Everybody knows the famous line “Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings.”
But there’s an even more inspiring message to be gleaned from Hollywood history: Sometimes when a movie flops, it gets a second chance.
That, bewilderingly, is what happened to “It’s A Wonderful Life,” Frank Capra’s seasonal classic that many today regard as the greatest Christmas movie of all time.
You’d never know it from the cherished title’s fame and ubiquity, but the film starring James (Jimmy) Stewart and Donna Reed wasn’t a big hit at the box office in its day and got a shrug from many critics who found it too sappy.
“[Capra] is trying for the big, meaningful sentiments and as often as not falling into embarrassing theatrics,” wrote Archer Winsten in The Post.
“The weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it,” echoed Bosley Crowther in the Times.
George Bailey would eventually become the richest man in town. However, after almost being lost to history, it took more than 30 years.
When “It’s A Wonderful Life” hit theaters on Dec. 20, 1946, it wasn’t unpopular, per se. The starry premiere was here in New York at the Globe Theatre on Broadway (now the Lunt-Fontanne, home to the musical “Death Becomes Her“).
The film from the renowned director of “It Happened One Night” went on to gross $3.3 million at the box office — a strong haul under most circumstances.
The trouble is Capra’s budget had ballooned, and the movie needed to do nearly double that business just to break even. One of only two pictures made by Capra’s Liberty Films, “It’s A Wonderful Life” failed to recoup its high costs. In short, ’twas a flop.
Still, the movie was nominated for five Oscars — including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor — but won none. The big winner at the Academy Awards and the box office was William Wyler’s enduringly brilliant “The Best Years of Our Lives.”
How, then, did ‘Life’ turn out so wonderful?
In 1974, Capra’s film’s copyright was up for renewal — at the time, each term lasted 28 years — but owner Republic Pictures mistakenly let the property lapse into public domain. Suddenly, anybody could air it for free.
And air it, they did. Frequent TV showings of the Jimmy Stewart heart-warmer became hugely popular in the mid-’70s for baby boomers who had altogether different tastes than their Silent Generation parents. Capra’s movie got another shot, and exploded.
“It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” the director told the Wall Street Journal in 1984.
“The film has a life of its own now and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I’m proud … but it’s the kid who did the work.”
“It’s A Wonderful Life” is back to making bank, by the way. Republic took its case to the Supreme Court in 1993 and regained the lost copyright. Paramount then bought Republic in 1998.
This year, countless families will sit down to watch the bona fide holiday fixture, the director of which surprisingly had no big yuletide aspirations.
“I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it,” Capra said. “I just liked the idea.”
