George Bailey is more Christmas than Santa Claus. And yes, they are in competition with each other. Whenever one TV station is playing It’s a Wonderful Life, you can bet that our country’s other black-and-white holiday classic, Miracle on 34th Street, is just a channel away.
George lives on as our Christmas avatar at least in part because he represents so many of our shared anxieties about the holiday season. I love Christmas dearly—participating in the ritual of decorating, being earnest with friends, indulging in cookies, reconnecting with extended family, listening to holiday music, taking time off work just to sit on the couch and watch hockey or football at my parents’ house, and exchanging gifts. But the intensity of its consumerism and the import of its traditions also have a habit of freaking people out. There’s a lot of pressure for Christmas to be perfect, but also so much that can go “wrong,” and so much that can feel bad even if there’s nothing wrong about it. Does the house look nice? Am I eating too much? Is my flight going to be delayed? Do the people I love actually like the gifts I got them? How am I going to pay these bills? Is my family judging some aspect of my lifestyle? Are we going to make it through a few days in close proximity without a huge fight? How can I handle all this after losing a loved one?
Through George, It’s a Wonderful Life is the tale of an American dream held, lost, and then reincarnated. And Jimmy Stewart was the perfect guy to embody it.
All of our Christmas worries could perhaps be contained by two terrifyingly simple questions: Is my life what I want it to be? And if it’s not, could I fix it? George, in the part of the movie that everyone remembers best, is a man laid low by his answers to these questions. No, my dreams were endlessly deferred, and No, I can only see it getting worse. He yearned for freedom, excitement, and self-determination—everything a man in his country is supposed to want. He’s threatened instead with the opposite of all those things: long, isolating days spent in a cell after a prison sentence for bank fraud. Through George, It’s a Wonderful Life is the tale of an American dream held, lost, and then reincarnated. And Jimmy Stewart was the perfect guy to embody it.
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Jimmy Stewart was always James on his movie posters, but I can never get myself to call him that. It just feels wrong, giving any extra layers of formality to an actor who, particularly in the first half of his career, always feels like he could walk out of the screen, sit down next to you, and make little self-deprecating remarks about his performance as you watch the rest of the movie together. As a romantic lead, he is invariably handsome and consistently charming, trying as best he can to follow the directions of his pure, loving heart even when the world does all it can to shut him down. He never behaves perfectly—his characters will be too anxious or clumsy, or they’ll lash out at women who care for them—but despite and possibly because of this, he remains everybody’s buddy, carrying a Goldilocks quotient of masculine heroism that’s somewhere right between Gary Cooper’s shy innocence and Cary Grant’s aggressive worldliness. It’s a cliche to compare Stewart with Tom Hanks—the younger actor even invited the comparison directly when he starred in the The Shop Around the Corner remake You’ve Got Mail—but it’s too obvious not to mention here. As Roger Ebert wrote in Awake in the Dark, praising Hanks and Stewart simultaneously: “The central triumph of Tom Hanks as a movie actor is that, most of the time, we believe he thinks a lot like us. It is the James Stewart quality.”
Nobody was better at selling their own inherent goodness to moviegoers. Coming from hardware-store roots in Indiana, Pennsylvania—a town near Pittsburgh that seems specifically engineered to sound appealingly folksy to a large portion of Americans—Stewart started in theater and then moved out West as a young man in the 1930s. His rise to stardom wasn’t quick, but he got there after a few years of lesser roles. In the slapstick comedies of Vivacious Lady or Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You, he stays in love with an unconventional girl who is so clearly perfect for him, even though his parents don’t approve. In Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he’s too naive for his own good but triumphs through the sheer force of determination. In The Philadelphia Story, his character is a little rougher around the edges, but he is nevertheless the picture of a gentleman, even as he’s caught in the chaos of Grant and Katherine Hepburn’s relationship.
But after working as an instructor with the Army Air Corps, and, thanks to his own persistent requests, flying 20 combat missions over Germany in a B-24 during World War II, Stewart returned to the movies for a second act that wasn’t played for laughs, most notably in his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock. These movies complicate the Jimmy Stewart audiences were used to seeing, giving him characters who are often frustrated and sometimes dangerous. None of them are more acclaimed than Hitchock’s Vertigo, which definitely touches a nerve for me as he so insistently tries to shape Kim Novak into the woman he originally knew her to be.
Is this the gradual appearance of a real person where there was once simply a comedic archetype? Maybe. The intensity of Stewart’s advocacy for the Vietnam War, even after his adopted son from his 45-year marriage to his wife Gloria was killed in action, provides a sort of real-world touchstone for the loss of innocence and increasing paranoia we see on the screen over the course of his career. But even through these darker turns he never stopped being Jimmy Stewart, his characters’ menacing sides glossed over. Audiences forever remember him for that friendly drawl and that basic decency we could all see inside him. I can watch Vertigo and be very creeped out, and then I can turn on The Philadelphia Story and feel just as much love for Stewart as I always did. That’s the power that Jimmy Stewart possessed.
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It’s a Wonderful Life was Stewart’s first movie after his World War II hiatus, and it feels like the exact midpoint between the two Jimmys—the all-American boy and the unsettled man. He’s filled with wide-eyed excitement in the first half of the film: a selfless brother, caring son, an ethical boss, a trustworthy neighbor, and a dreamy object of romantic affection. But within him—just like everyone else—is something threatening and scary, that can take over under the worst of circumstances.
