Note: I co-authored this blog entry with my wife, Mary Bona.
We hope you all enjoyed the holiday season!
Along with the holidays come many traditions. One tradition in our family is to watch the heart-warming, iconic holiday film, It’s A Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. It’s no surprise that this film is amongst my wife’s favorites, not only because she loves the old classics, but also because, like the main character George, she is a small-business owner, and, like George’s wife (also named Mary), she loves old homes and fixing up the dilapidated ones.
Frank Capra, the film’s director and producer, was a Sicilian immigrant who grew up in the Italian ghetto of San Francisco. He started from very humble beginnings to become one of the most influential directors of his time. During his acceptance speech for the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1982, Capra stressed his most important values:
“The art of Frank Capra is very simple: …the love of people…coupled with the freedom of each individual, and the equal importance of each individual, [is] the principle on which I based all my films.”
He went on to recall “celebrating” his 6th birthday in the miserable steerage section of a boat full of other terrified immigrants. After 13 awful days at sea, the boat stopped, and Capra’s father brought him up to the deck of the huge ship. “’Chico, look at that!’”, his father cried, “That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem! I looked up, and there was the statue of a great lady, taller than a church steeple, holding a lamp over the land we were about to enter, and my father said, ‘It’s the light of Freedom, Chico. Remember that. Freedom.’”
It’s no wonder that, when he finally formed his own independent film production, he titled it “Liberty Films,” and the first thing we see when the movie starts is the tolling of the famous Liberty Bell. Continue reading →
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