Above is a clip of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas talking about falling out with John Cassavetes and Nikos Papatakis over Cassavetes’ first film Shadows (1959), which Papatakis produced. The story is that Mekas, who moved in the same avant-garde and underground New York film circles as Cassavetes, was blown away by the first version of the film but that Papatakis suggested a reshoot to make it more commercial. Cassavetes agreed with Papatakis and Mekas felt betrayed.
In fact, the first version of Shadows was long thought lost, only for Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney to discover it in 2003. This is Carney’s account of that discovery. What Carney doesn’t mention in his piece is how the first version of Shadows has rarely been shown as a result of a dispute between Carney and Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, over who owns the film. Carney has accused Rowlands of blackballing him for revealing the more unpalatable side of Cassavetes’ genius.
‘There was a lot that was wonderful about Cassavetes that no one ever denied, and that I still believe to be true. There is no question that he is one of the great twentieth-century artists – in any medium. He was a visionary and a dreamer, a passionate, nonstop talker who was exciting to listen to. He was a born charmer, with the charisma of a Svengali. People loved to be around him. They basked in his energy. He inspired them and could talk people into doing seemingly anything. It took those qualities to make the movies. He had to throw a lot of magic dust around to keep people working long hours without pay. He had to play with their souls to motivate them.
‘But as I dug deeper, I was forced to recognize that you can't have the positive without the negative, the virtues without the corresponding vices. Cassavetes was a super-salesman, a Pied Piper, a guru – but he was also most of the other things that come with the territory. He was a con-man. He would say or do almost anything to further his ends. He'd lie to you, steal from you, cheat you if necessary. He could be a terror if you got in his way. If he liked you or needed you, he was a dream – kind, thoughtful, generous; if you crossed him, he was your worst nightmare.
‘To put it comically, you might say that he had a short man's complex or a Greek man's macho streak. The positive side is that he was a fierce competitor and a perfectionist. When it came to making movies, nothing could make him compromise his vision. The negative side was that he was incredibly proud and temperamental. He would turn on you if you even politely questioned his judgment or wanted to do something different from what he did. It was good he wrote, directed, and produced his own work, because no one was less of a team player. He couldn't deal with authority. He had to be the boss, the center of attention, the star of the show – on and off. If he didn't get his way he threw temper tantrums and behaved childishly.’
Great interview with Martin Scorsese talking about the making of Mean Streets (1973). Scorsese talks interestingly about many things, including the impact of John Cassavetes’ Shadows on Mean Streets; how Cassavetes gave Scorsese work on Minnie and Moskowitz; and advised the younger man to keep his distance from Roger Corman, for whom Scorsese had made Boxcar Bertha, and who wanted Scorsese to work on exploitation flicks (Corman even suggested that Scorsese make Mean Streets with a black cast to cash in on the blaxploitation fad). Richard Romanus who plays Michael in Mean Streets (and also played Richard LaPenna in The Sopranos, a series indebted to Scorsese but whose gangsters, Scorsese reveals, he doesn’t understand) now lives on Skiathos and has written about relocating from Hollywood to Greece as well as penning a novel set during the Greek civil war.
Above is a very funny clip from I’m Almost Not Crazy, the documentary on the making of John Cassavetes’ last film Love Streams (1984). In the clip, which is like a scene from a Cassavetes’ movie, Cassavetes and his cousin and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael passionately argue about the merits of Socrates over a game of backgammon. Below is an interview given by Phedon Papamichael to the Independent Film Quarterly’s Stuart Alson in 2006, in which Papamichael discusses working with Cassavetes.
Phedon Papamichael: My life with John Cassavetes
Being in the film business, sometimes I am asked to serve on the Jury at film festivals. If my schedule permits, I accept the offer.
In March 2006, I flew 15 hours from Las Vegas to Cyprus for the their first annual film festival, Cyprus International Film Festival (CIFF). During this business trip I found such a gem. However it was not a film, as I had hoped and expected, but it was a person. Had I not served on the Jury Committee in Cyprus, I would never have met this man.
Phedon Papamichael is 84 years old. He had a film career in Los Angeles working on John Cassavetes’ films.
IFQ: You worked with John Cassavetes for 25 years on his films. What was your job in the film business and how did you get started?
PP: I started doing art design for theatre in France. When I came back to Greece, I met Jules Dassin. He said forget the theatre; let’s make movies. I said that I didn’t know what to do, but he said don’t worry. I did two movies with him, Never on Sunday and Phaedra. Then John Cassavetes came to our home to visit. He was my second cousin. He asked me to come to America to make movies together. I did not go right away, but eventually I did go and we lived together for 25 years and made movies.
