In 1941, James Stewart turned the first important actor in Hollywood to enlist inside the navy when the United States had entered World War II. He joined the Air Force and stayed out of the spotlight for five years. It wouldn’t be until 1946 that he returned to Hollywood to collaborate alongside along with his “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” director Frank Capra, who had joined the Army and documented the warfare for the “Why We Fight” propaganda film sequence, to make what we now see as a Christmas conventional in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Stewart’s George Bailey is pushed to the brink of suicide. Pressure comes at him from every nook — familial, monetary, accountability, and psychological — making him need he had under no circumstances been born. To play that half, James Stewart truly wanted to look deep inside to hunt out the weather of himself to attach with these emotions. The horrors of warfare, no matter how righteous you assume it’s, will stick to the combatants, informing the rest of their lives. Bravely, he allowed himself to faucet into that trauma and ache for his effectivity, most notably inside the scene the place he makes one closing plea to god. Stewart knowledgeable Guideposts once more in 1987 of that scene:
“As I said these phrases, I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of those who had nowhere to indicate, and my eyes stuffed with tears. I broke down sobbing. This was not deliberate the least bit … Frank, who cherished spontaneity in his motion pictures, was ecstatic. He wanted a close-up of me saying that prayer, nevertheless was delicate ample to know that my breaking down was precise and that repeating it in a single different take was unlikely.”
Though not a success, the film pointed inside the course Stewart was headed as an actor, in a position to uncover his darker sides.