A crucial scene in the 1946 Frank Capra film “It’s a Wonderful Life” called for actor Jimmy Stewart (playing lead character George Bailey) to have an emotional breakdown as he desperately prayed to God for help on Christmas Eve.
Stewart wasn’t sure he could do it.
Stewart said that, as he prayed on camera, he contemplated all the terrible shit gone wrong in George Bailey’s life: His faltering building and loan company had lost a large sum of money that was going to cause the business to crash, and he was probably going to prison for it (in addition to being despised by all his trusting customers). Bailey had also temperamentally frightened his loving wife and children in the throes of this turmoil, and he couldn’t forgive himself for that.
The character George Bailey felt like a colossal failure, trapped by circumstance with no way out…except suicide.
With all of this dark emotion churning inside, Jimmy Stewart became the tortured George Bailey in that scene and he started sobbing uncontrollably. Later, Stewart recalled:
“As I said those words, I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. That was not planned at all.”
The whole film crew was impressed, and director Frank Capra called cut…but Stewart couldn’t stop crying. It took several minutes for Stewart to regain composure, and Frank Capra knew he had captured the real thing on camera in one take.
Unfortunately, the sequence had been filmed as a wide shot rather than a close-up, and Frank Capra realized after the fact that a close-up was essential; but the director knew he couldn’t ask Jimmy Stewart to put himself through that emotional ordeal again for a second take.
So, Capra took the wide shot footage, enlarged and cropped every frame one-by-one to create a zoom and close-up sequence of Stewart’s emotional collapse, which went into the finished film.
Edit to “building and loan” rather than “savings and loan”… Just watched the movie again.