IFQ: What was it like working together?
PP: It was wonderful. I was in charge of art design and costumes. However, whatever movies we made – we made together. We shot and edited them together in the house where we lived. We had two moviolas in the garage.
IFQ: How did you distribute the films?
PP: Many times, we had no money. We would go to theatres and ask them to play the films and they could keep all of the money. Then in the middle of the night, we would go around town and hang posters ourselves. It was all about the art and the work. John Cassavetes was the first independent filmmaker. He did not want money from some moneyman or studio because he did not want them telling him what to do. Everything was done on deferments and everyone worked for free or for points.
IFQ: How did you fund the projects?
PP: John and his wife would do acting jobs and put the money they made into the films. Also if things were tight John would turn to the actors, like Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, and say, ‘Hey you stingy Peter Falk, put 50,000 dollars in to the film so we can finish.’ And they would. It was all about the film, not the money and everyone wanted to work with John. Steven Speilberg was our production assistant. He would go and get coffee and run errands just to learn from John.
IFQ: What were your favorite movies that you made?
PP: I did not have a favorite movie. It was how we made certain movies that made them my favorite. I remember A Woman Under the Influence. We had no money at all. We had no money to feed the crew. We ate at McDonalds. But John said, ‘I don’t care we are going to make this movie.’ It was that type of adventurous independence that I loved. With Faces, it took us four years to finish the film. We would run out of money and John and his wife would take acting jobs and then come back and work on the film some more. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was great fun too.
IFQ: What was the worst thing that happened when you worked with John?
PP: The worst thing that happened was one time we got into a fistfight with each other.
IFQ: What happened?
PP: When we had breakfast together that morning, John told me that he wanted something a certain way on the set and I disagreed. When he came to shoot, he saw that I had not done what he wanted. We got into an argument and I said I was leaving. He shouted, ‘No one walks off my set.’ Of course, the set was actually in our house. I went to leave and we got into a physical fight. I ran away and he tried to chase me but could not catch me. I called later that night after we cooled off. He said to come home. When we saw each other, we kissed and that was the end of that.
IFQ: What happened after John died?
PP: I tried to find someone else with the same love and independence to work with, but I could never find the same happiness. I tried Peter Bogdanovich and others, but it was never the same. I stayed in Los Angeles and worked on more films like the The Fabulous Baker Boys. I tried to help new people and give them advice, like Leonardo DiCaprio and others. He had a big party for me last time I went back.
IFQ: Why did you finally leave Los Angeles and return to Greece?
PP: Well, I just could not find anyone to work with who was like John. The last thing I did was with Charlie Sheen, Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage, Nick Cassavetes [John’s son]. Everyone put in some money and we opened a beautiful production office called Ventura Productions. We planned to make films. We had great offices and receptionists, but everyone just used the place to hang out and party. We did make one film with Gérard Depardieu because he wanted to do a John Cassavetes’ script. But that was it, so I came back to Greece where I started my life. I spend time helping new people, when I can and when they will listen. My son [Phedon Papamichael II] and his success give me happiness. [Phedon Papamichael II is a cinematographer whose credits include: Walk the Line, Sideways, Identity, America’s Sweethearts, Patch Adams, and Poison Ivy].
IFQ: What advice do you have for new people starting in the film business?
PP: I tell them: If you have talent and you love that talent, then you should go for what you want and do not give up just because things don't go your way sometimes. If you have talent and do not love that talent, then don’t worry about it. I know many people who are talented but do not love their talent.
IFQ: What about stress?
PP: Stress is the worst thing for anyone. Stress can kill a person. You must keep your mind clear and deal with what is in front of you.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt), made in 1963, is, among other things, a meditation on Homer’s Odyssey, a celebration of Mediterranean landscape and culture and an exposition of the filmmaker’s love/hate relationship with America.
Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is invited by American film producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the screenplay of The Odyssey because he feels the version being filmed by the director, Fritz Lang – who plays himself – is too intellectual.
The American wants more sex in Lang’s Homer – and not just more sex, but more of everything, without being able to define what he wants more of, he just wants more – and although Paul is reluctant to undermine Lang, the money Jerry offers him for joining the project, which Paul thinks will please his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), overcomes his doubt and guilt.
