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In 1943 RKO bought the film rights (for $10,000) to Philip Van Doren Stern's story "The Greatest Gift" about a small-town American who contemplates suicide ("I wish I had never been born") and is saved by his guardian angel, who grants him his wish and makes it possible for him to see what a difference his non-existence would have made to his family and townspeople. The first screenwriter hired to adapt it was Dalton Trumbo. Ultimately, despite hiring Clifford Odets and Marc Connelly to rewrite Trumbo's draft, RKO was unable to come up with what it considered a satisfactory script, and on September 1, 1945, Frank Capra bought the material from RKO. The rest, as they say, is history.

What if Trumbo's original screenplay had been filmed? As one would expect, Trumbo, a Communist (later of Hollywood Ten fame) gave Stern's story a political slant quite different from Capra's. In Trumbo's screenplay, George is a politician who started out as an idealistic state assemblyman and has become a cynical congressman. He contemplates suicide after losing a race for governor. As Joseph McBride explains in *Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success* (p. 521): "The angel shows him Bedford Falls as it would have been not if he had never been born but as it would have been if he had gone into business instead of politics." The result was to turn Bedford Falls from an idealized small town to a foul, polluted, overindustrialized modern city. There was no Potter in Trumbo's version (nor was there in Stern's original story); rather, George was his own Potter, a ruthless businessman spoiling the town for his own profit. Trumbo would no doubt have dismissed the idea that the only problem with capitalism was stereotypical Victorian stage-villain bankers like Potter (who could be defeated by "good" businessmen like George) as a typical bourgeois illusion.

In this respect, it is interesting that when screenwriter Jack Moffitt testified before HUAC that "the party line" in Hollywood was represented by "picture after picture in which the banker is presented as an unsympathetic man who hates to give a GI a loan", he was nevertheless careful to exclude Capra from his criticism:

"I do not mean that I think no picture should ever show a villainous banker. In fact, I would right now like to defend one picture that I think has been unjustly accused of communism. That picture is Frank Capra's *It's a Wonderful Life.* The banker in that picture, played by Lionel Barrymore, was most certainly what we call a 'dog heavy' in the business. He was a snarling, unsympathetic character. But the hero and his father, played by James Stewart and Samuel S. Hinds, were businessmen, in the building and loan business, and they were shown as using money as a benevolent influence..."

It is easy to say that Trumbo's version, with its message that politics (at least sufficiently "progressive" politics) was morally superior to business, could not possibly have been a popular success. But neither *at first* was *It's a Wonderful Life* in OTL. And much to Capra's chagrin, William Wyler's *The Best Years of Our Lives*, a "serious" social drama about returning veterans, easily eclipsed *It's a Wonderful Life* in popular as well as critical acclaim at the time. So maybe Trumbo's version could have been successful after all. (One has to remember that Capra did keep some elements that Trumbo had added to Stern's story, especially Trumbo's whimsy with the angel "including dialogue for the scene in Nick's Bar in the unborn sequence and the penultimate line about an angel getting his wings every time a bell rings." McBride, p. 522) Of course it would fall into disfavor during the period of the blacklist but maybe today it would be remembered as the ultimate Commie Christmas Classic...
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