This screwball comedy starts off promisingly, but the script plays both characters too extreme. The two eventually are supposed to be romantically involved, which isn’t believable anyhow, but it’s a constant see-saw of loving or hating one another. Going into the film you think that it couldn’t be better cast: Claudette Colbert and James Stewart – two actors that seemingly fit well with any costar…except with each other. James Stewart and Claudette Colbert in “It’s a Wonderful World” (1939) This man, played by James Stewart, is wanted by the police but escapes arrest in order to solve the crime. However, this time it isn’t by her own free will. With this 1939 film, “It’s a Wonderful World” places Claudette Colbert in a similar situation we found her in back in 1934 with “It Happened One Night.” Colbert is traveling with a man to evade another group of people. My review: Searching for the “1939 feature”: She was used to being able to take her time at her home studio of Paramount. Claudette Colbert was unhappy at the brisk pace that the film was shot.Claudette Colbert was in three films released in 1939 and James Stewart was in five.Claudette Colbert’s first film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.Guy kidnaps Edwina so she won’t report him to the police as he tries to continue to clear Heyward of murder. Johnson escapes the police by jumping off a train, and poetess Edwina Corday (Colbert) witnesses his escape. Wealthy Willie Heyward (Treux) is accused of murder and his private detective Guy Johnson (Stewart) is arrested for obstruction of justice for hiding Heyward after the murder. Right now, that’s difficult.Ĭast: Claudette Colbert, James Stewart, Guy Kibbee, Nat Pendleton, Frances Drake, Edgar Kennedy, Sidney Blackmer, Ernest Truex, Hans Conried, Grady Sutton, Cecilia Callejo, Cecil Cunningham, Frank Faylen (uncredited), Phillip Terry (uncredited) This new series chronicles films released in 1939 as I watch them. As we start out this blog feature, this section may become more concrete as I search for a common thread that runs throughout each film of the year. Only after it lapsed into the public domain in 1973 and became a Christmastime TV perennial did it don the mantle of a holiday classic.In 2011, I announced I was trying to see every film released in 1939. Capra's first production through his newly-formed Liberty Films, It's a Wonderful Life lost money in its original run, when it was percieved as a fairly downbeat view of small-town life. After a nightmarish odyssey through a George Bailey-less Bedford Falls (now a glorified slum called Potterville), wherein none of his friends or family recognize him, George is made to realize how many lives he has touched, and helped, through his existence and, just as Clarence had planned, George awakens to the fact that, despite all its deprivations, he has truly had a wonderful life. Bitterly, George declares that he wishes that he had never been born, and Clarence, hoping to teach George a lesson, shows him how different life would have been had he in fact never been born. But even the love of Mary and his children are insufficient when George, faced with an $8000 shortage in his books, becomes a likely candidate for prison thanks to the vengeful Potter. Along the way, George has married his childhood sweetheart Mary ( Donna Reed), who has stuck by him through thick and thin. Warner) to deliver poison by mistake to an ailing child foregoing college and a long-planned trip to Europe to keep the Bailey Building and Loan from letting its Depression-era customers down and, most important, preventing town despot Potter ( Lionel Barrymore) from taking over Bedford Mills and reducing its inhabitants to penury. But first, Clarence is given a crash course on George's life, and the multitude of selfless acts he has performed: rescuing his younger brother from drowning, losing the hearing in his left ear in the process enduring a beating rather than allow a grieving druggist ( H.B. High above Bedford Falls, two celestial voices discuss Bailey's dilemma and decide to send down eternally bumbling angel Clarence Oddbody ( Henry Travers), who after 200 years has yet to earn his wings, to help George out. As the film opens, it's Christmas Eve, 1946, and George, who has long considered himself a failure, faces financial ruin and arrest and is seriously contemplating suicide. This is director Frank Capra's classic bittersweet comedy/drama about George Bailey ( James Stewart), the eternally-in-debt guiding force of a bank in the typical American small town of Bedford Falls.
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