It's a Wonderful Life

by Michael Newton

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since.

Michael Newton's study of the film investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity.

168 pages, Paperback

Published September 7, 2023

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

From Wikipedia:
"Michael Newton (born 1951) is an American author best known for his work on Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan series. Newton first began work on the Executioner series by co-writing "The Executioner's War Book" with Don Pendleton in 1977. Since then he has been a steady writer for the series with almost 90 entries to his credit, which triples the amount written by creator Don Pendleton. His skills and knowledge of the series have allowed him to be picked by the publishers to write the milestone novels such as #100, #200, and #300.

Writing under the pseudonym Lyle Brandt, Michael Newton has also become a popular writer of Western novels. He has written a number of successful non-fiction titles as well, including a book on genre writing (How to Write Action Adventure Novels). His book Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida won the Florida Historical Society's 2002 Rembert Patrick Award for Best Book in Florida History. Newton's "Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology" won the American Library Association's award for Outstanding Reference Work in 2006."

Pen names: Lyle Brandt, Don Pendleton, Jack Buchanan

Bibiliography available here.

Reviews

[GJ]

Lots of conversation online about the different ways to read the politics of this movie and this book helps elevate all that. This book treats the movie as a cultural object and it tells the biography of the movie and all the different players in the story of its development and how it was received. I take it the author claims the movie had “socialist credentials” in the early stages of script development, and some of those energies can still be felt, but the final movie, like Capra himself, is ultimately “moderate Republican”. I get that one reviewer in Goodreads said there’s no formal analysis in this book (Robin Wood’s Rio Bravo for BFI is an example of this if that’s what you’re looking for), but I found this book to be the most informed thing I’ve read about this movie and kinda now makes a lot of the shoot-from-the-hip commentary I’ve seen about this movie pale in comparison.

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

god what a picture!! all good screenplays rhyme, and this movie does it in spades. i loved how the michael newton kept returning to the idea of america being a contradiction of the need for a home vs the love of an open road. this contradiction is the definition of george's torment.

essay does a good job of defending the film against accusations of it being sentimental fluff. the one place it declines to defend the picture is the caricature of an "old maid" in the last act. it's a comically ungraceful depiction of woman, and it's the major flaw of the film, in addition to the stereotyped depiction of annie.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this but was surprised by its structure and focus. It revisits the pre-production and production stages of the film, gives a reading of incidents in the film (not focusing on its form at all), and reviews the film’s afterlife.