YMMV / It's a Wonderful Life

• Accidental Aesop:
  • If you're a woman and don't marry your designated soulmate, you'll spend your life as a miserable spinster.
  • Don't conduct business or drive drunk. It means you may accidentally kill someone, or damage a tree.
• Adaptation Displacement: The film is adapted from a short story called "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern. It is infinitely better known than the story these days.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is George really a saintlike hero who selflessly sacrifices his hopes and dreams for the good of others, or is he just an Extreme Doormat who lacks the spine to stick up for himself and only gives because it's expected of him? Some have also claimed that George brings his problems on himself by running an overleveraged, illiquid bank and letting his alcoholic uncle handle the business.
  • Can the "unborn sequence" with Clarence be seen as a vision reminding George how important life is, or as an example of his grandiose egotism where the only thing that convinces him life is worth living if he is somehow convinced that he is a Christ-like martyr who is literally saving the souls of everyone in the town? William S. Pechter pointed out that logically the film leads to George Bailey's suicide, and the coda as fantastic, over-the-top, and emotionally compelling as it is, merely serves to indicate the lengths Capra had to go to convince himself, the viewer, and George himself, that his otherwise thwarted, frustrated, and sad life was truly worth living.
  • The Agony Booth interpreted Mary as being the true villain of the film, because it's implied that her broken-window-wish to marry George is what caused him to suffer tragedy after tragedy that kept him from leaving Bedford Falls. (It's doubtful she knew it would happen that way, though.)
  • A lot of fans have speculated that Violet is actually pregnant in the third act of the film, and is planning to move to New York to avoid the scandal that would come from such a thing in a small town.
  • Does Clarence honestly care about George? Or is he trying to reignite the desire to live in him because that's his job? Having his own salvation secured, does he care about George's fate? Or does he play the yes-man to God and just wants his wings i.e. greater status in Heaven? The Deleted Scene where he confronts Potter indicates he does care about George personally, as this is something he chose to do himself rather than because it was his instructions from God and Joseph.
  • Even Mr. Potter can be subject to this: he seems to have a sincere understanding of George's financial and personal frustrations in the scene where he tries to buy George out, the only time in the movie where he comes off as remotely sympathetic (at least until George realizes he's being played). Presumably he can relate from his own experiences as a small-town businessman who only succeeded at the expense of his soul and principles. While Capra doesn't really dwell on it (Potter crosses the Moral Event Horizon anyway when he doesn't return the lost money to Uncle Billy), this may be the residue of earlier script drafts where George's fate in Clarence's vision was essentially to become Mr. Potter, i.e. a successful but lonely and unloved businessman.
  • Does Clarence take George to the alternate reality where he was never born with the intention of proving to George how important he is to the world, his community and his loved ones? Or is it simply a scare tactic in order to force him to just accept all the misfortune and unhappiness in his life unquestioningly because of the threat of something worse if he doesn't?
  • Mr. Welch is definitely a (not entirely unjustified) Jerkass to George after the latter chews out his wife when Zuzu gets sick. But is it a case of him being a Jerkass to One, since he tells Mr. Martini he still wants to pay his tab even after Martini kicks him out of the bar? Or is he just a Jerkass in general, since he calls all of his wife's students, not just Zuzu, "stupid kids"? (Although the last part needs to be remembered, he was utterly pissed off when he said that.
  • As CinemaSins points out, George's motivations for keeping Mary's robe from her are a bit murky. Is he genuinely being a perverted asshole sexually harassing a poor girl who's repeatedly asked for her clothes back or does he think it's just a little gentle teasing between friends who already have some chemistry together?
  • When Wainwright sends $25,000 to George (which mind you is over $400,000 in today's money), is it with the expectation (and faith, given that no contract is involved and the telgram doesn't mention this) that George will eventually pay it back, or is it 100% a gift to George (that Sam could write off as a charitable donation but still)?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • That gym with the swimming pool under the floor really exists (at Beverly Hills High School). Capra added the scene to the movie after he heard about the gym, noting that no writer could have come up with an idea like that.
  • You can (and should — it's more sustainable) make plastic out of soybeans. It was first done as an experiment by Henry Ford (and it was designed to run on fuel made out of hemp). Jelly beans, kidney beans, chili beans — not so much.
