Quite by accident I stumbled across an old press release (1997) from a
Franklin & Marshall Professor titled
Ruining Your Holiday....Why the FBI Thought "It's A Wonderful Life" was a Subversive Film.
Yikes! I said to myself, past is indeed prologue. I'm surprised Ann Coulter hasn't written a book about this as a sequel to her tome on why Joe McCarthy was right. This being the appropriate season, I thought I'd share some of it with you. Am I crazy, or does this kind of thinking sound eerily similar to what is going on in this country today?
Yet in 1947, the FBI had some very different ideas about this holiday classic. In fact, the FBI branded "It's A Wonderful Life" and seven other films, including "The Best Years of Our Lives" as subversive.
To add insult to injury, the film's producer and director, Frank Capra, was reported to have "associated with left-wing groups and, on one other occasion to have made a picture which was decidedly socialist in nature--'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'"
"The FBI tried to analyze the content of movies in order to find evidence that Hollywood communists were trying to put propaganda into movies," explained John Noakes, F&M assistant professor of sociology. "They had been keeping Hollywood under surveillance for several years, keeping track of people's affiliations, who ate lunch with whom, and who was sympathetic to communist causes. Their reasoning was that if you were either a communist or known to consort with communists, then you might put communist propaganda into your films."
In searching for subversive frames in Hollywood films, the FBI set up three categories of "common devices that were used to turn non-political pictures into carriers of political propaganda." These devices included smearing values or institutions judged to be particularly American, such as wealth, free enterprise and the profit motive; glorifying values or institutions judged to be particularly anti-American, such as failure or the triumph of the common man; and making casual references to current events that belittled American political institutions.
"According to the FBI, "It's A Wonderful Life" fit into the first two categories," said Noakes.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
What's interesting in the FBI critique is that the Baileys were also bankers," said Noakes. " and what is really going on is a struggle between the big-city banker (Potter) and the small banker (the Baileys). Capra was clearly on side of small capitalism and the FBI was on the the side of big capitalism. The FBI misinterpreted this classic struggle as communist propaganda. I would argue that 'It's a Wonderful Life' is a poignant movie about the transition in the U.S. between small and big capitalism, with Jimmy Stewart personifying the last hope for a small town. It's a lot like the battle between Home Depot and the mom and pop hardware store."
BushCo and its attendant wingnuts have moved this country right back to the McCarthy/ J.Edgar Hoover era (as if you didn't know). I wonder which movies from the last few years, tagged by the right wing as "subversive", will end up as beloved classics?