So some people tried to understand the horrors these men had experienced - and their desires to plunge headfirst back into normalcy - via art. Today, we would recognize this as PTSD, but post–World War II America didn’t have such a clinical diagnosis.

Men had died in battle, and many of those who returned home were wracked with mental anguish over what they had seen and done. But there was a constant question of just how great the ultimate cost would be. The evils of fascism had been defeated, and everyone could agree that was good. In the wake of World War II, many Americans were struggling with a very specific sort of mental hurdle. It’s a Wonderful Life belongs to a very specific subgenre of popular American art To Mama Dollar and Papa Dollar. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of the best films America has ever made about itself, and that’s why I love it so much. It would be too bad if the film lost its cachet, though. Now that NBC owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the film, it’s less ubiquitous, just another annual tradition. It’ll never be as forgotten as it was before that paperwork mishap, of course, but in recent years it’s been replaced in popular discourse by a new series of Christmas movies, like A Christmas Story and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Weirdly, It’s a Wonderful Life seems to be slipping back into the mists of time. Upon release, It’s a Wonderful Life was greeted with weak box office earnings and reviews that amounted to, “It’s fine, but nothing special.” Though the film was nominated for a handful of Oscars (thanks mainly to Capra’s prestige within the industry at the time), it lost to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, also a terrific film. Local TV stations found it to be a good way to paper over the long winter afternoons of December, their viewers discovered how good it is, and it became the classic it is today.īut if you were to tell Capra back in the late ’40s that his film would go on to become a perennial favorite, he might have scoffed at you. It’s a Wonderful Life’s status as an American classic is owed largely to a quirk of paperwork - after National Telefilm Associates, which owned the film after a long, convoluted chain of corporate sales, failed to renew its copyright in 1974, the movie fell into the public domain. And, yes, there are far more influential ones. My favorite movie is Frank Capra’s immortal It’s a Wonderful Life, which celebrates its 70th birthday December 20, 2016.

It's a wonderful life movie poster