’s life touches so many others. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
It’s a Wonderful Life‘s Timeless “Trick”
This brings us to Mr. Potter. Casting Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter was strategic in more ways than one. Barrymore was an arch conservative who actively campaigned against FDR and the New Deal. More importantly, he played Scrooge in radio adaptations of A Christmas Carol for 20 years before portraying the miserly money man in Capra’s film. Barrymore’s casting to ensure audiences would hate Mr. Potter was so transparent that it prompted the FBI to investigate Capra as a socialist for employing “a common trick used by communists”, according to the 1947 memo, “Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry.”
Every Time a Bell Rings tells us that “Henry S. Potter is what happens when you remove the guardrails from America.” Money men buy up local businesses: Potter is on the board of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan and wants to own it. Housing is controlled: he owns housing stock in what is known as “Potter’s Field”, where the working class is forced to live. This may explain why modern audiences may find much similarity between the bleakness of Pottersville and the present.
It’s a Wonderful Life does not portray Potter as evil just because he’s rich; George Bailey’s childhood friend, Sam Wainwright, is, too: but he brings his business to Bedford Falls to put people back to work and wires money to save George after his Uncle Billy loses his Building and Loan deposit. In this story, Potter is evil because he does not care about or help his neighbors. This becomes clear when Potter objects to loans that have already been approved. When Potter tells him to pressure borrowers struggling to pay their mortgages, George objects. “These people have children,” he says. “They’re not my children,” Potter replies.
As fans of It’s a Wonderful Life know, things go downhill during the detour to Pottersville, revealing just how much worse life would have been for George and his neighbors had he never been born. Yet it is Mary who saves the day in the film’s direst moments. When the bank crisis hits, Mary saves Building & Loan from the run, which would have shut it down, by offering customers their wedding cash: “How much do you need?” Similarly, Mary spreads the word about the lost bank deposit that prompts people to show up at the house with cash to help their friend:
“I busta the jukebox!”
“I’m not gonna go, George. I changed my mind.”
“I been savin’ this for a divorce if I ever get a husband.”
Throughout the film, Mary is depicted as the happy homemaker we associate with the post-war years today. Yet in 1946, 35 percent of adult women worked outside the home. Many of those were recruited to fill places vacated by men who went off to fight. Once the war ended, the country wanted women (white women, anyway) back in their homes, where the era’s conservative milieu deemed they belonged. Actress Donna Reed made that life look wonderful, not only in Bedford Falls, but into the 1950s and ’60s on her own TV show.
St. James and Theisen argue that, despite its status as perhaps the iconic American Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life is really “Christmas adjacent”: more Die Hard than Dickens. Only the last third of the film takes place at Christmastime. Despite the Christmas miracle that saves George from jumping to his death in the river, his life before and likely after that event does not seem objectively wonderful.
Capra’s message met the moment. In a nation beaten down by decades of economic hardship and the far-reaching effects of WWII’s destruction throughout the world, neighbors needed to know they could count on each other. As my father knows, we still do. That’s the “bell” from It’s a Wonderful Life that we still hear ringing in 2026.