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The title points up Griffith (Isn't Life Wonderful), a similar ambivalence envisions Bob Cratchit as Job in a cosmic imbalance. Mr. Americana on the edge of the precipice, "his crucial night," James Stewart in one of the greatest performances in all of cinema. The diligent philanthropist is a squashed explorer since childhood aware of no good deed going unpunished, the bad ear he got from pulling his brother out of the ice gets smacked by the distraught pharmacist he saves from an accidental poisoning. Seeing the world takes a backseat to saving the town from the desiccated plutocrat (Lionel Barrymore) who's got his number: "You once called me a warped, frustrated old man. What are you but a warped, frustrated young man?" From offhand romance to "David and Goliath wisecracks" to accidental socialism, the supreme recapitulation of Frank Capra's themes. Vivacity of form encompassing freeze-frames and jump-cuts keeps darkness at bay, the kind of ebullient surrealism that opens the ground beneath the hero's dancing feet before morphing his sweetheart (Donna Reed) into a talking bush. (The clinching of the couple is a blur of passion and bitterness beautifully sustained in close-up around a phone, their honeymoon has a Victrola powering the fireplace barbecue as Ward Bond and Frank Faylen serenade them outside.) "A fundamental urge" and a celestial view, the thanklessness of decency and the prayer answered by a punch, it all builds to Christmas Eve above a vortex. Powell and Pressburger are concurrent with A Matter of Life and Death, the "second class" angel (Henry Travers) halts the suicide by revealing the even worse fate of nullity. "Each man's life touches so many other lives and when he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" A noir Sodom is ever ready to burst through the cozy postcard, a movie theater playing McCarey's The Bells of St. Mary's heralds the paradisiacal return. An incalculable wellspring (Ikiru, I Vitelloni, Shadows...), down to Kubrick's surprising analysis in Eyes Wide Shut. Cinematography by Joseph Walker and Joseph Biroc. With Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, Gloria Grahame, H.B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Todd Karns, Samuel S. Hinds, Mary Treen, Virginia Patton, Bill Edmunds, Lillian Randolph, Sheldon Leonard, and Charles Halton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |