Top Ten

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
directed by Frank Capra
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

The voice of the "senior angel" - or "Franklin," I think, somewhere - who might, by way of the courtesies that Joseph and Clarence extend him, be God himself, was that of Moroni Olsen - the Magic Mirror in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walter Beardsley in Notorious, and a grim, worrisome man through two decades of film. The angels have a mean streak, and life is not fair. Do movies get more raw than kid George Bailey's bloody ear in the back room of the pharmacy, or big George Bailey dressing down his children on Christmas Eve? Does loneliness get worse than the squirrel on Uncle Billy's shoulder? Even Mary's broken-window wish is the curse that keeps her husband from ever leaving Bedford Falls; isn't it cruel that her dreams should carry more weight than those of the one idealist among them?

"I've been doing a great deal of thinking, and what I've come to is this: amid all the bangs and the drama and the grand passions, it's kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end."

But aren't George and Mary passionate, too? Is there anywhere a more romantic rain-lit serenade? Ah, but this one has it all!