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| Poster for IAWL (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
She's a big IaWL fan, even though she hates black-and-white movies in general. I like b/w movies, but I can't stand IaWL, even though I like everyone in it. If you're like Lisa, brace yourself -- I'm not going to show it any mercy. And, you might want to look into this issue-- there's plenty of discussion about it on the web, plus a great short story, "Miracle," by Connie Willis (award-winning s/f writer) that has a plot rooted in the flaws of IaWL.
To begin with, the film was a major flop in its original release for some very good reasons: it concerns a suicidal man who has had a life filled with so many disappointments that he can't see anything positive in it, so an angel shows him how much worse other people's lives (not his) would have been if he hadn't been born. You wouldn't think this would be very persuasive, since the main cause of all George's disappointments is his almost pathological need to sacrifice his own wants and needs for others. Basically, this film is a twist on Dickens's A Christmas Carol, just a bit more subtle about it than other films. There's one obvious parallel set piece: the dance at the high school gym, which is one of the few happy moments in the film, is the Fezziwigs' Christmas party in post-WWII drag, but other parallels are there throughout. The bottom line is that it was too grim for its time (there were other factors as well, things like how it was released to theaters, etc.), and it sank into obscurity until something that had nothing to do with its merits turned it into a Christmas staple: copyright laws.
I first got this story from my mother, who also doesn't get IaWL as a Christmas movie. According to her, she never saw the film until the late '70s, when all of a sudden it was all over television (at a time when there were only 7 or so channels in the Chicago market), except for the three major networks. The reason for this was that its copyright had ended and it was in the public domain: all the tv stations needed was a copy to show-- they did have to pay some royalties, but they didn't have to make deals to buy packages of films (the usual way things worked then), which meant it was as close to pure profit for them as they could get. This situation went on through the 1980s (showings fell off somewhat over time, because people could only take so much), with the start of home video. You could get copies from a bunch of different companies, all with different covers and of different quality (some were made from really crummy prints). Then, one fateful day, it all ended.
The way she remembers it is that it was discovered that a song in the film was still under copyright, which may or may not be true (I haven't looked hard enough to find anything on it), but according to Wikipedia (a source that may or may not be as reliable as my mother), it was the original source material, the short story "The Greatest Gift," that was still under copyright, and "In 1993, Republic Pictures, which was the successor to NTA, relied on the 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Stewart v. Abend (which involved another Stewart film, Rear Window) to enforce its claim to the copyright. While the film's copyright had not been renewed, Republic still owned the film rights to 'The Greatest Gift'; thus the plaintiffs were able to argue its status as a derivative work of a work still under copyright" (Wikipedia).
My point in telling you this is that through the relentless bombardment of tv broadcasts coinciding with their own Christmas experiences, people were brainwashed into thinking that IaWL is a good Christmas movie. They associate it with good times that happened while the film was on their tvs, and it became a Christmas tradition that was interrupted for a while until NBC got a license to air it (but only twice a year). By that time, people were jonesing for it, possibly in a literal sense. I can just imagine whole families not knowing how to begin their celebrations without seeing the film first to trigger all their memories.
All of this doesn't get me to discussing why it's no good as a Christmas movie, but that's okay. I'll do it in my next post.
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