Classic

Every generation has had its Christmas classics, films that have become as much a part of the holiday family traditions as Christmas trees and candy canes. For me it has been the more modern A Christmas Story with ol’ Carl Kolchak himself, Darren McGavin. Kids today have taken more of a shine to even more recent films, but for more than one generation, Christmas wouldn’t be the same without Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Since 1947 the film became a seasonal fixture in neighborhood movie houses across the fruited plain. In the 1970’s the film temporarily fell into the public domain and was played relentlessly on local television stations as each holiday came and went. Unfortunately, these were usually prints in horrible condition, so that scratches and splice marks became a part of the experience, not to mention ads for department stores touting their early bird specials. It is with that experience that I as did most from my generation become acquainted with Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey. When the home video market began to bloom with VHS in the mid 1980’s a better print resurfaced, so that the experience improved dramatically, along with the loss of those commercials. Of course, this new resource of home entertainment created a fight for the rights to the film to once again be restored to a single owner. It ended up being the film’s score that would allow the rights to be enforced once again. The crappy television prints disappeared, and by the early 1990’s efforts to restore the film began.

These restoration efforts invariably turned to the controversial subject of colorization. If anyone remembers Ted Turner’s push to colorize RKO films, including King Kong, you will also remember how bad those films looked. The color was an added texture of hue covering the picture so that the subject’s textures and subtleties were obliterated. It was almost as if some child decided to finger paint all over the negative. There was nothing magical or at all realistic about the process. It’s A Wonderful Life has been colorized no less than three times. In both 1986 and 1989 the film got the colorized treatment, both failures. Now in 2007 It’s A Wonderful Life has been colorized by a new process developed by Legend Films. This new process allows films to be colorized naturally, retaining all of the detail and texture of the original print. These are the guys who are working with legendary Ray Harryhausen to colorize and restore many of his classics. The new process uses a 16-bit grayscale which offers over 64,000 shades of just gray. The process, called “Photo-Real”, can reproduce HD quality pictures with stunning life-like color. I was a very cynical skeptic of the process and was prepared to rip this color print to shreds in my review. I was blown away by how natural the color looks. You will be hard pressed to believe this wasn’t an original color print. Not only are the colors realistic, but the print retains the particular color palette of the 1940’s, so that the film still looks like one from the correct era. I know you’ve seen incredibly bad colorization before, and it likely has made you unwilling to even give this one a chance, but you owe it to yourself to check it out.