The War on Christmas never stops. Shots were fired again last week when some of Amazon’s Prime Video viewers in the United States discovered that the streamer’s version of the seasonal favourite It’s a Wonderful Life omitted the crucial “Pottersville” sequence.
That’s the part of the film in which guardian angel second class Clarence Odbody shows suicidal savings-and-loan manager George Bailey what his hometown of Bedford Falls would have been like had he never been born. Among other things, George’s children would not have existed, his brother would have died in a skating accident, his uncle would have been committed to an asylum and his boss would have been jailed for manslaughter. Even more tragically, the film suggests, his beloved wife would have ended up “an old maid”.
The most striking feature of this alternate universe, though, is that, without George, Bedford Falls, a sleepy, amiable sort of place, would have become Pottersville, a bawdy, raucous, neon-lit den of amorality and casual violence.
In Prime’s abridged version we cut directly from George sarcastically asking Clarence whether he has the $8,000 he needs to avoid bankruptcy and disgrace to George running joyfully through the snowy streets, crying “Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!” The unwary viewer will conclude that Clarence was sent on his mission to Earth merely to provide a heavenly bridging loan.
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This is clearly an abomination. But whether it represents a woke bowdlerisation of the original sacred text, as some right-leaning commentators suggest, is debatable. References to the Pottersville scenes as being “pro-life” are accurate only insofar as they are clearly in favour of life (the clue is in the title, after all); references to abortion are – unsurprisingly in a 1946 production – conspicuously absent.
A stronger case can be made that Pottersville, with its malignant oligarch, exploitative employment practices and substandard housing, is an indictment of unfettered capitalism’s tendency towards exploitation and extreme inequality.
An internal memo for J Edgar Hoover’s FBI at the time of the film’s original release was unimpressed by its depiction of bankers and the upper class. Three-quarters of a century later, which contemporary figure does the grasping Mr Potter remind you of, with his determination to extinguish all competition and squeeze every drop of profit from each transaction, regardless of the human cost?
Despite Potter’s resemblance to Jeff Bezos, it seems improbable that the Amazon boss took such exception to It’s a Wonderful Life that he or one of his minions decided to leave Pottersville on the cuttingroom floor. Prime, which points out that an unexpurgated version is also available on its service, has been annoyingly vague about the reasons behind the edit. Mail Online reports that “it appears the version of the film was released following a copyright dispute regarding the scene, which was based on a short story”.
Although that doesn’t really explain very much, it is worth recalling that copyright law was a major reason why Frank Capra’s Christmas fantasy, a box-office flop on its release, became a staple of US TV in the 1970s and went on to join the canon of much-loved Hollywood classics. All this was due in large part to the failure of the film’s owners to reassert their copyright after 28 years, as the law required. As a result the title entered the public domain in 1974, was snapped up by grateful TV networks and became a hit with generations that had been previously unware of its existence.
Subsequently, Republic Pictures managed to reassert some secondary rights in It’s a Wonderful Life on the basis of its ownership of the music and of the 1943 short story on which the film was based. It is possible, therefore, that there’s something to Prime’s claim that some rights issue was involved, though why that should apply to the Pottersville scenes and nothing else is hard to understand.
What is more likely to have happened is that Prime simply wasn’t paying proper attention to the inventory it was licensing. It is largely forgotten now, but the so-called golden age of films on TV, when schedules were packed with classic titles, was also a time when movies were treated with contempt by broadcasters, who clearly couldn’t care less about the quality of their print-to-video transfers.
They used crude pan-and-scan technology or – even worse – simply squeezed the image to fit the television screens of the day. They chopped them up brutally to accommodate ad breaks and fit their schedules. And they had no qualms about removing anything that might be deemed even mildly offensive.
This cinematic landfill can still be found at the cheap-and-nasty end of your TV planner (and on YouTube). It’s probably not a bad thing that when it shows up on what’s supposed to be a premium subscription service, the people responsible find themselves accused of killing Christmas.
