- Barbara Stanwyck and David Manners star in Capra’s The Miracle Woman, which screens at the Music Box this weekend.
In the emblematic, all-American town of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it takes an act of divine intervention to stop a pure-hearted altruist from committing suicide. George Bailey’s struggle to remain a moral paragon in a climate of corruption and failure is presented as a Herculean effort—the film shows that without Bailey’s superhuman power the town would devolve into a modern-day Gomorrah. The hero’s sudden outbursts at his uncle Billy and his own children are surely some of the most wrenching moments in U.S. cinema, as James Stewart draws on feelings of self-loathing and paranoia buried deep beneath the lovable everyman persona with which he became synonymous. I never watched Life on TV as a kid, coming to it only as an adult, so I never developed a sentimental attachment to the film as most of its fans do. For me, experiencing hundreds of people cheer and hiss at the characters, as they do every December at the Music Box, is a bit like seeing a crowd go wild for Melancholia.
The director’s most wonderstruck film may be Lost Horizon (1937), closing the Music Box series on February 7 and 8, which takes place in the otherworldly paradise of Shangri-La. (The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), playing next weekend, takes place in a studio-built dream version of China that’s almost as ravishing.) The setting of Horizon is a place out of time, undefiled by modern society, where peace reigns and people don’t need money. Its most Capraesque quality is that it’s patently unreal.
