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“I did this over and over again, and pretty soon, I started getting fan mail.” “They kept knocking at my door wanting an interview,” she recalled.
#ITS WONDERFUL LIFE TV#
Wonderful re-entered her life with the film’s ubiquitous TV screenings. He would die of cancer one of her teenage sons later committed suicide.
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She then re-married a man with three children of his own. She was married and divorced, raising two daughters alone after her second husband died in a hunting accident. It’s quite an understatement: Grimes was orphaned at 15, then ordered by a court to live with her strictly religious aunt and uncle in Missouri. Incredibly, she said she did not initially see the film until she was 40. That’s why I think people love to watch it.” We lose sight of that every once in awhile. Capra was trying to make people realize that life is worth living, and that you can make a difference.
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And it never gets old: “I absolutely love it,” she said. Grimes, 76, estimates that at this point, she has seen It’s a Wonderful Life 500 times. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives.” By Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. “But we’ve had people say maybe it’s even better that can’t.”ĭirector Frank Capra standing on set, covered with artificial snow. “It’s all circumstantial we can’t prove it,” Caracillo states. But most telling is the fact that the original short story on which the film is based had no corresponding bridge scene.
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The movie’s high school principal is also named Partridge, a prominent moniker in Seneca Falls. Soon, regional names-Rochester, Elmira, Buffalo-were added to it. The town not only rallied to commemorate his act of heroism, but chipped in to raise money to bring over the rest of Varacalli’s family from Italy.Īccording to Caracillo, at this point, the It’s a Wonderful Life script was still in development. Bellissima told him that Varacalli had saved the life of a woman who jumped off the bridge-but drowned in the process. Capra allegedly inquired about the town and its people, and asked for the story behind a plaque on one of the town’s three bridges honoring Varacalli. (The anecdote gets a mention in Bellissima’s 2011 obituary in the Finger Lake Times). As Caracillo tells it, Seneca Falls barber Tom Bellissima once claimed that in 1945, he cut the hair of a stranger who identified himself as Frank Capra. But as the keeper of the Frank Capra archives at Wesleyan University in Connecticut-and as a close friend of the director-she believes this notion is “utter nonsense.” She has found no evidence of a Seneca Falls connection in Capra’s diaries or in the film’s voluminous production materials the garrulous director never mentioned any such link to her, either in private conversations or in classroom visits with her students.īut then there’s the matter of Antonio Varacalli. Grimes, for one, is a believer: “It has the Victorian houses, a canal that runs right through town, a steel bridge, the railroad station it’s all there.”īasinger does not like to be cast in the role of Mr. Though Fran Caracillo, Seneca Falls’ former city planner, had long noticed similarities between his hometown and Bedford Falls, it wasn’t until December of 1995 that Craig Fox, a reporter for the Geneva, NY-based Finger Lake Times, wrote a story indicating that the real town had inspired the cinematic one. 9 to 11, is the biggest yet: three of the four Bailey kids will be there, including Grimes, Jimmy Hawkins (Tommy) and Carol Coombs (Janie). As befits a 70th anniversary, this year’s three-day fest, from Dec. For the past 20 years, Seneca Falls has hosted a celebration of both the film and the town’s possible place in its legend. Which brings us to Seneca Falls, New York, the small town that inspired Frank Capra’s vision of quaint Bedford Falls. It feels authentic to those of us who grew up in those places.
#ITS WONDERFUL LIFE MOVIE#
And this movie captures something in its ozone. That’s the way Frank Capra designed it: “Anybody who grew up in a small town in the 1940s can easily believe that Bedford Falls is their hometown,” Basinger said. George and Mary Bailey, played by Donna Reed, mid-embrace after receiving news via a phone call from Sam.