gardenerchance:

wednesday-in-a-cafe:

Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (1947)

Jimmy Stewart was actually super nervous about kissing Donna Reed. He said: “She turned out to be the embodiment of goodness, and got me so disconcerted that I kept putting off that kiss scene, you know, when we’re in that tight two-shot on the telephone? We put off doing that scene for weeks.” But when the time finally came, they nailed that kiss scene in a single take. Jimmy said it was “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

tl;dnr: Jimmy Stewart, “She got me disconcerted.”

The best moment of the best scene of the best Christmas movie.

Not only did it in one take. They had pages more dialogue, but then the emotion kicked in and they just went straight to the kiss and Capra was like, well okay then. And they put that lightning in a bottle and it still hits just as hard today.

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/637362209037647872.

Can you imagine if you’d shown a 1946 audience this trailer? It is to boggle.

The actual trailer, for comparison:

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1Jvw17v.

lies:

This scene is fairly spectacular. Along with a few other scenes, like George’s dinner-table conversation with his father before the dance, I think this is what made the movie off-putting to audiences in 1946 (such that it failed at the box office), and increasingly beloved with the passage of time (such that it has become many people’s, including my own, favorite Christmas movie).

It was just way, way ahead of its time. It was so dark, so in-your-face realistic in confronting things normally swept under the rug, at least in the stylized world of Hays Code Hollywood, that it must have been a jarringly intense experience to audiences of the day. It’s a jarringly intense experience now.

I think this scene is probably the best example of that. Not necessarily the part shown in this gifset (though the “He’s making violent love to me, Mother!” line is both out there and hilarious), but the rest of the scene as it plays out. If you know the movie, and the scene (which, c’mon, you have to, right?) you know what I’m talking about. If not, consider this a giant **SPOILER ALERT**. You really should see it before reading about it.

Supposedly Stewart was very self-conscious about filming this, his first romantic scene since returning from the war. As a result, Capra filmed the end of the scene in a single unrehearsed take. After George and Mary get on the phone together there was a significant amount of additional dialog they were supposed to say, but in the moment Stewart and Reed skipped it and went right to the embrace. The result was so intense that Capra had to cut some of the kiss in order to get the scene past the censors.

It’s really an amazing thing to watch. I’ve heard some people (“kids these days,” I think is the technical term) talk disparagingly about old black-and-white Hollywood movies, about how boring they are.

Um, no, sorry. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Donna Reed died in 1986, Jimmy Stewart in 1997. But with the help of Frank Capra and the rest of the people who made this movie, the five minutes of film they created here remain as compelling today (for me at least) as anything I’ve ever seen on screen.

Reblogging to remind me how much I love this scene.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/Pu8Y76.

# 10: It’s a Wonderful Life:

jaynaneeya:

Why I watched It’s a Wonderful Life 16 times from 2003 to 2012.

I’ve now gotten into my top 10 most viewed movies, and it’s getting intense.

Also this is my 3000th tumblr post, so yay milestones!

I agree with everything you said about the movie, which is also in my all-time most-watched list (if I kept track of that, which I don’t, really). I find it interesting that you don’t really talk about the film’s style and tone, which to me is one of the most amazing things about it. It was so far ahead of its time in terms of the gritty realism of the heavier scenes. I’ve read that audiences of its day found it really off-putting, such that it flopped at the box office originally, and only became a huge hit decades later when modern audiences embraced it from all the TV airings it had.

The Gower scene that you mention, the last conversation George has with his father, the scene where George stops by Mary’s house and they share the phonecall with Sam; I could just keep listing them. They’re so dark, and so real. It’s scary how intense those scenes are.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/50554494405.