• Award Snub: It received five Academy Award nominations and won a Technical Achievement Award for Russell Shearman and the RKO Radio Studio Special Effects Dept for the development of a new method of simulating falling snow on motion picture sets. While James Stewart's performance was nominated, Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore weren't.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Mary losing her bathrobe and having to hide naked inside a bush. George even lampshades it. "This is a very interesting situation!"
• Common Knowledge:
  • A minor example. Viewers very often mistake the homeowner whose tree George runs his car into as being played by William Frawley of I Love Lucy. The character was actually portrayed by an uncredited J. Farrell MacDonald. It is an easy mistake to make, since the two actors do look and sound very similar and the character's only appearances in the film come in a pair of dimly-lit nighttime scenes.
  • A more major example is the general pop-cultural perception that the film is a corny, diabetes-inducing schlockfest that only young children and old people stuck in the '40s would be able to stomach. Those who believe this are frequently surprised to learn that the film contains Black Comedy, sex jokes, discussions of economics and banking that are difficult to understand without prior knowledge of the subjects, and copious Realism-Induced Horror and Nightmare Fuel even before the Bad Future sequence kicks in.
  • People who only know the film from having seen the It's a Wonderful Plot trope in other works are often surprised to discover that the Trope Namer plot only occurs in the film's last act.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The scene where Mary is hiding in a bush because her robe fell off and George refuses to give it back to her, particularly when George tells her threatening to call the police is futile not just because they're all the way downtown, but because they'd probably be on George's side.
  • It's very likely not meant to come across this way, but the combination of his innocent kids' annoying behavior, Mary acting horrified throughout, and George acting as pissed as possible can cause the scene where he reacts to his home life in a rather poor way to get its fair share of laughs. Special mention goes to his blunt cry of "Why the Hell do we have all these kids?!". And to be fair, any humor derived from the scene doesn't detract from its quality, as moments like when he tearfully embraces his kids, starts to violently beat up up his surroundings, realizes that he's acting like a heel, and leaves in shame are all still genuine tearjerkers.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • An odd example. A lot of viewers think Pottersville looks like a fun place, citing that there are lots of places for potential work. This is ignoring the obvious rampant corruption that's going on in town — Violet in particular implied to be a prostitute — and that the citizens are clearly miserable, most likely due to an increase in poverty and thus people living in the poor houses of Potter's slums which all the entertainment establishments perpetuate by encouraging the careless squandering of money. That's not to mention the Fridge Horror in a town that's run and owned by Potter.
  • Potter himself get this from fans, often seen as a stern but reasonable businessman while George is often considered to be an irresponsible lender. This glosses over the fact that Potter tries to frame George for misappropriation of funds by knowingly keeping the $8,000 that Billy took, and later told him a really vile insult that made George want to throw his life away. Not to mention that Pottersville is the way it is because Potter wants to suck all the wealth out of the town rather than invest in the well-being of the community. That's in addition to it also being pointed out that George's more humane approach does yield results as giving people stability makes them happier, better and more reliable and improves life for the whole town and Potter would rather they be miserable and impoverished to keep them dependent on him. Potter is less interested in making money than he is dominating the whole town and forcing people to be at his mercy forever.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • George Bailey's younger brother Harry has quite a bit of fans for being The Ace at various things (All-American college football star, genius at research, war hero to boot), but also being relatable, since George's frequent sacrifices are what makes Harry's achievements possible in the first place. Later on, Harry comes when Mary tells him his big brother is in trouble, and he repays the favors to George tenfold, even bringing his squad of men for reinforcement.
  • The Pottersville version of Nick is a memorably cranky Deadpan Snarker, getting the sequence's single best line.
    "Hey look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere. Is that clear, or do I have to slip you my left for a convincer?
• Fair for Its Day:
  • Annie being a stereotypical housekeeper, and the only black character at that, subverts a lot of stereotyping seen at that time by showing her as being treated like a member of the family, which was relatively unseen at the time.
  • Likewise, Giuseppe Martini, the Italian bartender, has an over-the-top accent, yet is portrayed sympathetically. Most notably, the only character who says any bad words about Martini and his family is Mr. Potter. It should be noted that this movie's director, Frank Capra, was himself an Italian immigrant.
