A strange concatenation of circumstances hit me today -- it's Christmas Day 2008 at 9:45 AM as I write this.  One was obvious, and one was tenuous, but both had a deep impact in my consideration of this, the last film I watched several weeks ago for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon and the last Christmas film I'll be posting about this year.  The first was the discovery that a friend of mine, who hosts an excellent radio show in Chicago on the nexus of politics and popular culture, recently presented a special Christmas episode in which the central question was:  has A Christmas Story replaced It's a Wonderful Life as America's most beloved Christmas movie?

On the surface, it's a pretty strange question.  As often as it's shown -- and that's pretty damned often -- Bob Clark's endlessly re-watchable, terrifically funny tale of a young boy's Midwestern holiday misadventures in the late 1940s has never had the cultural ubiquity that Frank Capra's classic had during the years it was out of copyright.  It can hardly be called contemporary anymore; it was made 25 years ago (as celebrated in a deluxe new DVD release that's highly recommended by this writer) and was set only a few years after It's a Wonderful Life.  And the older film is a genuine four-star cinematic acheivment, directed by one of the towering talents of the Golden Age of Hollywood, made for a significant amount of money and starring some of the greatest screen stars of the day.

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Eight films into our little holiday movie marathon, we finally arrive at the one that most of our readers who haven't spent the last sixty years in the Witness Protection Program in a cave on Mars have probably already seen a dozen times or so:  Frank Capra's legendary 1946 Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life.  While there's been dozens and dozens of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, there's only one It's a Wonderful Life:  despite decades of references, parodys, homages and metacommentaries, the big-screen adaptation of the Phillip Van Doren short story "The Greatest Gift" remains one of a kind.  Thanks to an inexplicable chain of events that led to its falling into the public domain for a number of years, it was shown on pretty much every television station at Christmas for decades; finding someone in the U.S. who hasn't seen it is next to impossible.

The challenge when discussing It's a Wonderful Life, then, isn't to explain its plot or detail the great things about it:  these are things most people know intimately from repeated first-hand experience.  The challege is to think of something new to say about a movie that almost everyone of a certain age has seen, probably more than once.  Frank Capra's surehanded direction, the solid script (primarily by Capra and Frances Goodrich), and iconic performances by screen legend Jimmy Stewart (whose interpretation of George Bailey is more responsible than anything for the cultural shorthand we now have for him), future television star Donna Reed, and Hollywood patriarch Lionel Barrymore are the building blocks for a film that defines the word "Capraesque", but what makes it resonate so?  It it simple repetition that makes this the Christmas classic above all others?

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