It's a Pretty Good Life

So I settled in to watch Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed make me cry. As I do every year at this time.

I paid no attention to the notification before the film commenced that what I was about to view was an edited version of George Bailey's life. It seems someone had the brilliant idea to essentially leave Clarence on the cutting room floor.

It was as if the Gettysburg address ended after "four score and seven years ago" or Beethoven's ninth closed in the top of the sixth. It was Abbott without Costello, Lennon without McCartney, Trump without the Mexicans crossing the border.

Here Clarence is reduced to an afterthought, a cameo. We are introduced to him in the movie's opening scene and then again when he dives off the bridge to keep his ward from doing what he is contemplating. Thereafter, like Houdini at his finest, this version makes our angel in waiting disappear. No reveal to George how Mr. Potter would have destroyed Bedford Falls, how Harry Bailey would have passed away. No Zuzu, nor that Donna Reed, my Donna Reed, would have been nothing but a spinster, a lonely librarian.

This George doesn't know what life would have been like if he had never been born and dashes madly back home through the falling snow towards certain imprisonment because, well we have no damned clue why actually.

There are precious few things that are perfect in this world. Like peanut butter and jelly on white bread, Michael Jordan hanging in mid air before taking a shot or school letting out for summer vacation.

It's a Wonderful Life should never, ever be "abridged". Sure I cried when the townspeople emptied their pockets for George and his arrest warrant was torn up. And when that glorious bell rings. But if I hadn't memorized every scene, every word of Mr. Capra's classic I fear I would have been left wondering what all the fuss was about.

And probably felt that Clarence Oddbody never truly earned his wings.

It's a pretty good life. Is there nothing sacrosanct anymore?