Frank Capra and Robert Riskin "Magic Towns"

James Stewart confirmed that Robert Riskin did not direct any part of the film "Magic Town" (1947), and William Wellman told John F. Mariani in 1975, "Frank's just being kind about it. I was in on that thing from the beginning, and I wish I never started it. It stunk! Frank and Bob had a big argument about the picture and Riskin asked me to do it. I told him this is the kind of picture only Capra could do. It's not my kind of film. In my book Capra's the greatest, and I thought of giving Magic Town the Capra touch while shooting."

-Mary Peterman (Jane Wyman): The air becomes charged with electricity around desperate men.

-Lawrence 'Rip' Smith (James Stewart): "I've been searching for a town like this for years. You know, when I got off that train this morning, I said to myself 'This is it.' I've just walked through your town, folks, with its shade trees and its lovely parks. I stood before your impressive buildings mellowed with age, and I said to myself 'Here is a sturdy challenge to the evils of the modern era.' I watched your people on the street, and I felt their vitality and their sense of security. Your children are happy. They're happy. You can see it in their dear little faces, and hear it in their wholesome talk. There's beauty here. It's almost indescribable. You're used to it, you're all a part of it, you take it for granted. But to me, it's a hope and a dream of a lifetime. I too want to become a part of it. Please don't change it."

With Riskin unavailable for Liberty Films, Capra went to Leo McCarey, the producer-director whose 'Going My Way' had won the Oscar as best picture of 1944 and whose Rainbow Productions was making a sequel for RKO, The Bells of St. Mary's. McCarey was formally offered a Liberty partnership on May 7, 1945.

When he explained in a 1968 public appearance why he did not want to film the first script RKO had commissioned for The Greatest Gift —the one by Dalton Trumbo— Capra gave a simple reason that spoke volumes: Trumbo's script "was about politics." Already by 1946, politics for Capra had become a dirty word. Trumbo's George is a politician who rises from an idealistic state assemblyman to a cynical congressman contemptuous of the people he represents. He goes to the bridge to attempt suicide after losing a race for governor. The angel shows him Bedford Falls as it would have been not if he had never been born but as it would have been if he had gone into business instead of politics. Bedford Falls in Trumbo's nightmare sequence has changed from an idealized small town to a foul, polluted, overindustrialized modern city: there is no Potter to serve as George's nemesis, for George, in effect, serves as his own Potter—a ruthless modern businessman who carelessly spoils the town for his own profit.

Capra's postwar regression was manifested in his depiction of sexual politics in Bedford Falls. The fact that Donna Reed's Mary Bailey is a housewife and mother, unlike the Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck single professional women in the Capra-Riskin films, reflects the prevailing mood of postwar America, in which women were being pressured to give their jobs back to returning servicemen and stay home raising children.

Yet in Wonderful Life, Mary's yearning for marriage, home, and family is portrayed with considerable ambivalence by Capra in the deeply moving telephone scene with Mary, (which Capra considered "one of the best scenes I've ever put on the screen"). George blames his wife and children for their role in keeping him in Bedford Falls and curbing his ambitions to be an architect and city planner; what finally drives him to attempt suicide is Mary's turning on him after his frightening outburst in the living room in which he smashes his models of a bridge and skyscraper. Capra's reaffirmation of family and small-town values at the end is accomplished, as critic Robin Wood put it, "with full acknowledgment of the suppressions on which it depends and consequently, of its precariousness."

Capra's unborn sequence is a powerful vision of despair—though labeled a "fantasy," the sequence was shot in the fashionable film noir style, and it much more closely resembles the reality of 1946 than the rest of the film—but politically it is Capra's ultimate cop-out, his way of washing his hands of the modern world and the clearest expression of how much his social optimism depended on Riskin (whose absence is felt in the unborn sequence just as strongly as George Bailey's) and how utterly distrustful Capra had become of the American public. William S. Pechter noted that the supernatural resolution of Wonderful Life exposes the "fatal weakness" of Capra's work, his tendency to resolve impossible social dilemmas with "strangely perfunctory" happy endings that are imposed "deforce majeure... Yet, for those who can accept the realities of George Bailey's situation and do not believe in angels the film ends, in effect, with the hero's suicide. Capra's desperation is his final honesty. It ruthlessly exposes his own affirmation as pretense."

Jean Arthur explained in 1987: "I am awfully angry when he always says that [It's a Wonderful Life] his favorite picture. I think Stewart did a great job, it was a great part, but I wouldn't have liked to have been that girl, I didn't think she had anything to do. It was colorless. You didn't have a chance to be anything." Capra's thoughts went to his old flame, Ginger Rogers, but she also turned down the film because "the woman's role was such a bland character." He thought of Olivia de Havilland, Martha Scott, and Ann Dvorak.

Then he saw Donna Reed in an MGM film. It probably was They Were Expendable; Reed gave a strong and luminous performance as a Navy nurse. She was only twenty-four when she made It's A Wonderful Life, but her fresh Iowa beauty made her an ideal match with Stewart.

Capra was fed up with independence. "It was the most gentlemanly way of going broke, and the fastest way, anybody ever thought of," he told Richard Schickel in 1971. "We didn't have enough capital, so we decided to sell Liberty Films, which was a very, very hopeless thing to do. My partners did not want to sell. But I got cold feet, and I'm the one who insisted that we sell. And I think that probably affected my picture-making forever afterward." By the spring of 1950, after almost a year of forced inactivity, he was beginning to despair of feature filmmaking altogether, telling the press that he was "gloomy about his future projects" and that he didn't know "where ideas are coming from that will seem worthwhile to him and safe to the studio."

During the shooting of "Here Comes the Groom," he told Alexis Smith, whose playing of Wilbur's spinster cousin Winifred is one of its few delights, that he did not want to make any more movies because "It isn't fun anymore." "I was shocked," she remembered. "I thought he was kidding at first, he seemed to be enjoying himself so much on the set, but he said, 'No, I'm serious. I don't mean it isn't fun here, I mean the pressures that come from the schedule and from money.' That drove him crazy. He said he wasn't used to the banks moving into a position of creative control. This was before the drastic changes in the industry became apparent, and he was probably ahead of a lot of people in realizing what was happening. But I remember being very disturbed by it, because I didn't think Frank Capra should just walk away from it."

The fact that "a large part" of the public "seem[ed] to have more or less forgotten" Capra and Stewart during the war (as Variety observed after Wonderful Life opened weakly) should have been only a temporary setback for Capra. Not only Stewart but also Capra's fellow directors who had spent the war in uniform—Ford, Huston, Wyler, Stevens—were, in time, able to regain their former prominence in the industry. Hollywood's lack of enthusiasm for Capra on his return from service stemmed from an accumulation of factors unique to Capra: it was a reflection on his faltering box-office track record and his reputation for extravagance; a delayed backlash against his rebellious posture toward studio control before the war, both in his own career and on behalf of the Screen Directors Guild; and, perhaps, a resentment of his arrogance toward Hollywood during his Army years, such as his blast from London at Hollywood for "embarrassing" the troops with "flag-waving" war movies. Capra continued to talk poor mouth to the press, telling The Washington Post in 1972, "I wasn't really wise financially — I'm the poorest director you ever saw."