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All About It's a Wonderful Life
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Questions: What's the name of the movie theater in It's a Wonderful Life? — William
What's the name of the house where George Bailey throws a rock? — Sue
What book is Clarence reading when he falls into the river? — Ed
Is Bedford Falls a real place? — Barry
FlickChick: I'm a huge fan of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which is not the sentimental piece of Capra-corn so many people imagine it to be. So before the holiday season is definitively over, I'm taking this opportunity to answer some queries about the classic holiday film that have trickled into my Ask FlickChick mailbox.
The movie theater is called The Bijou (and though you didn't ask, it's playing 1945's The Bells of St. Mary's). The deserted house, which George Bailey (James Stewart) and his wife, Mary (Donna Reed), eventually move into, is the Old Granville place. Clarence (Henry Travers) the apprentice angel is reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
And no, Bedford Falls is not real — I was actually surprised to find that there is in fact no Bedford Falls at all in the U.S., unless it's so small it's unmapped. The film was actually shot on an enormous set constructed on RKO's Encino Ranch property (in the middle of summer, no less), near the Sepulvida Dam basin. But there's compelling anecdotal evidence that director Frank Capra's image of what the fictional Bedford Falls should look like was based on a real place: Seneca Falls, in the middle of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, about four hours north of New York City. Capra had an aunt who lived in nearby Auburn and so he had passed through Seneca Falls, and local barber Thomas Bellissima, who's now in his eighties, claims to have cut Capra's hair on several occasions in the early 1940s. Bellissima says the director spoke glowingly of Seneca Falls' beauty.
Several features of the town, including a truss bridge over the Seneca-Cayuga Canal and a couple of Granville-style Victorian mansions, distinctly resemble places in the film, and since the mid-1990s Seneca Falls has actively promoted the rumored connection to the film with an annual festival. There are references in the film to the neighboring cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Elmira and Binghamton, all of which are not far from Seneca Falls. And Seneca Falls has always had a significant Italian population — not always the case in small towns, but also true of Bedford Falls.
Granted, there's no hard evidence, and Professor Jeanine Bassinger of Wesleyan University, who is a film historian and scholar, as well as curator of the Frank Capra Archives and author of The "It's a Wonderful Life" Book, has combed Capra's extensive papers without finding a reference to Seneca Falls or, for that matter, mention of any real city that might have inspired Bedford Falls.
But the believers include actress Karolyn Grimes, who as a child played little Zuzu Bailey. She describes her first visit to Seneca Falls here, and her memories of the Bedford Falls set jibe with what she saw.
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
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Dec 29, 2006 3:24 PM
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Being from Rochester, I know Seneca Falls really does a lot of publicity from Wonderful Life. The George Bailey run usually makes it into the paper, as well as restaurants that have been changed to resemble locations from the movie. It's interesting to have one town claim it, without a ton of evidence to back it up.
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Dec 29, 2006 7:42 PM
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This was the first year in I don't know how long that my schedule did not sync up with a showing of IAWL on TV... a pox on you Republic Pictures for enforcing the copywrite! Just because it was derivative of previous works? Which ones? If so, then everything is derivative!
It was so much better when it was on with crappy prints 10 times a day. You could watch 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there... and by Christmas... you'd seen the whole thing!
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Dec 30, 2006 9:34 PM
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