Henry Potter Gets His Due

National Review Online, December 22, 2001

He is, of course, the original H. Potter, a silver-screen legend long before young Harry was even a twinkle in a witch's eye. You know him better, perhaps, as "Mister Potter," stern-browed, stentorian, scowling and shrewd, the true star of that annual tryst for our tear ducts, Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Forget, for a while, ingratiating George Bailey, batty Uncle Billy, and Zuzu's precious petals. This Christmas, why not focus instead on Mr. Capra's greatest creation, Henry Potter (no one called him Harry), the J. P. Morgan of Bedford Falls, a Main Street mogul with an empire to build? Played by Lionel Barrymore with a savage gusto, Potter is a titan among pygmies, a force of nature so overwhelming that, despite his wheelchair (in real life, tragically, Barrymore suffered from a disabling form of arthritis) no one else has a chance. We catch our first sight of him early in the movie, clattering along in an old-fashioned coach and horses. It is a glimpse of glory.

"Who is that," asks Clarence the angel, "a king?"

It is an understandable mistake, but the reply (from a more senior seraph) reveals the terrible truth.

"That's Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the county".

If It's A Wonderful Life is the New World's answer to A Christmas Carol, then Potter is its Scrooge, but he is a very American Scrooge, bigger, badder, and bolder than his cold-crabbed counterpart across the Atlantic. To start with, he likes a bit of luxury. Potter will spend money, so long as it is on himself. From what we read about Scrooge, we know that he was prepared to lavish little on heating ("[he] had a very small fire") and not much on accommodation ("a gloomy suite of rooms" in an office building, apparently). Potter, by contrast lives in some splendor. He employs a manservant and dresses stylishly. In his office there is a large bust of Napoleon. Potter is a man who likes to dream.

We never discover the full extent of his business activities, but it is obvious that, locally, he is the economically dominant figure ("This town is no place for any man unless he is prepared to crawl to Potter") and it has to be admitted (although in Capra's biased script no one ever does) that, with the help of his wealth, Bedford Falls has become a pleasant, if slightly dull place. These days this crippled Croesus would be praised as a role model and profiled in People as an inspiration to the "physically challenged." Without even the help of the ADA, Potter has triumphed over disability and made a large fortune. He is a lender of last resort, and, for some poorer citizens, a landlord. Of course there are complaints about the standards of his rental property, but what tenant does not like to grumble?

He is not, it is clear, overly sentimental ("I am an old man and most people hate me, but I don't like them either, so that makes it even"). A Rumsfeld in a Rockwell town, Potter is not a man to mince words. References to the "rabble" and the need for working-class thrift would point to politics that are reassuringly conservative if not exactly compassionate. His approach to commerce is sound. Charity and business should not be muddled up, credit must be checked and loans repaid. Like Warren Buffett, he is a longer term, contrarian investor, prepared even (at a price) to back Bedford Falls' failing banks in a moment of crisis. Unlike Scrooge he will reward a potentially valuable hire. The deal Potter offered George Bailey, $20,000 a year for three years, was extraordinarily generous, unthinkable from miserly Ebenezer, an employer who begrudged his clerk a lump of coal. Given the opportunity, in that alternative timeline where George Bailey never lived, the energetic and enterprising Potter even manages to transform his sleepy hometown from a PBS sort of place into a WB city, the glamorous, glittering Pottersville, a Yankee Las Vegas complete with Midnight Club (Dancing!), Bamboo Room (Cocktails!), and burlesque (20 gorgeous girls!).

George Bailey, however, did exist, and Pottersville is never to be. Quite why the survival, under his control, of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan should have made such a difference is never made clear. Potter's financial strength cannot have been dependent on the income derived from renting to the likes of Giuseppe Martini, so losses to competition from George's Levittown, the immodestly named Bailey Park, seem unlikely to blame. Perhaps this mystery is to be expected. There is no room for economic logic in a fairy tale or, for that matter, the operations of Bailey Brothers. The building and loan is as much Barnum as it is Bailey. It appears to flourish despite a limited capital base (a shortfall of $8,000, ultimately, is enough to cause a near terminal crisis), nepotism, commingling of personal and bank funds, and a staff that appears to consist only of a bird and a birdbrain as well as Cousin Eustace the shock-haired clerk, a secretary (another cousin, naturally), and, of course, George Bailey himself.

Now George, it is true, is not quite as bland as is sometimes claimed. There are moments of redeeming vice. He is a grown man who picks up a girl at a high-school dance and then tries to impress her with an act of petty vandalism at the old Granville house. This night of shame reaches its dismal nadir when Bailey threatens to leave his date undressed in a shrubbery, a potential public humiliation that would have had terrible consequences in such a small community. Running through the movie there is also the question of uxorious George's curiously ambiguous relationship with Violet Bick, the woman who put the fallen in Bedford Falls, culminating in the occasion when he offers the hussy a "loan" to get out of town. But, these peccadilloes apart, George Bailey is unquestionably a fine fellow, dutiful, decent, and a lifesaver, a Clark Kent without the cape, a modest hero for a straightforward age. It is a testimony to the power of Capra's good guy that, more than 50 disillusioning years later, we are still rooting for him to win.

But not without a backwards glance at old Potter, cruel but compelling, appalling yet attractive, a man who doesn't really need the assistance of trick furniture to dominate his every encounter with George Bailey. His charisma is an old, but effective, cliché. For the most part, as viewers of the bin Laden video were recently reminded, wrongdoers are rather dull, pedestrian types, but whether it is Milton's Lucifer or Oliver Stone's Gekko, the vibrant fascinating villain has become a stock character, a rationalization, perhaps, of our tendency to give in to evil's temptations.

Frank Capra himself seems to have succumbed to his creation's wicked allure. For, while the director does show the financier's descent into outright criminality (the theft of the $8,000 left lying around by Uncle Billy), this squalid behavior seems to bring Mr. Potter little in the way of adverse consequences. Although thwarted in this final attempt to ruin the building and loan, Potter survives the movie unscathed. He gets to keep the $8,000 and unlike the craven Scrooge, he remains proud and unrepentant.

There will, it is clear, be no turkeys from Henry F. Potter for the Cratchits of Bedford Falls.