In fact, Paul becomes so impressed by Jerry’s money and power, so enamoured with the glamour of filmmaking, so anxious not to alienate his benefactor, that he encourages his wife to go along with the advances of the voracious American, virtually offering her to him on a plate, prompting her to lose respect and love for her husband, to feel the ‘contempt’ which constitutes the title of the film.
Paul and Camille’s disintegrating marriage – revealed in an extraordinary 30-minute sequence of fighting, insults and arguing – encourages the writer to accept Jerry’s interpretation of The Odyssey as a tale of a poisoned marriage, of Penelope’s infidelity and Odysseus’ ennui.
For Jerry, Odysseus leaves Ithaca to fight the Trojan war because he is bored with Penelope, and stays away for so long because he can’t stand the prospect of returning to his wife, who far from being faithful and patient is, according to Jerry, resentful of Odysseus for abandoning her and cuckolds him with the suitors.
Lang, the personification of European sophistication and old world charm, always ready with a quote from Holderlin or Dante, hates this interpretation of Odysseus as a ‘modern neurotic’, but is impotent to impose his view on Jerry – the bullying, crude American film producer, who quotes trite aphorisms written on scraps of paper he keeps in his pockets, who expects the world to conform to his desires, and who ‘likes gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.’
When Fritz Lang defends his vision of The Odyssey – ‘it’s a story of man’s fight against the gods’ – and tells Jerry that in his film ‘finally, you get the feel of Greek culture’ – Jerry says: ‘Whenever I hear the word culture, I bring out my chequebook,’ echoing Gestapo chief Hermann Goering: ‘Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.’
The exchange is an early hint of the anti-Americanism which infamously characterises Godard’s films – though Le Mépris, infused with references to Rancho Notorious, Hatari, Bigger Than Life, Some Came Running, Rio Bravo, Griffith, Chaplin and United Artists, also shows how much Godard’s imagination has been shaped by American film and culture.
In Eloge de l’amour (2000) – in which one of the plot lines involves Spielberg Associates and Incorporated trying to buy the rights to make a French resistance movie – Godard has his protagonist Edgar say: ‘Americans have no real past… They have no memory of their own. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the past of others.’
But in Détective (1985), Godard shows his abiding love for American film and American culture by dedicating his film to John Cassavetes, Clint Eastwood and Edgar G. Ulmer.
Josef von Sternberg’s film The Blue Angel (1930), with Marlene Dietrich, is an extraordinary depiction of loneliness and humiliation, hubris and tragedy. (See the English-language version of the film in its entirety above).
Writing in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Ray Carney reveals the influence of The Blue Angel on John Cassavetes.
Carney says of Gena Rowlands (John Cassavetes’ wife and star in many of his films):
‘It’s indicative… of many of her enduring attitudes that, after she saw The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich became her idol as an actress. Rowlands was fascinated with Dietrich’s blend of feminine sexual allure and almost masculine toughness and swagger. She watched the film over and over again… and even adopted a few of Dietrich’s gestures and mannerisms (sitting backward on a chair and such).’
Carney also tells us how The Blue Angel inspired Cassavetes in relation to his The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975):
‘Cassavetes and Rowlands were both fans of Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Rowlands loved the toughness and unsentimentalilty of Dietrich’s performance. Cassavetes liked the film for a different reason – because it was about an artist-surrogate who creates an artificial, artful world in which to live. (The filmmaker once asked me to give him a rare photograph I had from it, as well as a photograph showing the set of Yen’s palace in [Frank Capra’s] The Bitter Tea of General Yen, another film with the same subject). It’s not accidental that there is a photograph of Dietrich visible on the mirror of the strippers’ dressing room in the first version of [The Killing of a Chinese Bookie]. Although none of Cassavetes’ interviewers picked up on the allusion, in several post-release statements, Cassavetes wryly implied that he had modelled the character of Mr Sophistication [picture above] on Professor Rath.
‘Another reason Cassavetes was fascinated by The Blue Angel was that the film focused on the situation of a scorned, humiliated stage performer, an emotional event that spoke to Cassavetes for personal reasons. Notwithstanding the macho-man image he so diligently cultivated (or perhaps because of it), he often thought of his own life as a series of public humiliations – from his grade-school, high-school, college and drama-school days; to his years of unemployment and unsuccessful audition experiences – like the time he was jeered off stage as an MC at a burlesque house (an event dramatized in Shadows in Hugh’s nightclub debacle); to the various and sundry fiascos associated with his appearances at screenings and on television shows; to his run-ins with directors when he was acting (some of which are dramatized with the character of Myrtle in Opening Night).’