  • The film's view of suicide as a mortal sin can be a bit old-fashioned but it was noticeably one of the few films of the era to seriously tackle the subject and portray George sympathetically rather than demonizing him as selfish for feeling that way.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Mr. Potter's death scene really should have been included, as many would have loved to see the hateful old bastard get his comeuppance.
• Glurge: Out of context, the film can come across as this. It's Common Knowledge that this is an uplifting film full of moments of twee sentimentality. Thus it's quite a shock to new viewers how dark the first half can be — and how much Nightmare Fuel is in the portion where George sees what life would be like without him. This is lampshaded in a Friends episode where Phoebe watches the movie and turns it off before the end, finding it too dark and gloomy. This fan trailer and this one bring out the more horrific aspects. This one references The Twilight Zone (1959).
• Genius Bonus: Clarence's offhand line about the book he carries, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its author ("You should read the new book Mark Twain's writing now!") is most likely a reference to Twain's final, unfinished work The Mysterious Stranger - about an Angel who appears on earth before human beings and takes them on a journey through time and space to help them evade tragedy in their lives. Sound familiar? (Although that's where the similarities end - Twain's Angel is in fact Satan, and the story's intended nihilistic message - that "There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream" - is the polar opposite of Capra's hopeful message at the end of the film).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The banks today are basically run by Potters, and the way they were run caused much of the late 2000s recession. Meanwhile, the small-town savings and loan operations of the sort run by George Bailey are pretty much dead after causing a financial crisis of their own in The '80s.
  • And on that note, today George Bailey's more open lending practices are likely to be viewed a lot less favorably, especially in light of the subprime mortgage crisis. See Values Dissonance below.
  • A case for an earlier version of the script; originally, Mr Potter was to die of a heart attack as Laser-Guided Karma, though his comeuppance was cut due to being too bleak. Lionel Barrymore would die the same way a decade later.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mary's sarcastic line to her mother that George is "making violent love to me, mother" is an example of Having a Gay Old Time. Mary's merely saying George is giving her an overemotional courtship (when it's her that's doing the courting). With the modern meaning of the term, the joke becomes even funnier and now comes across as extreme Refuge in Audacity.
  • Also, Those Two Guys in this movie are named Ernie and Bert. The entire Sesame Street crew has always insisted this is a complete coincidence, and they got the names in an unrelated way. Whether that makes this even more hilarious is up to the individual. Even Elmo Saves Christmas makes a reference to it in the Bad Future, where Ernie and Bert give an Aside Glance as the movie plays.
  • Henry Potter could be the ancestor of a young wizard.
• Hollywood Homely: Pottersville Mary is supposed to be an unmarried, unattractive "old maid." All they did was put Donna Reed in a heavier coat, hat, and a pair of glasses, then apply concealer and darker eyebrow makeup. See Hot Librarian on the main page.
• Ho Yay: Ernie and Bert — they're Those Two Guys who always spend time with each other, and during the honeymoon, Ernie even kisses Bert on the forehead!
• Inferred Holocaust: Pottersville has more excitement and a superior economic infrastructure, but under the glamor, many people live on the streets (and many of the ladies are hookers instead of homemakers). Bedford Falls only has a moderate manufacturing economy and no obvious places to find excitement, though the honesty and unity between the B&L and small business owners allows them to overcome most financial problems. Once the factory closes down, Bedford Falls will suffer depression and unemployment. In the end, a place like Bedford Falls has a better chance of bouncing back from a bad economy because of the mutual cooperation between the banks and small businesses. And, if you pay attention, that's actually exactly what happens: George suggests to a plastics magnate that he convert a closed tool-and-die factory and employ the locals. It's a minor throwaway line in the middle of a scene with much more important things going on, emotionally speaking, but it's there.
• Iron Woobie: George. He essentially gave up his life for the people of Bedford Falls, though he cracks when he has to either put his dreams on hold or abandon them entirely. You can't help but feel sorry for him throughout the scene where he's angry after Uncle Billy loses the money, and then during the whole of the Pottersville sequence.
