With December two months away, I’ll count down month by month with a comparison of three diverse films, ending in December with, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life.
For most people, the fantasy of It’s a Wonderful Life endures. By identifying with its characters, we can believe that there is meaning to our own lives and purpose to our sacrifices. I want to contrast it with another, more recent film with the same outward theme, but which gives only ephemeral pleasure.
Like George Bailey, the hero and heroine of It Could Happen to You are trapped by responsibilities and the circumstances of their lives. Charlie, the cop, is a good-hearted man trapped in a marriage to a shrewish, selfish woman who despises his generosity. Yvonne, the waitress, is a virtual slave to her mean boss because her ex-husband has gone through all her money and ruined her credit. George Bailey could not escape his trap; instead, he came to find it a blessing. Charlie and Yvonne escape the trap of their responsibilities and circumstances as well as the censor of morality; but the pleasure we share with them cannot be sustained when we leave the magic of the theater.
It is hard to know if the creators of It Could Happen to You had It’s a Wonderful Life in mind, but there are certainly similarities both at the beginning and the end. With the opening credits, the three main characters are introduced by a narrator who calls himself Angel. Charlie, the hero of the story, is a good-hearted man like George Bailey. We see him handling a crowd after a traffic accident, showing a young boy how to hold a baseball bat, apprehending a thief, helping a blind man cross the street, and delivering a baby in a city bus. He is an honest cop, who won’t use his authority to cut into line to buy his lottery ticket. Like George Bailey, he lives and works in the same community in which he was born. Unlike George, he has no ambitions to leave or to make more of his life. He likes what he is doing and is content. His only unfulfilled wish is to have children.
Charlie’s wife, Muriel, is very ambitious. She is a hairdresser. We see her complaining to a sympathetic patron about her unambitious husband, who likes to wear a uniform. She would rather see him in plain clothes or striving for higher rank. She could even accept his current status if he was corrupt. She says she needs money. It is Muriel who shares George Bailey’s ambition to move out and up in the world, but she does not share his loyalty or ideals. We can tell from the start that in this film the conflict is not within a character, but purely between characters.
Yvonne, the film’s heroine, is a waitress. We first see her in bankruptcy court trying to explain to the judge how she got so deeply into debt. She was wiped out by her “ex-husband” whom she cannot even afford to divorce. She had moved to New York to become an actress, and was swept away by a man who turned out to be a pathological liar. She explains that she was innocent and still had faith in people. When she returns to the diner where she works, her ogre boss docks her two hours pay. This is a film about good people and bad people. The people will not change as George Bailey changes. They will be rewarded and punished.
At the outset the narrator, Angel, tells us that the story is mostly true. That is a lie. The film is based on a true story. A police officer, short of change for a tip, did offer a waitress half the potential winnings on a lottery ticket. When it won, he honored the promise. That kernel of a true story sets the plot in motion, but the characters and the plot serve a different function and tell another story.
Charlie and his partner stop into a diner. When Yvonne comes over to serve them, Charlie gives her a long, seemingly admiring glance. He jokes with her, only irritating her further after all the bad luck of her day. When they get a call and have to run out, he finds he has enough for the coffee, but nothing for a tip. He tells Yvonne that if his ticket wins, he’ll give her half. She thinks she’s being stiffed again.
That night, we see Charlie being harassed by his shrewish wife, first for soaking his feet, then for getting the lottery numbers wrong by confusing the date of their anniversary. Just then she hears the winning numbers and goes into wild delight. By contrast, Yvonne is sitting with her friend feeling hopeless. Muriel is disappointed when she hears that there are other winning tickets, cutting their share to four million. She gets hysterical when Charlie tells her he promised half the money to Yvonne. They end up arguing over it, but Charlie sticks to his principle, “A promise is a promise.”
He is also swayed by Yvonne’s kindness to the patrons in the diner when he returns there. He looks on as she talks to a gay man who has AIDS. She tells Charlie, “What a world. It makes you appreciate every moment, and not be petty or spiteful.” He understands completely. They are made for each other. When Yvonne hears about her lottery winnings, she kisses all the patrons in the diner and offers them ice cream on their pie.
