Could anyone seriously imagine that It’s a Wonderful Life was an anti-capitalist manifesto cloaked in a sentimental storyline of an angel helping a suicidal businessman recognize the value of family, friends, and Christmas? It seems preposterous, but it’s not that far removed from how today’s right wing imagines that even the most modest expansion of a government program is evidence of creeping socialism.
In a May 1947 memo to FDI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a special agent in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office warned, “With regard to the picture ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ [an informant] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.”
Barrymore played Mr. Potter, the cruel and clutching banker whose machinations brought the honorable George Bailey’s building-and-loan firm to the brink of ruin, and Bailey himself to the bridge where he contemplated suicide, before a guardian angel’s counsel turned him homeward.
According to the FBI report, the informant told the field agent that “in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.” The source also suggested that the film could have been made differently, by portraying Mr. Potter as a conscientious banker who was simply “following the rules as laid down by the State Bank Examiner in connection with making loans” and as “a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money rather than portraying the part as it was shown.”
In addition to being very bad cinematic counsel, the source’s suggestion would have actually undermined the essential message of a film that in many senses was asserting classic small-town values regarding right and wrong ways to treat people.
However, the FBI report compared It’s a Wonderful Life to a Soviet film, and argued that the film’s producer and director, Frank Capra, was “associated with left-wing groups” and “made a picture which was decidedly socialist in nature—’Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’” It also alleged that screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were “very close to known Communists.”