‘It breaks my heart to have this era come to an end. Ben meant so much to all of us. To our families. To John. To Peter [Falk]. To have them gone now is devastating to me.’ Gena Rowlands
Sadly, the actor Ben Gazzara has died. He was involved in many notable films but was defined by his collaboration with John Cassavetes, for his roles in Husbands (1970); Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975) and Opening Night (1978).
Above is the documentary the BBC made on the filming of Husbands, which starred Cassavetes, Gazzara and another (recently deceased) Cassavetes’ stalwart, Peter Falk. The documentary captures something of Cassavetes’ intensity as an artist and his working methods, though these are wrongly described in the introduction to the programme as relying on improvisation.
In fact, rather than improvisation, Cassavetes’ method was to revise and rewrite his scripts during rehearsals in light of things he and his actors discovered about the characters and story. Other directors would approach their films having already decided what lines their actors would speak and made up their minds as to how and where they expected actors to move and behave. But for Cassavetes’, film – all art – was not a technical endeavour; it was a process of exploration, an odyssey, a way of life, so that the film was shaped and emerged only in the making of it.
The myth of Cassavetes’ improvisational style – only his first film Shadows was properly improvisational – obscures his brilliance as a writer; his ability to convincingly convey the impression of spontaneous speech and deeply-embedded emotion – the inarticulate outpourings of men and women struggling to fathom their lives or the world. His characters often appear to be improvising, to be making it up as they go along, because Cassavetes wrote it that way and because this is what Cassavetes believed people do in real life, make it up as they go along. A lot of Cassavetes’ genius, as well as the hostility with which mainstream critics and audiences reacted to his films, can be attributed to his determination to show, against Hollywood, that people don’t know what they’re doing, that they can never make sense of themselves no matter how hard they try and that we all make it up as we go along, with all the danger, awkwardness and inevitable failure this implies. In other words, for Cassavetes, echoing another Greek: all that we can know is that we know nothing, and that, not unlike Socrates, Cassavetes pokes and prods – even tortures – his characters, takes them apart (always sympathetically, never cynically) to reveal to them their flaws and weaknesses and make them think again about who they are.
Below is a clip of Ben Gazzara talking only last year about working with Cassavetes on Husbands:
Nikos Papatakis is an interesting character (1918-2010). Born in Addis Ababa, he lived in Ethiopia, Lebanon, Greece and France – where, after the Second World War, he moved in Parisian avant guarde circles and became most notably associated with Jean Genet. In 1957, he went to New York, where he befriended John Cassavetes and was financier/producer on Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows. Also, in the 1960s and still in New York, Papatakis got to know the singer/model Christa Päffgen – aka Nico, of ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’ fame – who, indeed, was nicknamed after Papatakis.
Anyway, in between all this, Papatakis was a film-maker in his own right, starting off in 1963 with Les Abysses, an adaptation of Genet’s The Maids. Papatakis then, in 1967, made a film in Greek, Οι Βοσκοί – aka The Shepherd’s Calamity or Thanos and Despina. It’s very difficult to get hold of Papatakis’ films, I’ve not seen Les Abysses and only managed to find Οι Βοσκοί the other day and I have to say it’s one of the most remarkable films I’ve ever seen, heavily influenced by Genet, with themes of outcasts, social repression and rebellion and the ineluctable road to catastrophe. Papatakis followed in 1976 with a French film, Gloria Mundi, which I haven’t seen, and then in 1986 he made The Photograph, another brilliant Greek-language film, set in Paris and Kastoria, and the Papatakis work I’ve known about and seen the most.
Papatakis’ last film was Les Equilibristes, from 1992, which is about Genet’s doomed relationship with an Algerian circus performer. I saw this film a while ago in Athens and, again, thought it was superb.
Now, I’ve uploaded both Papatakis’ strange, disturbing and occasionally hilarious Greek films – The Shepherds and The Photograph, and even managed to get English subtitles for The Photograph. No subs, unfortunately, for The Shepherds.
My favourite interpretation of John Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie is that Cosmo Vitelli and the strip-club he presides over, as father-figure, lover, director, producer and all round life and soul, is a metaphor for Cassavetes the artist and his films; his metaphorical depiction of all the rubbish an artist has to put up with in order to assert his vision. Poor Cosmo has to deal with gangsters and money men trying to take his club away from him; recalcitrant performers who don’t understand his vision or insist on bringing their personal problems to work: a public indifferent or even contemptuous of his art; and so on.
