SASHA STONE: Why We Watch It’s a Wonderful Life:

There is only one movie most people watch around Christmas, and that has to be the ultimate Christmas movie, Frank Capra’s sublime It’s a Wonderful Life.

What’s remarkable to me about this movie is that everyone still watches it and loves it, even though it is unapologetically religious. It’s a Wonderful Life is what Hollywood today would label “faith-based,” even though no one would describe it that way. And yet, it’s inescapable. This is a movie about prayer. It’s a movie about angels and a movie about faith.

Hollywood would never make a movie that dared to say, as It’s a Wonderful Life does, that we all believe in God and that there are such things as angels watching over us and that in times of complete and total helplessness we pray.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: It’s a Wonderful Life: Holiday Classic Takes On New Meaning As Jimmy Stewart’s Post-War Struggles Bleed Into Film.