'It's a Wonderful Life' — When You Play Fair

It’s the perfect Christmas movie and a towering masterpiece of American cinema. I’m speaking, of course, of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the much-loved 1946 Frank Capra feature that also anticipated something we badly need today: morals to moderate capitalism. All this, even though it very much reflects the race and sex stereotypes of its day.

A plot summary, in case you haven’t seen the movie (spoiler alert!): Forced to give up his dreams of world travel to take over his father’s job as a small-banker, Everyman George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart in one of his iconic roles) is near suicide. Divine intervention saves him: An angel convinces George that his life is worthwhile to his family and friends.

But how we get to that ending is perilous to anyone raised for the 21st century rather than the 20th.

George is sexist, largely because he’s immersed in a sexist atmosphere. Attending his younger brother’s high-school graduation party, he hears from the principal that there are “lots of pretty girls” — a statement that would rightly get a school official fired today.

At the party, George becomes ­reacquainted with Mary, graduating that night. Mary is smart — she advances to college — but that isn’t what interests George. Walking home, he speaks lines seemingly from the Weinstein couch: “How old are you, anyway?” he leerily asks Mary, who replies that she is 18 and wonders if that is “too young or too old.”

Later, when he learns he will be stuck in town managing his late ­father’s bank, George drunkenly makes his way to Mary’s house, where he “shakes her,” yells at her and forcibly kisses her.

After George and Mary have married and had children, George releases his workplace stress by screaming at his children and ­destroying family belongings — ­incidents that today would be seen as red flags for domestic violence.

Racism? Annie is the Bailey family’s African-American maid. At one point George’s brother “slaps her fanny.” All in jest, though one wonders how an older minority woman, as Annie is, might take such sporting if she weren’t ­dependent on a privileged white family for her room and modest income.

As for the professional side of life, George, the film’s great ­defender of small-business finance, is not, in fact, a good banker. In the film’s ­final scenes, George’s uncle, Billy, is dispatched by George’s small bank to deposit $8,000 in the town’s central bank, controlled by uber-capitalist Mr. Potter.

The money gets misplaced (to put it mildly), leading to the crisis that spurs George to contemplate taking his own life.

But George never should have let Billy handle such a sum, the equivalent of about $153,000 today. Billy is a known ­alcoholic, irresponsible with basic tasks. A serious banker would have assigned the task to two competent underlings, mandating that each watch the other.

So why does “It’s a Wonderful Life” endure? Well, it’s a superbly told story, for one thing, anchored by Stewart’s natural and imitable humanity.

But it’s also because, for all its cringe-inducing elements, the movie contains a moral core. ­Capra understood that capitalism must be tempered by humane values. George is imperfect. But he realizes, far better than Mr. Potter does, that for capitalism to prevail, self-interest must be balanced against compassion.

George allows his bank’s customers to miss a mortgage payment or two, if they are distressed: a lesson for this year’s Toys’R’Us bankruptcy administrators, who would have let go thousands of veteran employees with no severance had not more compassionate voices ­intervened.

Potter, conversely, is an extreme capitalist: No matter the cost to his hometown in foreclosures or ­monopoly rents, he is in it for the money.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” was made at the start of the Cold War. America had to conquer Communism. Yet the film industry knew that, to resist the lure of collectivism and totalitarianism, the country had also to tame unbridled capitalism.

More than seven decades on, we are taking on sexism and racism, in however fraught a fashion. But we still struggle with the question of how to contain the capitalist system’s downsides. For an ­answer, today’s financiers and tech giants need look no further than this American classic.

Nicole Gelinas (@nicolegelinas) is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post