I am nuts about It's a Wonderful Life (1946)  - it is among my 3 fav movies, I love watching it over & over, I even love quoting from it.  Honestly, I even tolerated the horrible It Happened One Christmas, a remake starring Marlo Thomas, Orson Welles and the first guy who played Trapper John - and I just groove on It's                       a Wonderful Life in                 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies. (otoh, this is sorta wrong & sorta great)

I have been fascinated that two writers I admire have remixed meaning from it in the past week:

Ed Rothstein wrote in the NYT  What Would George Bailey Do?

In the film the Building & Loan faces what is now called a “liquidity crisis” — the association could not possibly cover its obligations with available cash, let alone guarantee any loans. The townspeople rush in demanding their life savings. “You’re thinking of this place all wrong,” George tells the crowd. “As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here.”

That much was obvious. But George goes on, pointing to individuals. “Your money’s in Joe’s house,” he says to one man. “Right next to yours,” he says to another. “And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Backlin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can.”

You think you are just depositing your money here, he suggests, but actually we’re all helping one another. And if some homeowners can’t meet their payments, “what are you going to do,” George asks, “foreclose on them?”

“We’ve got to stick together,” George says, or the truly evil banker Henry Potter will gain control of everything. “We’ve got to have faith in each other.”

Ross Douthat wrote Not So Wonderful Now

If the global economy survives the autumn and our cable-TV companies are still in business come Christmas, Americans surfing the channels for classic Yuletide movies may finally figure out exactly whom they have to blame for the housing bubble and everything that has followed. Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: It all started with George Bailey.

Yes, that George Bailey -- the hero of Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," the most popular man in Bedford Falls, the man so indispensable that he earned a private visitation from a guardian angel just to show him how dreadful a world without him would have been. It's easy to forget, so potent is the supernaturally charged final act of Capra's classic, that before he was visiting looking-glass worlds where he'd never been born or scampering through the snow and shouting "Merry Christmas!" till his lungs burst, Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey was actually a pretty savvy businessman. And it's even easier to forget the precise nature of his business: putting the downscale families of Bedford Falls into homes they couldn't quite afford to buy.

This is the substance of the great war between Bailey and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls. Potter is against easy credit and the suburban dream, against the rabble moving out of his tenements and buying homes, while the Bailey Building and Loan exists to make suburbia possible.