It’s a Death by Suicide—Uh, Make That, It’s a Wonderful Life

Deaths of despair in Frank Capra’s—and our—America

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Tonight, following a decades-long Yuletide tradition, NBC will air Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece, It’s a Wonderful Life. Not to dive into the realm of Bah, Humbug and beyond, but recall that this is the tale of a quintessentially decent and normal American who decides to kill himself and is saved only by divine intervention or the actor Henry Travers, take your choice. More to the point (well, my point), I’m compelled to point out that the suicide rate in the all-American classic films of Frank Capra, almost every one of which has a happy ending, exceeds that in any other body of American narrative art, be it film, plays, or novels. By this metric, Capra makes Eugene O’Neill look like a cockeyed optimist.

Consider: The climax not just of It’s a Wonderful Life but also of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, Lady for a Day, and Pocketful of Miracles is a suicide attempt that doesn’t quite come off (of the protagonists played by, respectively, Jimmy Stewart, Claude Rains, Gary Cooper, May Robson, and Bette Davis), not to mention the suicide attempt that does come off of the protagonist of The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Even more telling are the consummated suicides of secondary or even incidental characters that Capra completely gratuitously inserts into State of the Union (which begins with the dying father of villainous Angela Lansbury ending it all with a gunshot) and the comedy You Can’t Take It With You, in which an unsuccessful business rival of heavy-turned-good-guy Edward Arnold also takes his own life.

But it’s the Jimmy Stewart–George Bailey suicide attempt in It’s a Wonderful Life that cuts the deepest, because his guilt, his sin is the one that Capra clearly felt most deeply, and the one that resonates as the most distinctly American—particularly, horribly, today. That guilt, that sin, is failure. At a time when the phrase “deaths of despair” has entered the common parlance, the god who punishes failure, poverty, the absence of prospects, stalks our land. And it’s that god that Capra furiously sought to propitiate, as his autobiography makes painfully clear.

Forty-two years ago, I interviewed Capra in his Palm Springs–area home, abutting the La Quinta Country Club. It had been 16 years since he’d made a picture; he was angry at the studios for thinking him too behind the times, and angry at himself for fearing any picture he’d now make would be a failure. The walls of his home office—a room not much smaller than the Senate chamber where he’d set Mr. Smith—were entirely covered with photographs, personally inscribed to him, of about half the prominent figures of the 20th century, with pride of place going to Winston Churchill and George Marshall. Confirmation, if he awakened in the morning feeling down, that he’d been a success.

Happy holidays. As Capra knew, we all could use a light in the winter’s gloom.

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