In 1977, Universal/MCA decided it would be a great idea to remake It’s a Wonderful Life as a TV Special Movie event starring Marlo Thomas (“That Girl”) in the George Bailey-type role and Orson Welles in the Mr. Potter role. It Happened One Christmas is the result.
In 1977, every other film was not a remake. Certainly a gender swap remake was really out-of-the-box thinking at the time. It may have been a progressive approach, but the movie suffers from a rushed approach to the story. It feels like you are watching It’s a Wonderful Life on the 2x speed on your DVD player. Trying to get the detailed story completed in 2 hours with commercial breaks is a challenge.
Adding to the challenge is that the original is so very, very well known that watching it is really an exercise in comparison. How can you compare, though, to what are probably the career defining performances of every performer in the film.
You didn’t need this caption to know that.
Marlo Thomas is no Jimmy Stewart, and Wayne Rogers is no Donna Reed. Now, if you didn’t already know that, I’d be surprised, but it is the truth. It’s just hard to explain how weird watching the film is. Adding to the oddness is the breathy readings of the awkwardly reconstructed script by Marlo Thomas. Every moment they attempt to shorten, to take away a moment to push, shove the story forward in a quicker, lazier way.
Strangely, some parts of the George Bailey story needs to be done by a male at the time periods they depict, so parts of his story is split between Mary and George…back and forth, basically giving Marlo Thomas the best parts of both roles. Again, whenever they are building toward telling the story and letting the moment breathe, the limited run time makes them forge forward with higher velocity…losing any chances at letting the film stand on its own. It’s almost as if the filmmakers, knowing they didn’t have enough time to put together a standalone film, relied on the audience’s knowledge of the original film to skip over sections at a time.
I admit, often, that my favorite film of all time is Jaws, but my favorite character of all time is George Bailey. This is an empty shell of that character. This is a character built on moments and a wonderful throughline of charm. We don’t get that here.
Now, Orson Welles as Potter sounds like a match made in heaven. Potter is one of the great screen villains ever put to screen. Potter, as originally played by Lionel Barrymore (yes, Drew Barrymore’s great uncle) was the embodiment of greed and cantankerous curmudgeon crankiness. His sing-song delivery helped make him one of the more creepy Hays Code era criminals on celluloid. (He got away with stealing the $8,000 in the original.) Welles has the chops, obviously, but it feels like an impersonation. Welles knew Barrymore as a young man with Barrymore playing Scrooge on his radio program’s annual “Christmas Carol” productions. In the original film, his evil, generally, was shown as taking advantage of bad situations. In this movie, he’s more like the Godfather…pulling all the strings and making things happen. (Spoiler here: In the original, Potter is handed the key funds in Uncle Billy’s excitement. In this one, Potter actually grabs the money as he absent-mindedly places the money on the table. Potter didn’t know the cash was in there at the moment…but still, he grabbed it.
The cast is deep, too. Playing the father, Richard Dysart (known from L.A. Law and being rather hands-on with John Carpenter’s The Thing) does a typical competent job. Doris Roberts (Everybody Loves Raymond) does a fine job as the mother. Her brother is played by a pre-Spinal Tap Christopher Guest in a rare straight role.
While this speedy rendition of the tale is remarkably true to the original with the exception of the aforementioned pacing, gender switch and pitiful television budget that makes the entirety of Bedford Falls feel more claustrophobic than in the original. With all that staying true to the original, all the dialogue appears original, removing even some of the most beloved dialogue. In doing so, again, more of the charm of the original is spilled out on the ground never to be captured.
An odd choice was to get an extremely British-accented woman in the “Clarence” (we’ll just say “Clara”) role. This is one of the most American of films. Oddly, the owner of that accent is American actress Cloris Leachman. Leachman is one of the best comedy actresses of the period and she is wasted in the role. While many of the performers in the film either had their best work ahead of them or in the rearview mirror, Leachman was at the peak of her powers at the time and somehow landed in this film after making Young Frankenstein only three years previously.
In the late 70’s, television extravaganzas were fairly commonplace resulting in cast stuffing with every role by a “name actor”…typically an actor no longer in favor in Hollywood. This tendency led to phenomena such as The Love Boat and Fantasy Island and ushered in the golden age of miniseries. In fact, Orson Welles was the narrator of the ultimate miniseries, Shogun, during this very period. Fans of the Bill Murray Christmas film, Scrooged, would recognize the format from their amped up Christmas Carol television production within the film. This film seems to have been caught in that trend of the time, and I’m not at all sure that benefits the film.
Oddly, one of the things that works against the film the most is the drabby set design and poor color in the production. The original black and white film is more colorful in your mind than this was in the actual film stock. The entire production looks shabby and gritty, much like the filming of the TV show The Waltons from the same period.
Another ill advised decision was to split the story exactly in two. Our angel arrives at precisely the halfway point of the film, giving it a lot less joy and a lot more of dark, unhappy parts of the story without Bailey. When you have too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday on a story like this, you wonder why the entire town was praying for her in the opening frames of the movie. It just doesn’t make sense. It gets remarkably dark and I just don’t think that serves the movie well here.
Ultimately, the film is squarely on the shoulders of Thomas and while she is game and asked to do the impossible here. I think she does best in the scenes when Bailey is most frustrated and losing her composure. I can’t help but wonder if that wasn’t how she felt during the production of the film. It had to be insurmountable to compare to Frank Capra’s signature film with a cast of has-beens of the small and big screen on a miniscule budget with a script that smelled of a Xerox machine (with the exception of the dialogue) and a sped up stopwatch.
Film fans will see this as a fascinating experiment. To the rest of us or people unfamiliar with the original, it will only be seen as an average Christmas film that is devoid of the saccharin and sugar piled on in deep helpings by the Hallmarks of the world.