I said earlier that in this film, all the conflict is between people, not within people, but that is not entirely true. Charlie is conflicted—about Yvonne. He walks past the diner with his partner, Beau, who tells him that he knows Charlie wants to go in to see her, but Charlie, remains loyal to his marriage vows. Like George Bailey, Charlie is trapped by responsibility and circumstance. The solution will prove different.
In It’s a Wonderful Life, events forced George to make difficult decisions that involved giving up some of his ambitions, although gratifying others that had been defended against. He had to give up one form of gratification, which involved escape, for another that involved meeting responsibilities. In It Could Happen to You, events allow Charlie and Yvonne to escape from their responsibilities and from conventional morality so that they can gratify their wishes.
The first of these events are those around their chance meeting, the missing tip, and the winning lottery ticket. This forced them into each other’s world. Now events bring them closer. They meet again at a party set up for lottery winners on a boat cruising overnight. By accident, Charlie and Yvonne miss the boat, forcing them to spend the night together. They have dinner at a romantic spot by the river where they exchange sad stories about their marriages. She tells him that she’s bought the diner and set aside a table in his name for people who can’t afford to pay. They dance to love songs, and agree to get together during the day just as friends.
They meet for innocent and generous fun: rollerblading, giving out free tokens at the subway station, and taking the neighborhood kids to play baseball in Yankee Stadium. Then circumstances force them further together.
Muriel is infuriated when she reads in the papers about their generous exploits, both at his giving away money and spending time with Yvonne. She asks for a divorce. Yvonne’s husband shows up at her apartment demanding money and threatening not to leave. They both pack up and leave home, and by “chance” they both decide to go to the Plaza Hotel, where they meet, again by chance, in the lobby. They are, of course, shown to adjoining rooms. They kiss, and in the morning we see them standing together in matching robes. Their love is clean and pure, but it is distorted by others.
Muriel has hired sophisticated lawyers to handle her divorce. She sues him for all his lottery money and all of Yvonne’s lottery money, claiming that he had a long-standing secret relationship with Yvonne before giving her half his lottery winnings. Always the altruist, Charlie is willing to concede most points to her, but is enraged when he hears that she wants Yvonne’s money as well. Charlie is one of those people who can defend the rights of others, but not his own. In the world as we know it, these people often have little, but in the world of this film, he will be rewarded without having to demand what is coming to him.
The courtroom scenes in which Muriel sues Charlie and Yvonne for the lottery winnings are designed to outrage the film’s audience. We are made to feel particularly frustrated by the distortions of reality committed by Muriel’s sophisticated lawyers and the press. Her slick lawyers run rings around Charlie’s honest, but outclassed lawyer. They characterize Yvonne as a gold digger and Charlie as a married man who was having an affair and arranged to give half his lottery winnings to his girlfriend. Each lie is glorified in newspaper headlines sensationalizing the trial. Our outrage is capped with the jury’s unjust decision to award the entire lottery share to the dishonest Muriel.
Based on what we see and know, we have every right to be outraged. We are outside the film and can see the truth that is disguised from the people who live in the world of the film; but, there are different layers of truth, and we see only one of them.
This film, like many others, has the quality of a daydream. Daydreams are fantasies that we create for our own entertainment and relief. Although they sometimes appear to us with spontaneity and a sense of having a life of their own, like a movie, they clearly serve our needs. In most daydreams, we are quite clearly gratified—with accomplishment, recognition, money, sex, revenge, or any of the myriad possibilities for pleasure. These pleasures are not bounded by reality, although if they stray too far from reality, they lose some of their effect. They are also not tightly bounded by conscience. If the pleasure we seek requires breaking some rule or moral injunction, the plot is constructed to get around the difficulty.
This film is a perfect example. We can look at the daydream from the perspective of either the man or the woman. In one, we identify with Charley, the cop. He is strong, brave, honest, generous, and loved by all. He wins a fortune and meets the woman of his dreams. Alternatively, we can identify with Yvonne, who is beautiful, honest, innocent, kind, and thoroughly loveable. She meets a man who offers her a wonderful, honest, loving relationship of shared values, along with enough money to solve all her material problems.
This daydream has clearly dealt with problems of reality. In fact, we are not all strong, brave, honest, generous, beautiful, kind, and loved by all. We do not have enough money to satisfy all our needs. We have never met the perfect man or woman of our dreams, devoid of imperfections, and when we thought we did, she had a boyfriend or he wouldn’t give us a second glance.