This interpretation of Killing of a Chinese Bookie always made a lot of sense to me, and it’s one Ben Gazzara, who played Cosmo, gives credence to: ‘I remember when we shot the scene in the limo, where I’m alone without the girls, and John was on the floor, holding the camera. Between takes, he explained what the film meant to him: “All these people who destroy art, who persecute you, who make you do things and never leave you alone.” He began to cry. I thought: My God, it’s really a personal thing for him. The gangsters were a metaphor, Cosmo was John. The club was where Vitelli created beauty, with its girls, music, jokes and spectacle… and the gangsters were the system, which was so hard on John.’
Above is a clip of Gazzara in Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and below he – and producer Al Ruban – discuss the hostile reaction the film received from audiences and critics on opening, causing it to be withdrawn after a week.
In this Hollywood film, John Cassavetes couldn’t stand the demands producers and the studio made on his artistic integrity and expression and decided he would never work like this again. Still, despite all the compromises and flaws, this is a terrific film.
Here’s an opportunity to see rare footage of Nikos Papatakis. The clip above is from Susanne Ofteringer’s 1995 documentary Nico Icon, which is about Christa Päffgen, the 1960s German model and singer, better known as Nico, as in The Velvet Underground and Nico. In fact, Nico was a terrible singer and she led a pretty awful life of artistic failure and drug addiction, as the compelling but depressing Nico Icon demonstrates. Papatakis and Päffgen were lovers in the late fifties, before Päffgen – encouraged by Papatakis to take up singing – left for New York, where she eventually became immersed in Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, got to know Lou Reed and so on. Warhol, not an artist I'm interested in, was in fact a practising Greek Catholic, and it's been suggested that the pop art portraits he’s most famous for were inspired by the Byzantine iconography he was exposed to growing up. I’ve left in the interview with Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock, slagging off French actor Alain Delon, calling him a ‘sausage maker’, because it’s funny.
In the years after the second world war, St-Germain-des-Prés, on the left bank of Paris, was a melting pot of intellectual and artistic life. One of the favourite hangouts for the existential and beatnik crowds was the basement nightclub La Rose Rouge in the Rue de Rennes. It was there that Juliette Gréco made her cabaret debut, and Les Frères Jacques performed their mixture of song, humour, dance and mime.
Among the audiences were André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian and Miles Davis. Presiding over them all was the club’s charismatic owner, Nikos Papatakis, who has died aged 92. He was also renowned for his distinctive contribution to the world of film.
Known as Nico to his friends, Papatakis, a self-styled subversive, was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Greek parents. Aged 17, he joined Haile Selassie’s army to fight against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. After the defeat by Benito Mussolini’s forces, Papatakis was driven into exile, first in Libya and then Greece, before arriving penniless in Paris in 1939.
A few years later, Papatakis met Jean Genet, who fell for the strikingly handsome, heterosexual Papatakis and dedicated his long homoerotic poem La Galère (The Galley) to “Nico, the Greco-Ethiopian god”. When they were both starving, they did some thieving together, but often fell out over the spoils. On one occasion when Genet received some money for writing, he taunted Nico with a mass of banknotes, then called the police when his friend tried to snatch the money away.
In 1950, when Papatakis was earning a good living from La Rose Rouge, and Genet had published several novels, Genet told him of his desire to direct a film. Papatakis provided the money and allowed Genet to use the restaurant space above the nightclub to construct the sets of the prison cells for Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love). This dialogue-free, 26-minute black-and-white cine-poem, which dealt with the mutual sexual longing of two prisoners separated by a wall, and contained masturbation and nudity, was banned in France and thereafter worldwide.
Papatakis, who owned the rights, sold copies of it to wealthy gay intellectuals until, in 1975, it was judged acceptable for public screenings, with a few cuts and added music. When it was awarded a cash prize for the year'’ best new film by the Centre National de la Cinématographie, Genet, who had since disowned it, refused the award and demanded that Papatakis return the money. Papatakis had since become a film director in his own right, and had long ago sold La Rose Rouge.
In 1957, after a three-year marriage to the actor Anouk Aimée, with whom he had a daughter, Manuela, Papatakis left for New York, in disgust at France’s colonial war in Algeria. He had an affair with the German-born model and singer Christa Päffgen, who took the professional name of Nico from her lover, before performing with the Velvet Underground. Papatakis got to know the actor John Cassavetes, who had just completed Shadows (1959), his first film as director. After the initial cold reception given to the film, Cassavetes agreed to reshoot some of it, for which Papatakis put up $5,000.
