My second favorite movie of all time is It's a Wonderful Life. You would not believe how closely I identify with George Bailey, a guy who always wanted to achieve way more in life than he was ever able to, and was only able to barely scrape by. Yes, he had a loving wife and beautiful children, but they lived in a drafty old house and he could never afford to get them the nicer things or ever travel anywhere. Poor guy didn't even get a honeymoon because of all his stupid customers taking his money during the bank run. All his friends went off and made big money, like Sam Wainwright. Hee-haw.
Well, like George, I'm worth more dead than alive. Maybe if I go jump off a bridge my angel second class will come down, we can skip the alternate no-Astro universe because I know it would suck, and then all my friends will take a collection to help me pay off my debts. Yeah right. Maybe I'll get a decent raise this year, but it won't be enough. Retire eventually? No, I'm going to die in my cubicle if I don't figure out something different to do.
11 comments:
Jimmy Stewart was the greatest actor ever when it came to portraying characters involving man vs. self or man vs. society. It’s a Wonderful Life is the wrong movie of his for you to be watching right now. Go get a copy of Firecreek (1968) watch it. The moral is better and the film more uplifting and realistic.
You might be in a hole right now, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay there.
If you're realy in the dumps get The Stratton Story. It's about a guy from Texas, you might like it.
I have reservations about Stewart...
He was a hawk about the Vietnam war.
He actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, after Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act.
Then it seems that sometime between 1964 and 1968, he switched sides...
He publicly favored the Lyndon Johnson Gun Control Act of 1968, one of the largest and farthest-reaching federal gun control laws in American history, which placed him solidly on the side of the Progressives and Socialists of the day.
Today the film "It's a wonderful Life" is considered a Christams classic what with his stellar portrayal of victimized George Bailey, but was rejected by the audiences of the day as too overly sentimental and unrealistic.
Not generally acknowledged today is that at the time of its release it was considered a flop, a mush-filled story of a suicidal failure that required powerful and external forces to prevail, considerd by some now as nothing more than a subliminal message for a big nanny government that steps into save the day. Americans of the day were still a bit too independent to buy into the movies "big brother" solution.
The very seductive message in "It's a wondeful Life" is easy to identify with... Mr. all-American Joe stuggling along with his all-American family to survive and prosper, finally making it, but only with the help of a friendly Angel who is actually a representive of an unidentified but all-powerful entity, without whom Mr. all-American Joe would have given up and done himself in.
Good stuff. Too bad it doesn't happen in real life.
"He was a hawk about the Vietnam war."
True. So were a lot of people. Stewart happened to be a hawk who also fought in Vietnam. Stewart was a hawk in WWII and Korea too. You might not know it but JS had a successful movie career and had already made it big by 1940. He enlisted as a private in the Army. Since he graduated from an Ivy league college (I forget which one) and was rated as a commercial airplane pilot he went into the army air corps. He hated working as a PR guy for the army and didn’t like training new pilots even though he was one of the owners of the Thunderbird air training center. He kept pushing until the army sent him to Europe as a pilot. When he got to Europe he was the ranking officer in an air group and became its commander. Even though he did not have to fly missions he took lead in formation as the PIC and fly over 20 bombing missions against the Germans. JS finished his military career with over 30 years in of both active and reserve units and retired as a major general in the air force.
Yes he was a hawk. He didn’t ask anyone else to do anything he wouldn’t or didn’t himself, including going into battle.
A lot of conservatives supported the gun control act of 1968. The main reason was that the act was supposed to help keep guns out of the hands of black radicals. It has proven to be a major failure in terms of liberty, but it wasn’t viewed that way at the time.
Yeah, Jimmy Stewart kicked ass. Don't be badmouthing Jimmy Stewart, Bob.
Not badmouthing him Astro...
Just making a comment about his sometimes conflicting political views.
Check out the original reactions to "It's a wonderful Life" when it was first released. It's just as I mentioned.
If you prefer not to have any alternative views about your posts and their subject matter, just say so.
Oh, no, I like contrasting views. I was just kidding around. Jimmy Stewart was awesome, though. Doo dee doo dee doo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efjant1RGvw
And, I have read before that the reaction to IAWL were not that positive when the movie was released. I recall reading that JS himself was not pleased with the movie.
But, I still like it. I don't see it as you describe above, with "big nanny government" being the deus ex machina that will rescue everyone from everything. Instead, I take it as a story that shows that by living well and doing the right thing, even if things look to be going against you, don't give up hope. The good that you do matters to those around you. You will recall that Clarence only went down there because of all the prayers of Mary and George's friends.
I think the inscription in Tom Sawyer that Clarence wrote is the point: No man is a failure who has friends.
"Check out the original reactions to "It's a wonderful Life" when it was first released. It's just as I mentioned."
That is true. The only reason the movie is so well known is that they forgot to renew the copyright and TV stations could show it for free. Which is what they did, every chirstmas for over 40 years.
JS didn't care for the movie that much.
"If you prefer not to have any alternative views about your posts and their subject matter, just say so."
Thats not the way it is here except on one subject. Go NASA!!!
Res Ipsa:
At one time I was a 100% dyed-in-the-wool cheerleader for NASA.
I worked at McGregor Test Range, White Sands Missile Range, Pacific Missile Range and Western Test Range. I worked on the USNS Wheeling, a PMR range safety vessel.
I was involved with such programs such as Agena, Athena, Gemini, Apollo, Minuteman, Midgetman, Polaris, ISEP, Poseiden and Safeguard, plus a few you have never heard of.
Today's NASA is not The NASA I worked with. It has become a massively bureaucratic political animal, and as a result has squandered billions on
unnecessary and/or wasteful programs and projects.
A classic example is that legless robot that overheated on it's very first mission. Five of them cost over a billion dollars. An entire Apollo rocket and moon lander cost less than that.
Or maybe that new "all-green" politically correct(but less effective) glue they were using to glue the insulation onto the Discovery's main fuel tank? What did that end up costing us?
Or the decision to launch the Challenger while the strap-on's O-rings on were still frozen? Pure politics, and the prime driver that killed our manned space program.
Why are we keeping two huge mission control centers - Kennedy AND Houston - open, when we don't even have a manned program of our own? (other than hitchhiking a ride on a Russian Soyuz?)
Good grief... we are now paying Russia up to 60-70 million dollars for one round-trip ticket to the space station we built.
It's hard to support an organization that has reduced itself to conduct like that.
Today's NASA is not The NASA I worked with. It has become a massively bureaucratic political animal, and as a result has squandered billions on
unnecessary and/or wasteful programs and projects.
Yes, unfortunately this is true. Here's hoping that the likes of Elon Musk and Robert Bigelow rewrite the rules.
Amen to that Astro.
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