There’s no avoiding the fact that a holiday movie is doomed to be heartwarming in the same way that pianos falling from roofs are doomed to impact the pavement with a giant crash and splintered keys flying everywhere. But smarter holiday movies have learned from Dickens how to walk the fine line between human darkness and heartwarming, the balancing act out of which enduring pathos is formed, cheesy as it may be.

It’s a Wonderful Life probably would not have the cultural scope it does today if not for a rights issue that enabled it to be broadcast over and over again, but it negotiated that balancing act almost perfectly. And once a cultural landmark is planted, it’s revisionism time all over again. Wendell Jameson in the New York Times interviews just about everybody who had nothing to do with the movie, including his elementary school teacher and a distract attorney from upstate New York. But nothing he comes up with is all that interesting or original.

Of course It’s a Wonderful Life is a basically downbeat story, grounded in enough realism about human life, that it makes the treacle, when it comes, go down all the smoother. And then there’s the conflict between the movie as envisioned by Frank Capra, and a complicated production process involving multiple scripts and writers. But the success of It’s A Wonderful Life the movie after its crashing failure on release provides a kind of real life testament to the sort of turnaround that the movie’s plot embodies.