Yet, the George we see through the vast majority of It’s a Wonderful Life is a guy who’s got it made. There’s his drop-dead gorgeous spouse, a huge welcoming home, darling children, and a pillar-of-the-community job that gives him a clean conscience. He’s clever, sincere, respected, sweet. And if you’ve ever seen the Muppet version of It’s a Wonderful Life, you know it’s barely a stretch to put the admirable, kind-hearted, universally cherished Kermit the Frog at the center of George’s story. He’s clever, sincere, respected, sweet. In a critical speech to Mr. Potter, George says:
What’d you say just a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even thought of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what?! Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that—You know how long it takes a workin’ man to save five thousand dollars?
George goes on to point out that the “rabble” Potter references are the ones who do “most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community,” and that his father—who saw them as human beings, not “cattle”—didn’t think it was too much to help them live their lives in a decent home. Then George fires the arrows that sticks in Potter’s side for the rest of the movie: “In my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.”
In George’s telling, it’s our duty to lend a hand to our fellow human beings when they could use one. That’s what a town like Bedford Falls should be. By extension, that’s what the country should be.
George’s acts of generosity, and the way that they’re returned with such an emotional punch at the end of the movie, give us a pathway to empathy—to seeing hard times for one of our neighbors as hard times for all of us.
It’s an inspirational sentiment. And at least one FBI agent at the time of the film’s release thought it sounded like socialism. As John A. Noakes writes in “Bankers and Common Men in Bedford Falls: How the FBI Determined That ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Was a Subversive Movie,” a Los Angeles agent wrote to J. Edgar Hoover after finding fault with the movie’s class conflict between the common man and the “Scrooge-like” Mr. Potter—a caricature of a capitalist finance mogul. It couldn’t have helped that two of its screenwriters, the married couple of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, “were very close to known Communists,” and that prior work on the script included a draft by the legendary Dalton Trumbo, later blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Clifford Odets, a former member of the Communist Party whose career was tarnished after he cooperated with HUAC (to a debatable extent).
But Noakes disagrees with the characterization of the movie as lefty propaganda, and for different reasons so would many of the millions who return to It’s a Wonderful Life as a Christmas tradition. George Bailey occupies a relatively privileged, uncommon position in society, Noakes argues, and what the film primarily laments, in his view, is mid-twentieth century America’s capitalism becoming more faceless, more corporate, with less power in the hands of an individual entrepreneur, as mega-conglomerations with global reach left the little guy in the dust. George is the star here, he says, not the community.
That argument felt exciting to me when I read it, because it challenged me to more carefully consider my assumptions about the goodness at the heart of the film. But I keep going back to that speech. I look forward to it every time I watch, and I feel this rising warmth in my chest when I think about how many other people across the country listen to it annually. “Working men are owed some measure of safety, dignity, and comfort.” And even though I personally would expand that sentiment to all people, it’s still a good start. To George, there are benevolent choices that businessmen owe to those who their work touches. I can’t help but connect George Bailey’s definition of a person’s real wealth with the version of Barack Obama who made himself an overnight political superstar with a speech at the 2004 DNC, who defined America’s greatness as something less measurable than the height of skyscrapers, the power of the military, or the numbers on the stock market ticker:
That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody’s son.
That’s the vision of America that George advocates, and I can’t imagine a better man to sell it than Jimmy Stewart, for many superficial reasons and some more profound ones. He’s a white man, crucially for the era. He’s also undoubtedly masculine, but not extremely so. He doesn’t have the stoicism of John Wayne or the world-weary intensity of Clark Gable. He saw combat in the skies, but it makes sense that George Bailey didn’t go overseas for the war. I can’t picture Jimmy Stewart holding a gun and shooting someone cold, even a Nazi. In fact, they made a whole classic movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, centered around the idea that Stewart didn’t quite have it in him to slay a hardened criminal, even if he made people want to believe he could.
In the end, George Bailey’s inherent goodness isn’t enough to save the world. Wonderful Life ends with Mr. Potter just as powerful as before. But George’s acts of generosity, and the way that they’re returned with such an emotional punch at the end of the movie, give us a pathway to empathy—to seeing hard times for one of our neighbors as hard times for all of us. I don’t believe any major uplifting project gets accomplished without that core value, and so I’m grateful for the kickstart—that Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey could perhaps ignite more than a handful of people to start thinking about who actually wishes them harm, and who’s simply a neighbor in need of a hand.
George is the role model, maybe now more than ever, and it was Jimmy Stewart’s task to bring him to life. Being so good at that job made Stewart, in his way, our hero of the holidays. His combination of down-to-earth intelligence, up-right dependability, and unshakeable sense of right and wrong all cohere into the perfect delivery mechanism for exactly the message we want and need to hear in December.
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Excerpted from Every Time a Bell Rings: The Legacy of It’s a Wonderful Life, America’s Most Beloved Holiday Film by Emily St. James and Lauren Theisen. Copyright © 2026 by Emily St. James and Lauren Theisen, used with permission from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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