• It Was His Sled: George Bailey gets sent to an alternate reality where he was never born. The plot twist is well known, but the actual surprise comes not from the twist itself, but from the fact that it only comes about in the last quarter of the film, rather than being the basis of the entire plot.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • As a result of losing his son, Mr. Gower is a grumpy old man who is driven to drink and would have fatally poisoned a child if not for George's intervention; seeing his reaction to learning what he did and his fate in the alternate future is heartbreaking. Thankfully, he gets better in the main timeline, his brief appearance showing that he has come back from despair, shaped back up, and become a very good friend to George.
  • George himself veers into this from time to time. He can become abrasive, but as this usually comes after he has to abandon or put his dreams on hold, you still feel bad for him. He always comes back from it, however; see Iron Woobie above.
  • At least two early cuts of the movie would have conveyed Potter this way, where, after a dressing down from Clarence and the realisation that his plan was foiled by George's loved ones, he would have come to realise his misgivings against George and that he would soon die a lonely despised old man. In one he slinks away in a Despair Event Horizon, while in another he would have a heart attack and die before he could repent.
• Love to Hate: Henry Potter. Yes, he may be callous and manipulative, but that's part of why so many people love him. There's probably a reason he became AFI's #6 villain. Not to mention that Lionel Barrymore absolutely nailed playing the character.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The scene where Mary smashes a record out of frustration, replaced with trashy music, has been used as meme fodder.
  • Various scenes within the final few minutes of the film.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Mr. Potter has started to get a number of fans who see him as a representation of a good capitalist businessman. This requires ignoring his criminal actions later in the film, his cruelty mixed with his business tactics, and his cold disregard for anyone else at all, favoring placing more value on material possessions and total control over everything he can have than on human life and decency. That's not even getting into it being shown that Potter's practices are less about business and more about keeping the people of the town dependent on him.
  • Pottersville itself has a few people who think that it actually looks like a fun place to live, and that the various nightclubs, dance halls and strip joints would boost the town's economy. This article by Gary Kamiya in Salon examines this argument in more detail, claiming that the portrayal of Pottersville versus the straight-laced Bedford Falls suffers from a bad case of Do Not Do This Cool Thing by making the town look glamorous enough that people might actually want to live there, while Bedford Falls, by contrast, seems to have a dearth of entertainment options and a severe lack of privacy. Likewise, it doesn't help that Capra himself shoots Pottersville in a very glamorous Film Noir-style that is visually quite striking.
    • This is ignoring the fact that it's clearly a Crapsack World where everyone is a complete asshole, or the very least utterly miserable, and there are so many nightclubs and strip clubs because people are desperate and unhappy, drowning their sorrows in alcohol, and buying just a few minutes of the pretense of human connection in the clubs (or with the hookers), and this squandering of money on such tasteless establishments only perpetuates the rampant poverty that lands many of its citizens in Potter's slum neighborhoods. It also ignores the fact that most of the businesses are either predatory (there are a lot of pawn shops and casinos), or else they're entertainment venues rather than serving the needs of the community. Of course it looks like "more fun"...to visit. But a town where general stores, pharmacies, and other "boring" low-profit necessities have been replaced by strip clubs and poker would lose its charm very quickly if you lived there...especially if you couldn't afford to leave.
    • It's fairly easy to miss, but there are two brief scenes that undercut any idea that Pottersville is more economically healthy than Bedford Falls. When George first arrives in downtown Pottersville, we see a montage of all the various sleazy establishments the town has, then when George returns to Bedford Falls at the end, we see what these storefronts are hosting in the real world. In Pottersville, the general store has been replaced by a gigantic pawn shop, or, in other words, there's more of a market for selling than buying in Pottersville, and in addition, the movie theater is now a strip club, the Building and Loan is a taxi-dancing parlor (from which we see Violet being dragged kicking and screaming in handcuffs), and a casino is glimpsed briefly as well — all places known for encouraging frivolous wasting of money on useless things.
• Moral Event Horizon: Mr. Potter is a hateful and greedy man throughout the whole movie, but what he does to George near the end — taking George's misplaced money and hiding it away so that George risks bankruptcy and imprisonment, and then calling out a warrant for his arrest when he comes to him begging for help, on Christmas Eve — is where he truly crosses the line and cements his place as one of the most memorable and evil villains in cinema.
  Mr. Potter: [chuckling] You're worth more dead than alive.
