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"This is the universe. Big, isn't it?" It's a Wonderful Life is at once recognizable, the cosmic panorama zeros in on a wondrous encounter: The RAF pilot (David Niven) going down in flames as he falls in love with the radio operator from Boston (Kim Hunter) over the airwaves, a flash of emotion through machinery that could have only been engineered by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A dash of bad English weather occasions the mix-up, the hero awakens on a pastoral shore, the hereafter is a vast bureaucratic hangar missing one newly departed soul. Romance, "it complicates things." Brain concussion or transcendental journey, thus the crossroads of trauma and hope at the end of the war. Lovebirds from across the pond in limbo—surely the poet appreciates convalescing in an Elizabethan mansion turned sanitarium, where soldiers and nurses rehearse A Midsummer Night's Dream. The celestial envoy is a powdered Gallic dandy (Marius Goring) who, away from the monochromatic office, takes a mighty whiff of Jack Cardiff's saturated cinematography: "One is starved for Technicolor up there." Overpowering metaphysical matters with a light, quizzical touch, Molnár's Liliom revised by The Archers. The village doctor (Roger Livesey) contemplates his private camera obscura, an uncanny oval rhymed in the patient's eyelid sealing at the surgical table. "A fine mind but a little taxed," up and down the great escalator, appealing his case to the highest of courts. The prosecutor (Raymond Massey) is "the first American to be killed by a British bullet" during the War of Independence, he points to cricket matches as proof of imperial absurdity but admits he doesn't understand his own country's big-band crooning. "Love is heaven, and heaven is love." A woman's tear carried on a rose figures in the verdict, and four decades later there's Wenders with Wings of Desire. With Abraham Sofaer, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Joan Maude, Bonar Colleano, and Richard Attenborough.
--- Fernando F. Croce |