James Stewartas George BaileyThe story
About It's a Wonderful Life
On Christmas Eve a small-town building-and-loan manager, ruined by a lost deposit and worth more dead than alive by his own reckoning, stands on a bridge ready to jump. A trainee angel gets to him first and shows him what his town would have become if he had never been born. Frank Capra's film is far darker than its reputation for warmth suggests, and only turns at the very end.
The CineClaus verdict
Darker than its reputation, which is exactly why it still works.
Most of the running time is a man being ground down by obligation, and the film is honest about how little his good choices pay him back. That is what earns the last ten minutes — they would be unbearable otherwise.
Black and white, nearly eighty years old, and still the one that gets people.
The family desk
Can the kids watch?
Our take: fine for children old enough to sit with black and white. Nothing frightening, but a long stretch of adult despair in the middle will simply bore them.
BBFC advice: Contains no material likely to offend or harm.
Content advice & accessibility
- Where the advice comes from
- The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
- Our age guidance
- Editorial, separate from the official U certificate, and never looser than it.
