An Antidote To ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’

Yes, we all want to believe “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but what if our lives are less than wonderful?

What if we live not in the Christmas-card setting of Bedford Falls, like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, but in a grimy city where that sound of crunching underfoot emanates not from fresh snow but from a spent pint bottle nesting in its brown paper bag? What if lovable old mom and dad are angrily divorced? What if Mary, the dreamy girl-next-door, is a nut case?

This year, some filmmakers at Comedy Central, a cable TV network, were so fed up with Frank Capra’s franchise on Christmas entertainment that they took matters into their own hands by dubbing new dialogue onto a reshuffled print of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

George was transformed into a literally gay blade buying cocaine at Gower’s drugstore; even Ernie the friendly cabby started barking like Robert DeNiro in “Taxi Driver.”

Alas, the sometimes riotous result - titled “Escape From a Wonderful Life” and slipped to me by a bootlegging elf - has been relegated to a Comedy Central shelf after corporate types said bah, humbug to the idea.

A parody of “It’s a Wonderful Life” may not be the antidote to the original anyway.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Capra film’s premiere. Isn’t it past time for those of us who feel left out of the permanently roseate postwar glow of Bedford Falls to have a sincere, unsoppy yuletide fable of our own?

There are, in fact, urban American Christmas tales being created all the time for those of us with less-than-wonderful lives.

The past year or so alone has brought “Rent,” in which the Christmas-carol-crooning angel is a dying East Village transvestite named Angel, and Oscar Hijuelos’ novel “Mr. Ives’ Christmas,” which tells of a New York advertising illustrator who finds charity in his heart even after his beloved son is murdered on Christmas Day.

But the ideal alternative to “It’s a Wonderful Life” would be another black-and-white Hollywood classic that can be rented tonight just as everyone else’s excess of Capraesque good cheer is about to send you into that annual holiday depression.

I’m glad to report that such a movie exists - as half-forgotten now as “It’s a Wonderful Life” was before TV audiences rediscovered it in the 1970s.

The movie is “The Apartment,” made in 1960 by Billy Wilder, a director to be prized as much (if not more) for his misanthropy as Capra is for his faux populism.

“The Apartment” even shares certain features with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” from its Christmas Eve climax and last-reel chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” to its earnest young hero (Jack Lemmon), cute-as-a-button heroine (Shirley MacLaine) and businessman Scrooge (an insurance company executive played by Fred MacMurray, in lieu of the nasty Mr. Potter).

But Wilder’s characters live in cramped apartments in an icy Manhattan, not in well-kept homes in a suburban winter wonderland. They work in the intimidating glass skyscrapers of Sixth Avenue, battle the flu all December and turn mean and indiscreet after having too much to drink at the office holiday party.

When a woman discovers that the mirror in her compact is cracked, she doesn’t mind because “it makes me look the way I feel.” Not long after that she, like Capra’s hero, flirts with suicide.

Where is the Christmas spirit in “The Apartment”?

Well, we do meet Kriss Kringle - though in the form of a belligerent off-duty department-store Santa closing down a midtown saloon. There’s also a tableau of happy children opening presents under a glittering Christmas tree - though you can’t help but notice that their parents barely speak to each other.

This is too close to real life, unwonderful though it may be, and it’s hard to imagine that a holiday miracle is in store for this film’s inhabitants as one is for the good folks of Bedford Falls.

But “The Apartment” has its own route to a traditional seasonal conclusion that testifies to the selfless generosity of a good Samaritan (or, as Wilder calls him, a “mensch,”) the persistence of faith and the power of love.

If Christmas can happen for these miserable New Yorkers, none of them fit to carry the angelic George Bailey’s coat, you at least have to entertain the possibility that Christmas can happen for you, too.