It Happened One Christmas may retain much of the thematic import and help remind people of Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, but it is otherwise best forgotten.
It Happened One Christmas may retain much of the thematic import and help remind people of Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, but it is otherwise best forgotten.
I t’s Christmas Eve, which for many households means an annual rewatch of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie, which stars Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, did not initially achieve the holiday immortality it now holds. But a lapsed copyright enabled cheap TV reruns. And once people got reintroduced, they rediscovered its enduring greatness.
Watching It’s a Wonderful Life now, it’s not hard to see why. The movie, based on the story “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern, is timeless and heartwarming, but also relatable and even visceral: Put-upon family man George Bailey (Stewart) grows gradually frustrated at his thwarted dreams, leading to a dissatisfaction with his life in his small hometown of Bedford Falls with his wife Mary (Reed). His bitterness culminates in a personal crisis that leads to his wishing he’d never been born, only for his guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) to grant his wish as a way of revealing how much he means to those around him. More than three-quarters of a century after its release, the movie continues to reward rewatches, find new fans, and defy its few critics.
It’s a Wonderful Life has also left a giant footprint on pop culture. Basically any time you see a “what if I never existed?” story or something similar in fiction nowadays (especially if it’s holiday-themed), you can probably trace it back to Capra’s genius. Sometimes, the inspiration is more direct. Ten years ago, Anne Morse wrote a sequel that imagined Bedford Falls in the present. It focuses on a grandson of George Bailey who more closely resembles Henry F. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the plutocratic antagonist of the original.
This Christmas Eve, few people are likely to watch a different take on It’s a Wonderful Life: 1977’s It Happened One Christmas. Directed by Donald Wrye, the movie is a remake of Capra’s film. It was made when It’s a Wonderful Life did not quite hold the esteem it does today. The Christmas season would ordinarily incline me to try to find the good in It Happened One Christmas. But for many reasons, this remake makes such charity a chore — and perhaps even an impossibility.
It Happened One Christmas keeps most of the big-picture stuff intact. It’s still in Bedford Falls. It’s still set over 30 or so years, from the early to the mid 20th century. And it’s still about someone who wishes never to have existed. But if you think gender-swapped remakes are a product of the 21st century, think again: This time, that person is Mary Bailey (Marlo Thomas), a female version of George. The mutual object of her affections is George Hatch (Wayne Rogers), the male-inverse-Mary.
And if you think bad remakes are a product of this century as well, It Happened One Christmas is here to prove you wrong. The flaws start with Mary and George. Thomas and Rogers lack chemistry, and credibility. The gender-swapping also struggles to make sense as anything other than a ploy for attention.
George Hatch, for example, works at Mr. Gower’s drugstore as a young man, but it is somehow Mary who notices that Gower has accidentally poisoned one of his medicines. And both George and Mary seem to have aspirations to leave Bedford Falls — in fact, George actually does leave, then comes back — thus attenuating the story’s theme of the importance of rootedness. And in this version of the story, George actually does fight in World War II (and is wounded!). But we learn nothing about the difficulty Mary must have had running her family business while also raising their three children (down from four in the original) during his absence.
The attempt to retell the story this way, as though it didn’t really matter what George Bailey and Mary Hatch did in the original, only reinforces the essentiality of their whole identities, including their sexes, in their characters and actions. Going through most of the same beats — the bank run, the loss of the money, the car crash, the trip to the bar, the bridge rescue — in rote checklist fashion makes it all amateurish and more than a bit insulting. Thomas never conveys either the stubbornness, the exasperation, the desperation, or the elation of Stewart’s Bailey through his emotional journey. Rogers is a nonentity, except in the dark what-if world, where he is a grimy auto mechanic who tries to force Mary to have sex with him.
The most memorable performances in It Happened One Christmas come, unsurprisingly, via its most talented and high-profile actors. Somehow, late-career Orson Welles got lured into the movie as Potter (perhaps he was attracted by the prospect of never having to stand up during filming). But Welles’s subdued glowering, though still imbued with the haughty charisma he retained through his long career, doesn’t quite measure up to Barrymore’s bombast. And as the also gender-swapped Clara Oddbody, Cloris Leachman goes all-in on a portrayal of the guardian angel as a quirky Victorian dandy, accent and all, that abandons Rodger’s reserved dignity and eccentricity. The rest of the actors are, at best, passable or forgettable, or at worst terribly miscast: a young Christopher Guest as Harry Bailey hardly measures up to Todd Karns, a reality never more evident than when he lamely calls Mary “the richest person in town.” Even the Bailey children are somehow more annoying here — and not just at the moment they’re supposed to be to Mary.
One part of the movie involving “Suzy,” the Bailey child renamed from Zuzu in the original, shows how fundamentally it misunderstands the story it is telling. In It’s a Wonderful Life, petals from one of Zuzu’s flowers, which George reconstructs for her, disappear when he ceases to exist, and reappear when he returns to life; he carefully places them back in his pocket. In It Happened One Christmas, Mary throws them up in the air in celebration. It’s just one small sign of a broader error. One that, in truth, is evident from the start of the movie, when one angel is showing Bedford Falls to Clara, who falls in love with the town. “It’s not all that charming,” the smarmy ’70s angel replies. He’s right about this version of the town, though, which strips the place and its inhabitants of the lived-in verisimilitude that helps make the original so engaging.
It Happened One Christmas is a ’70s fever dream best understood as a window into what our world would be like if It’s a Wonderful Life had remained in its initial obscurity and was not treated as a cherished holiday classic. This was briefly the case, thus allowing something like this remake to exist. But it is no longer. The best that can be said about this movie is that it’s a reminder to watch It’s a Wonderful Life again this Christmas Eve instead — and to be thankful we can.