Once a rarity, It Happened One Christmas, the 1977 television remake of It’s a Wonderful Life with Orson Welles as the conniving “Old Man” Potter, is seemingly everywhere this holiday season.
A dozen years back, the film’s star and producer, Marlo Thomas, took to Facebook to encourage fans to petition Universal Television for its release on home video. It’s now available as an affordable DVD or may be streamed on Fandango. Unauthorized copies are sold or posted on several websites, though some are of poor quality or not the full running time.
The ABC movie was not a hit with the critics when it first aired on December 11, 1977. Some of the kinder reviews called it “satisfying” (The Los Angeles Times) or “a well-intentioned, but minor-league TV remake” (The Chicago Tribune).
Dialogue was lifted from Frank Capra’s original 1946 holiday classic and some camera shots were also copied, prompting Capra to describe the ABC movie-of-the-week as an act of plagiarism.
It’s a Wonderful Life was not a television staple when It Happened One Christmas first aired and many viewers may have not been aware of the Capra film.
When The Washington Post panned the movie, writer Haynes Johnson made no mention of the original starring Jimmy Stewart: “I had the misfortune to turn on the television the other night to something called It Happened One Christmas. What happened was the kind of abomination you’d normally snap off immediately; a syrupy, about Tiny Tim and Scrooge, but this time set in happy, homey, small-town America with a heroine (Marlo Thomas) who exudes more goo per second than anyone seen before. The ghosts of Christmas past, present and future are combined in one Mary Poppins character with a cockney accent.”
The character The Washington Post was referring to was the guardian angel Clara, played by Cloris Leachman. She received an Emmy nomination for her performance. (Henry Travers played the angel Clarence in the original).
Orson Welles played the miserly “Old Man” Potter, the role originated by Lionel Barrymore in the Capra movie. Welles provided a serviceable performance, though it is nowhere in the league of Barrymore.
In an interview decades later, Thomas said she was thrown to find Welles relying on cue cards during her scene with him, though she noted it cannot be detected in Welles’ performance.
It Happened One Christmas did well enough in the ratings that ABC repeated it in 1978 and 1979.
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