But there are also problems of morality. Like George Bailey, we are tied down by responsibilities and obligations. In the film, Charlie and Yvonne are married. There is something remarkable about this film. This is a light romantic comedy in which marital infidelity is presented with no moral conflict. When disguises are pushed aside, this is a film about a married man who falls in love with an attractive young waitress. The theme is not new, and it certainly reflects the changing mores of our society. What is remarkable is that the exra-marital lovers are the heroes in a light romance aimed at family viewing. No one appears to notice the values that are being lionized.
In the films of the thirties and forties, marital infidelity was often sinister and deadly, as in The Postman Always Rings Twice, or, when treated more sympathetically, unconsummated, as in Now, Voyager. More modern films, like Starting Over or An Unmarried Woman, dealt with post-marital relationships, with a clear premise that they were focusing upon a serious issue that confronts many people in an age in which divorce is more common. In It Could Happen to You, neither the extra-marital lovers nor the viewers ever have to question what they are doing.
The daydream is constructed to get around any conflict with conscience. Charlie and Yvonne are so good and their spouses so bad. They were each deceived into marriage, Charlie by Muriel’s false claim of pregnancy and Yvonne by her husband’s wining and dining her and his false charm. If the ambition of the daydreamer is to have wealth and a beautiful mate, any conflict of conscience is overcome by turning the active ambition into passive reward. Charlie and Yvonne do not actively pursue an extra-marital relationship. They are forced into it by happenstance and their spouse’s behavior. They don’t even covet money, it just rains down on them. It is as if George Bailey could run off with Violet Bick to seek his fortune knowing that the cruel people of Bedford Falls were ungratefully running them out of town.
In fact, the case presented in court as a straw man is exactly the one that would be prepared by the daydreamer’s conscience. This is a fantasy about a man who leaves his wife, taking enough money to live on forever, to marry a beautiful, kind young waitress. It is about a woman who steals another woman’s man and half their money. The film as it is constructed is about two innocent, good people who are meant for each other, but if we view it in the cruelest terms of the daydreamer’s conscience that is being pushed aside, it is about an unfaithful man and a gold digging woman. Daydreams are constructed to quiet the harsh voice of conscience, and this one does it well.
It even disguises some ethnic prejudices. These two fair skinned, innocent, white Anglo-Saxons are freed from his pushy Puerto Rican wife and her deceitful, dark haired Italian husband. Of course, Charlie’s partner is African American as is the homeless man they take in at the end, and the children they take to Yankee Stadium are an ethnic mix; but in the end these two very much alike people find each other. I don’t for a moment think that the filmmakers had any intention of introducing ethnic prejudice into the film, but the needs of the fantasy pushed them towards it.
The film has an ending similar to that in It’s a Wonderful Life. Charlie’s wife and her evil lawyers get all the lottery money from him and Yvonne. Feeling that he has let Yvonne down, Charlie stays away from her for a while, but eventually goes back to declare his love. Pure of heart, they love each other without the money. But the film will not allow the fantasy to go unfulfilled. They do not struggle on with poverty. A reporter for the New York Post, disguising himself as a homeless man whom they help, of course, writes up their story. Suddenly they are deluged with gifts of money sent to them by the good people of the city touched by their story. Fortified with six hundred thousand dollars, they get married and end the film flying over central park in a balloon to the tune, “Fairy tales will come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.”
But unlike George Bailey, they have learned nothing from their experience, and neither have we. The film momentarily gratifies the wish to be free of the shackles of conventional morality and social convention. It says that it is good to be kind-hearted, perhaps a valuable antidote to the age of the Yuppie; but it does not really make us feel that there is an intrinsic reward in being good. Charlie and Yvonne don’t see how much worse the world would be without them. They don’t need to; they are without conflict, good at the beginning and still good at the end. The conflict has been totally externalized. If there is a message, it might be that we would be fine if we could just get rid of that nagging wife or nasty boss. Surely we are gratified to see that goodness is ultimately recognized and rewarded. We can shed a tear and leave the theater with a good feeling. The film is not without effect, but it does not have a lasting effect. This is a passing daydream that makes us feel free of our worries, not one that makes us feel we can live with our worries.
From Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein (2002: Ebooks)