• Narm:
  • Clarence's "She became an old maid" due to Values Dissonance can become this. Especially given the rest of Pottersville. Given it comes after the increasingly intense revelations about his uncle, his brother, etc., it can feel like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking. What makes it come off even more that way is that after the buildup Clarence gives to this reveal, even George himself completely ignores it and just demands again where his wife is.
  • The portrayal of angels as animated stars. It ends up looking really silly.
• Narm Charm:
  • George's unadulterated joy and relief when he realizes he's alive again. The endless shrieks of "Merry Christmas!!!" to every person and every building he meets should be Ham and Cheese at best, and Narm at worst. But in this movie, it's a cue for the Manly Tears of a man who went through emotional hell that almost drove him to suicide and just experienced a disturbing divine vision to give his life a powerful new perspective.
  • The portrayal of angels in the beginning is indeed a very dated effect, but their dialogue is still well written and the voice actors turn in strong performances.
• Pet the Dog: The residents of Pottersville may be a bunch of selfish and corrupt degenerates, but they're more than willing to protect the local spinster librarian from being chased by a man they perceive to be either crazy or drunk (or some combination) when she runs into the tavern screaming for help. They can be heard variously yelling to either subdue him or to call for a cop - which, in any other instance, would be commended.
• Popularity Polynomial: The reputation of this film these days is that it's an overexposed "classic" that plays too often on Christmas, and that it's much too sappy and sentimental to really be taken seriously (or, alternatively, embraced by its defenders for its serious and compelling portrayal of middle-class despair and for James Stewart's performance leading to George Bailey's breakdown). Strangely enough, this was more or less the reaction to the film in the year of its release, not only from the critics and the moviegoing public but from many of Capra's own contemporaries, friends, and colleagues (Jean Arthur often noted that it irritated her when Capra called it his best film). It was only in the 1970s and '80s, when it began to be regularly shown on television, that it came to be widely seen as a classic.
• Retroactive Recognition: Grandma Walton asks to borrow $17.50.
• Signature Line: "Every time a bell rings, an angel get his wings." The fact that it occurs during the Signature Scene mentioned below only helps.
• Signature Scene: The ending where George regains his will to live and happiness, runs through Bedford Falls overjoyed, and is then greeted at home by the entire town, who have all come to financially save him, followed by everyone happily singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and "Auld Lang Syne".
• Special Effect Failure: The scenes of Bert, Ernie, Marty, and Harry at war are very obviously the actors superimposed over stock WWII footage. It seems unlikely that they would have appeared convincing even at the time of the movie's release.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ruth Dakin-Bailey, George's sister-in-law, never appears following her introductory scene, and her only role is essentially to supply yet another Diabolus ex Machina to keep George in Bedford Falls.
  • Marty, who is Mary's older brother, one of George's best friends, and the one that really introduces them to each other at the dance. After that, he only appears a few more times in the rest of the film and does nothing of any significance.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • An interesting example. The present day timeline has many references to the war and how it affected daily life. However, the fact that it showed "Pottersville" as being a seedy and decrepit place compared to the wholesome "Bedford Falls" actually made it out of place for 1946, and likely led to the film not being a hit at the time. Remember that in addition to having just lived through WWII, Americans had spent the previous decade living through the Great Depression; as a result, a fun place like Pottersville was much more appealing to the average American than a poor sleepy place like Bedford Falls.
  • When Sam tells Harry the college football team's coach has been following his high school career and wants him to enroll and join the team, Harry tells him he needs to earn the tuition money first, dating the film to the time before athletic scholarships became commonplace.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • A few viewers find it difficult to sympathize with George because they feel he brings his problems on himself by choosing to run an unsuccessful business even though he's given many opportunities to do something else. For example, Harry was perfectly willing to take over the Building & Loan after he came back from college, but George refused to let him and insisted he take the job his father-in-law offered. The more patriarchal mentality of being "the eldest" and man of the house arguably makes George's dilemma more relatable to international audiences, since it's more common outside America these days than within.
