WE NEED TO PONDER - 256 - 09-13-09

I love Jimmy Stewart in the old movies – the long lanky and backward stuttery way has endeared him to his audiences, among which I am one of his biggest fans.  I still watch every Stewart movie that shows on Turner Classic Movies as they feature all the oldies and goodies.  Today it was the 1941 classic, “Pot ‘o Gold”, co-starring Paulette Goddard, but it really never mattered who the leading lady was or even if there was a leading lady, as in many of his western genre films, where his closest love was likely to be his horse.  He could be funny like he was in “Harvey”, dramatic as he was in some of the Alfred Hitchcock films like “Rear Window” and “Vertigo”, but my all-time absolute favorite was his role as George Bailey in Frank Capra’s, “It’s A Wonderful Life”, a perennial holiday classic called “favorite’ by many.  I think what makes that film so powerful is that it forces us all to look back over our lives and try to imagine what the world would be like if we had ‘never been born’, a wish that George uttered when life events were overwhelming.  We have all been there, but as Clarence, George’s eccentric guardian angle, wrote to him in the flyleaf of the Tom Sawyer novel he had been reading, “No man is failure who has friends”, a thought we all need to ponder.

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