On his return to Paris, he produced and directed his first feature, Les Abysses (1963), taken from the same factual source as Genet’s 1947 play The Maids, about two alienated sisters who kill their employers. As undisciplined as the servants, the frenetic film, a critique of France’s social and political infrastructure, almost caused a riot at the Cannes film festival.
His second film, Pastures of Disorder (1968), shot clandestinely in Greece, was a tragic love story about a young shepherd and the daughter of a wealthy landowner who dare to question the traditional values of an authority that represents the military junta. It starred his second wife, Olga Karlatos, with whom he was active in campaigning against the regime of the Greek colonels.
Gloria Mundi (1975), was a disturbing drama starring Karlatos as an actor who plays an Algerian terrorist in a film directed by her husband, but who has to face degradation and torture in reality because of her belief in a revolutionary ideal. It was withdrawn when the extreme right threatened to plant bombs in the cinemas where it was showing, and had to wait until 2005 to be screened again in Paris.
The Photograph (1987), in which an emigrant from the military dictatorship in Greece goes to Paris, was a fairly potent political allegory. According to the critic Yannis Kontaxopoulos, Papatakis’s oeuvre “revolves around one single theme: the relations between master and slave, humiliation and revolution, on both a political and personal level”. His last film, Walking a Tightrope (1992), dealt with a famous gay writer who tries to make the young Arab boy he loves into the world’s greatest tightrope walker. The main character, played by Michel Piccoli, was a thinly disguised version of Genet.
Papatakis is survived by Manuela.
• Nikos Papatakis, film director and nightclub owner, born 19 July 1918; died 17 December 2010.
‘Frank Capra… in my estimation is the greatest of all American directors, a man so beautiful, so forgiving, so democratic, so damned talented, so full of life and energy that his films patrol the imagination of America today’. John Cassavetes
As you settle down this Christmas to watch Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, remember that you are not watching a sentimental or light-hearted film, but a film about a desperate man, George Bailey, in irreconcilable conflict with the full range of social, bureaucratic and discursive conventions conspiring to thwart his hopes for self-expression and self-realisation; a film which depicts a ‘wild-eyed’ dreamer relentlessly frustrated and disappointed, who goes from one crisis to the next, suffers one wound after another, until his sense of defeat and estrangement is so great that he wants to kill himself.
This, at least, is the interpretation of It’s a Wonderful Life provided by Raymond Carney in his book, American Visions: The Films of Frank Capra, which touts Capra as a ‘poet of suffering and tragedy’ and aims to rescue his films – which include other classics such as American Madness, Forbidden, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Ladies of Leisure, Lost Horizon, It Happened One Night, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe – from accusations of ‘sentimentality’ ‘corn’ and fatuous celebrations of the American Dream, and establish him in a tradition of artists – such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, William James, Edward Hopper and John Cassavetes – who examine the conflict between what American society offers and what it delivers, the gap between imagination and reality in which alienation exists, who are advocates for the man or woman who dares to dream or desires too much, and defenders of the visionary individual battling against systems, ideologies and cultures out to repress, control or crush passionate impulses and creative energies.
The phone scene (in the above video) gives a good idea of the almost unbearable emotional strain and tension that Capra makes George Bailey endure in It’s a Wonderful Life, the turmoil and suffering that permeate the film and which not even the film’s notoriously ‘happy ending’ can heal.
Indeed, in relation to the ending, Carney says that even though George doesn’t commit suicide and seems to have found renewed reason to live thanks to the love of his family and friends, he has gone through too much to be so easily redeemed or reintegrated into society.
‘Capra wants us to know that George Bailey's life is wonderful – not because his neighbors bail him out with a charity sing-along, and certainly not because of the damnation of his life with the faint praise embodied in Clarence [his guardian angel's] slogan, "No man is a failure who has friends," but because he has seen and suffered more, and more deeply and wonderfully, than any other character in the film.
‘This Cinderella, unlike the one in the fairy tale… is returned to the hearth… [but] with no future possibility of escape and with only the consciousness of what has just been lived through in the preceding dark night of the soul as consolation – [although] that, Capra argues, is enough. The adventure of consciousness that George has lived through in dreamland is greater than any of the romantic adventures he has talked about going on – but it is at the same time only an adventure of consciousness.’