  • Conversely, everyone in Bedford Falls except George. Everyone in town knows how horrible Mr. Potter is for the community, but would rather guilt-trip George into fighting their battles for them instead of doing anything to fend off Potter themselves, from George's father to the board of directors, even though they also know George wants to see the world more than anything. It takes George almost being carted off to jail for the townsfolk to lift a finger.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In Pottersville, Mary is a single woman who works at the library. It is evidently supposed to be a horrible fate that she couldn't become George's wife and instead is an old maid. Frank Capra admitted decades later that this didn't age well and wished he gave her a different fate. George's more personal horror that the love of his life never knew him and his children were never born, though, is still timeless.
  • Major Values Dissonance with Mr. Gower and young George. When Mr. Gower slaps George, drawing blood from his bad ear, in modern times that would end up in a lawsuit, and probably a jail sentence. In Gower's defense, however, he does apologize and was partly not in his right mind due to grief and alcoholism.
  • George having an after-school job, when nowadays there are strict laws regarding child labor. Child labor laws did exist in 1911, but children and teens routinely worked after-school and weekend jobs up until the mid-1970s.^note This is why you see so many little kids riding bikes delivering newspapers in old films and TV. Today, adults have taken over these jobs; most papers have early morning deliveries anyhow, which rules out the employment of school kids. Teens could also take apprenticeship-type jobs and learn a trade (this is coming back).
  • The idealistic portrayal of the Building & Loan comes across as very naïve after both the savings & loan industry's huge meltdown in the late '80s and, more recently, the subprime mortgage crisis of the late '00s. George's style of lending to people who he knew likely couldn't pay him back wound up setting off financial crises and recessions in real life.
    • In strict fairness to the Bailey B&L, it's clear that they're not running a charity—there is an approval process, as we see with Ernie having submitted insurance and financial statements. The loans aren't careless—they're just fair, and the B&L doesn't turn to foreclosure as a first resort when a client falls behind on payments.
  • Pottersville has a taxi dance, a burlesque house, a dime-a-dance, a pawn shop, and a bunch of places where you can get alcohol. By twenty-first century standards, it seems like a pretty tame place to live. The problem of course is that those venues have replaced the essential businesses that make a town livable by catering to visiting nightlife tourists with more cash instead.
  • The prejudice that Mr. Potter has towards Italians comes across as odd to modern viewers, as the group isn't one that is considered to be especially oppressed in the twenty-first century.
  • Harry straight-up sexually harasses Annie the housekeeper during the dinner scene, and it's treated like a harmless adolescent prank. For that matter, Annie's portrayal in general, as the only black character in an all-white cast who exists just to laugh and react to the white characters' actions.
  • The scene where Mary ends up naked in a bush and George refuses to give her robe back — to the point she says she'll call the police, at which point he informs her they'll take his side anyway — is meant to be playful and flirtatious, but it's incredibly uncomfortable by modern day standards.
  • When discussing the new plastics factory, Sam encourages George and Mary to buy up as much stock in the company as they can before the price goes up. Nowadays, this would be considered insider trading.
  • The idea that suicide must be prevented because it's illegal/a sin, not only because it's a preventable tragedy. More recently, it has been recognized that criminalizing suicide doesn't prevent people from acting on suicidal thoughts, it only stops them from getting help. Though in a way, the fact that George considers killing himself despite the law actually lends Values Resonance to this (see below).
• Values Resonance:
  • The film's lambasting of the amoral way Potter runs the town bank, up to and including flat-out robbing his customers, remains ever relevant in light of the Great Recession, as is him getting away with it, and being untouchable despite all the stuff he does. The responsibility a businessman has to a community has become ever more relevant in the era of neoliberalism. George sees the people of Bedford Falls as his friends and neighbors and cares about creating a better life for them while Potter regards them as nothing but cattle who exist solely for his benefit.
  • George's speech to the townspeople about how Potter is trying to take advantage of their panic during the bank run and buy up all of their shares in the Building & Loan so he can gain control of it remains very relevant in The New '20s, when several of America's wealthiest citizens took advantage of the stock market crash that occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic (caused by people selling off their investments in a panic) to buy up stocks at a discount and increase their control of the market to the highest levels in history.
  • The conflict between Potter and Building and Loan is that Potter wants to build slums and charge high rents while George wants to give the working people of Bedford Falls decent housing that is affordable. With the cost of housing rising in the early 21st century, the need for cheap housing has never become more relevant than today.
