It’s a Wonderful Life: It's a Death by Suicide—Uh, Make That, It's a Wonderful Life

× Expand Brian A. Pounds/Connecticut Post/AP Photo The marquee of the historic Strand Theater in downtown Seymour, Connecticut, advertising the Frank Capra holiday favorite ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ December 15, 2013Tonight, following a decades-long Yuletide tradition, NBC will air Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece, It’s a Wonderful Life.

But it’s the Jimmy Stewart–George Bailey suicide attempt in It’s a Wonderful Life that cuts the deepest, because his guilt, his sin is the one that Capra clearly felt most deeply, and the one that resonates as the most distinctly American—particularly, horribly, today.

That guilt, that sin, is failure.

And it’s that god that Capra furiously sought to propitiate, as his autobiography makes painfully clear.

Forty-two years ago, I interviewed Capra in his Palm Springs–area home, abutting the La Quinta Country Club.