It's A Wonderful Life (1946) - Frank Capra.

 

It's A Wonderful Life

It's a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart as George Bailey and Lionel Barrymore as Henry Potter, is one of my favourite films. Despite the film's general popularity to this day and it being a Christmas classic, Ayn Rand, the author of the pro-capitalist novel Atlas Shrugged, told the FBI that Frank Capra's film 'It's a Wonderful Life', was Communist propaganda.

George Bailey, owns a small buildings and loans business in Bedford Falls, New York. George isn't really an anti-capitalist, because he believes in a kind of moral capitalism, which sounds like an oxymoron to me. We might call it compassionate capitalism. George is basically a decent man who is on the side of the working man. The arch villain of the film, Mr Potter, is portrayed as a grasping and greedy and conniving capitalist banker who wants to put George Bailey out of business. When uncle Billy, misplaces $8,000 dollars of the firm's money in Potters bank and can't remember where he left it, George finds himself facing financial ruin, scandal and possibly jail. Unable to find the money, Bailey wishes he'd never been born and considers committing suicide but the prayers of his friends and family reach heaven, and his guardian angel, called Clarence Odbody, is assigned to save George in order to earn his wings.

Clarence sees flash backs of George's life and shows George what would've happened had he not been born. He wouldn't have been able to save his brother Harry from drowning. Uncle Billy was institutionalised when the firm went bust. Mary never married and has become an old maid and his mother doesn't know him. Bedford Falls has been renamed 'Pottersville' and is full of callous people and sleazy venues. George begs for his life back and is granted his wish.

Like all good films, this one also has a happy ending. George's wife Mary and uncle Billy, have rallied the townspeople of Bedford Falls who have donated enough to replace the missing money which Potter is hiding in his bank. Among the donations, George finds a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer a gift from Clarence, who has inscribed: "Remember, no man is a failure who has friends."

I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago. Rand's novel, published in 1957, depicts a dystopian United States brought down by excessive regulation and government interference and collectivisation. This society is portrayed by Rand as having embraced mediocrity in the name of social egalitarianism. The hero of the book, John Galt, is a philosopher and inventor, who secretly organises a strike of the world's creative leaders to bring about the collapse of bureaucratic society.

The book was controversial when it was published. In America in the 1950s, and was criticised for its amoral tone and advocacy of self-interested rugged individualism and selfishness. Although Rand denied that she was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, the book is very Nietzschean in its tone. Rand's supermen, are the heroic capitalists like John Galt, the railroad tycoon Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, a steel barren and Ragnar Dannesjkold, a kind of inverted Robin Hood, who steals from the poor to give to the rich. All of them are depicted like Atlas, holding the world aloft on his shoulders.

Although Rand despised altruism and the welfare state, in later life she finished up on social security and Medicare. Today, Atlas Shrugged is considered the Bible of the American Congress and its hero John Galt, is a cult figure of the Tea Party. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, became one of the members of Rand's inner circle.