  • While suicide is mentioned as a crime in Bedford Falls (and a sin in heaven), thought at the time to be a suicide deterrent, the fact that George considers killing himself despite the law resonates with the more recent evidence that such laws don't often work, only stopping the suicidal person from getting help. By the 1990s, only two U.S. states still listed it as illegal.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Make no mistake, this film is a timeless classic which deserves all the critical acclaim it gets, but despite being labeled as a family film, it's a lot darker than you probably remember considering it takes place around World War II and the film's hero tries to commit suicide towards the third act, and he engages in a serious act of domestic violence before then. Not to mention all those various business-related moments you may have to explain to your kids for them to understand the concept.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: From the very beginning, this film has always been a political football for a number of critics, mostly because the particular style, story, and tone it takes lends itself to a number of Political Ideologies:
  • In the year of the film's release and its critical and commercial failure, it was common for many to interpret the film as being anti-capitalist, or saying Capitalism Is Bad, and indeed a number of Communist newspapers acknowledged it. Capra, for his part, had a "left-wing" reputation owing to the socially critical films he made in the '30s, and this even led some voices to raise questions about whether the film was "communist", which Capra's own friends and defenders had to soften by pointing out that at heart the movie is about a good banker (George Bailey) versus a bad banker (Mr. Potter). Nonetheless, the film's remorseless portrayal of a banker as a soulless and sadistic evil capitalist who is also a Karma Houdini in defiance of The Hays Code does provide the film a lot of "street cred" compared to other films made in the time, as is the general ethos of small businesses and small communities versus big capitalists and gentrified communities that the film still conveys.
  • In real-life, Frank Capra was at heart a "populist", i.e. someone who liked to take the side of the "little guy" against the system. That allowed him to take a bunch of contradictory attitudes. His strong individualism made him oppose, in his personal life, the New Deal policies of FDR and even admire, initially, Mussolini as a strong-man. But as an Italian-American in WASP America, he also understood the sympathies of the underdog, and as someone who wanted to entertain and please audiences, his movies in The '30s largely reflected the social criticism that was popular at the time.^note To wit, he was anti-Union but he also helped found the Director's Guild of America (mostly because it benefited his career). When the anti-communist controversy broke out, Capra became a stoolie for HUAC and provided secret testimony naming names, including many of his collaborators in the '30s, albeit this was something that pretty much everyone did, including people on the left such as Charles Laughton and Nicholas Ray, since it was either that or get fired; so it's not by itself disqualifying. When he made It's a Wonderful Life, his intention was to counter The Best Years of Our Lives by William Wyler, which was a somber, critical view of how the war changed American society and the plight of the returning veterans. However, in the year of its release, Capra's film failed while The Best Years of Our Lives was a success.
    Jonathan Rosenbaum: "It says something about the American public of 1946 that they preferred the realistic, astringent honesty and quiet resolution of Best Years to the fantasy feel-good solution that papered over the panic-stricken despair of It’s a Wonderful Life."
  • Since the film's re-evaluation from the '70s onwards, when it was Vindicated by Cable, many saw the film as a Proto-Reagan nostalgia piece, upholding the values of "small-town America" over the big city, with its overly religious and fable-like celebration of Christmas becoming seen as too dated and old-fashioned, seemingly enough. The biggest criticism and controversy settles on the "unborn sequence" since even critics of the '40s and '50s recognized it as a truer portrayal of America in The '40s than the nostalgia-laden depiction of Bedford Falls, and Capra was more or less advocating for the past over the present (in a manner analogous to many films in the time such as Meet Me in St. Louis and even The Magnificent Ambersons). A number of film critics argue that the film's real political criticism is not in terms of economics, but in the film's portrayal of the American nuclear family, which has been recognized as critical, albeit from the perspective of the man of the house. Neoliberal economists largely prefer Pottersville over Bedford Falls, while others see it as a case of Villainous Gentrification and the defenses for the lively and entertainment driven community can be seen as a case of short-sighted consumerism over Boring, but Practical authentic communities. Also worth noting that sleepy Bedford Falls wasn't completely lacking in entertainment — Martini's Good-Guy Bar and a movie theater are two prominent entertainment businesses in Bedford Falls.

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