For many years, American households have gathered to look at “It’s a Great Life” on Christmas Eve.
The 1946 Frank Capra film, a few man who on one of many worst days of his life discovers how he has positively affected his hometown of Bedford Falls, is beloved for extolling selflessness, group and the little man taking up rapacious capitalists. Take these values, add in highly effective performing and the promise of sunshine within the darkest of hours, and it’s the one film that makes me cry.
No much less a determine of goodwill than Pope Leo XIV revealed final month that it’s one in every of his favourite motion pictures. However as with something holy on this nation, President Trump and his followers are attempting to hijack the vacation traditional.
Final weekend, the Division of Homeland Safety posted two movies celebrating its mass deportation marketing campaign. One, titled “It’s a Great Flight,” re-creates the scene the place George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart in one in every of his greatest performances) contemplates taking his personal life by leaping off a snowy bridge. However the protagonist is a Latino man crying over the movie’s despairing rating that he’ll “do something” to return to his spouse and youngsters and “dwell once more.”
Minimize to the identical man now mugging for the digicam on a aircraft experience out of america. The scene ends with a plug for an app that permits undocumented immigrants to take up Homeland Safety’s provide of a free self-deportation flight and a $1,000 bonus — $3,000 in the event that they take the one-way journey in the course of the holidays.
The opposite DHS clip is a montage of yuletide cheer — Santa, elves, stockings, dancing — over a sped-up electro-trash remake of Mariah Carey’s “All I Need for Christmas Is You.” In a single split-second picture, Bedford Falls residents sing “Auld Lang Syne,” simply after they’ve saved George Bailey from monetary break and an arrest warrant.
“This Christmas,” the caption reads, “our hearts develop as our unlawful inhabitants shrinks.”
“It’s a Great Life” has lengthy served as a political Rorschach check. Conservatives as soon as thought Capra’s masterpiece was so anti-American for its vilification of big-time bankers that they accused him of sneaking in pro-Communist propaganda. In reality, the director was a Republican who paused his profession throughout World Battle II to make brief documentaries for the Division of Battle. Progressives are inclined to detest the movie’s patriotism, its sappiness, its relegation of Black individuals to the background and its depiction of city life as downright demonic.
Then got here Trump’s rise to energy. His similarity to the movie’s villain, Mr. Potter — a rich, nasty slumlord who names all the things he takes management of after himself — was simpler to level out than spots on a cheetah. Left-leaning essayists shortly made the facile comparability, and a 2018 “Saturday Evening Reside” parody imagining a rustic with out Trump as president so infuriated him that he threatened to sue.
However in recent times, Trumpworld has claimed that the movie is definitely a parable about their pricey chief.
Trump is a modern-day George Bailey, the argument goes, a secular saint strolling away from positive riches to attempt to save the “rabble” that Mr. Potter — who of their minds one way or the other represents the liberal elite — sneers at. A speaker on the 2020 Republican Nationwide Conference explicitly made the comparability, and the latest Homeland Safety movies warping “It’s a Great Life” suggest it too — besides now, it’s unchecked immigration that threatens Bedford Falls.
The Trump administration’s tackle “It’s a Great Life” is that it displays a less complicated, higher, whiter time. However that’s a aware misinterpretation of this most American of flicks, whose basis is strengthened by immigrant goals.
Director Frank Capra, circa 1940.
(John Kobal Basis through Getty Photos)
In his 1971 autobiography “The Title Above the Title,” Capra revealed that his “soiled, hollowed-out immigrant household” left Sicily for Los Angeles within the 1900s to reunite with an older brother who “jumped the ship” to enter the U.S. years earlier than. Younger Frank grew up within the “sleazy Sicilian ghetto” of Lincoln Heights, discovering kinship at Handbook Arts Excessive with the “riffraff” of immigrant and working-class white children “different faculties discarded” and incomes U.S. citizenship solely after serving within the first World Battle. Exhausting occasions wouldn’t cease Capra and his friends from attaining success.
The director captured that sentiment in “It’s a Great Life” by means of the character of Giuseppe Martini, an Italian immigrant who runs a bar. His closely accented English is heard early within the movie as one in every of many Bedford Falls residents praying for Bailey. In a flashback, Martini is seen leaving his shabby Potter-owned condominium with a goat and a troop of children for a suburban tract residence that Bailey had developed and offered to him.
Right now, Trumpworld would solid the Martinis as swarthy invaders destroying the American lifestyle. In “It’s a Great Life,” they’re America itself.
When an offended husband punches Bailey at Martini’s bar for insulting his spouse, the immigrant kicks out the person for assaulting his “greatest good friend.” And when Bedford Falls gathers on the finish of the movie to lift funds and save Bailey, it’s Martini who arrives with the evening’s income from his enterprise, in addition to wine for everybody to have a good time.
Immigrants are so key to the great life on this nation, the movie argues, that within the alternate actuality if George Bailey had by no means lived, Martini is nowhere to be heard.
Capra lengthy acknowledged that “It’s a Great Life” was his favourite of his personal motion pictures, including in his memoir that it was a love letter “for the Magdalenes stoned by hypocrites and the bothered Lazaruses with solely canine to lick their sores.”
I’ve tried to catch not less than the ending each Christmas Eve to heat my spirits, irrespective of how dangerous issues could also be. However after Homeland Safety’s hijacking of Capra’s message, I made time to look at the whole movie, which I’ve seen not less than 10 occasions, earlier than its customary airing on NBC.
I shook my head, feeling the deja vu, as Bailey’s father sighed, “On this city, there’s no place for any man except they crawl to Potter.”
I cheered as Bailey informed Potter years later, “You suppose the entire world revolves round you and your cash. Effectively, it doesn’t.” I questioned why extra individuals haven’t mentioned that to Trump.
When Potter ridiculed Bailey as somebody “trapped into frittering his life away taking part in nursemaid to quite a lot of garlic eaters,” I used to be reminded of the right-wingers who painting these of us who stand as much as Trump’s cruelty as silly and even treasonous.
And because the well-known conclusion got here, all I thought of was immigrants.
Individuals giving Bailey no matter cash they might spare jogged my memory of how common people have carried out a much better job standing as much as Trump’s deportation Leviathan than the wealthy and mighty have.
Because the movie ends, with Bailey and his household trying on in awe at how many individuals got here to assist out, I remembered my very own immigrant elders, who additionally forsook goals and careers so their youngsters may obtain their very own — the one reward to a lifetime of silent sacrifice.
The tears flowed as all the time, this time prompted by a brand new takeaway that was all the time there — “Solo el pueblo salva el pueblo,” or “Solely we will save ourselves,” a phrase adopted by pro-immigrant activists in Southern California this 12 months as a mantra of consolation and resistance.
It’s the guts of “It’s a Great Life” and the other of Trump’s push to make us all depending on his mercy. He and his fellow Potters can’t do something to alter that fact.
