Happy Birthday, George Bailey - Guardian Unlimited(Birthday News)
At the least, they’d have sponsored a week of Yuletide screenings of George’s ‘biopic’ - it’s hard not to think in self-reflexive terms about the beloved Christmas movie, one of the most iconic and misunderstood in American cinema. The home video revolution of the 1980s was equally responsible for the film’s resurgence, but the ubiquity of the remastered and slickly packaged DVD versions, including a new double disk set, is eroding the TV audience. Following the example of the Cahiers critics, Andrew Sarris acknowledged Capra as an auteur in his influential 1968 book, The American Cinema, though he damned his lurch from “populist sentimentality” into “populist demagoguery,” describing the Gary Cooper character in Meet John Doe (1941) as a “barefoot fascist”. Incredibly, 1946 was also the year of such seminal noirs as The Big Sleep, Gilda, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killers, Fallen Angel, The Blue Dahlia, Notorious, and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. More Birthday News
