It's a Wonderful (and Dark) Life

George Bailey (James Stewart) finds himself in the
film noir world of Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."

It’s a Wonderful Life (1947, Liberty Films)

Starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore,

Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Gloria Grahame;

Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra;

Directed by Frank Capra

This is one of the few films that you safely can assume most Americans have seen. When the copyright for this Christmas staple mistakenly wasn’t renewed in the 1970s, any TV station could broadcast “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and it seemed like all of them did.

That said, here’s a rundown of the basics: George Bailey (James Stewart) has a great wife, Mary (Donna Reed), several cute kids and the respect of nearly every citizen of Bedford Falls. But an $8,000 blunder by his Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) gives greedy bad guy Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) the opportunity to shut down Bailey Bros. Building and Loan and to have George arrested. This unhinges George, who gets drunk before plowing his car into a tree. He then heads for a bridge, where he plans to end it all because he thinks everyone would be better off without him.

Violet (Gloria Grahame) tries
to get George Bailey's attention.

But the townsfolk’s prayers are answered and Angel Second Class Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers) is dispatched to convince George he is valued by showing him how charming Bedford Falls would have become nasty Pottersville if he’d never been born. Having done that, George runs home to find friends and family chipping in to raise the money needed to keep him out of jail, which provides the tear-producing happy ending.

The story’s demonstration of how one person matters in the greater scheme of things is what keeps viewers coming back each Christmas. However, all isn’t sweetness and light. During the majority of the film’s final 30 minutes, George is thrown into the film noir world that Pottersville represents.

This section of the movie has many features that mark the film noir genre and style. It spotlights a tortured protagonist plunged into a universe where nightmares come true and where fate always finds him. It shows scenes of a neon-lit city at night, and its pool halls and drinking joints crowded with a sketchy clientele.

Adding to the film noir feel is a cast populated by actors who made their marks in the genre. At the top of the list is Stewart, who later shoved his good-guy persona aside when he went over to the dark side in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” “Rear Window” and “Vertigo.” Barrymore (“Key Largo”) and Ward Bond (Bert the cop, “The Maltese Falcon”) appeared with Humphrey Bogart in a pair of film noir classics.

Another element of film noir evident here is the concept of the good woman contrasted with the not-so-good woman. In this case, Mary is held up as a paragon of virtue while flirty Violet (Gloria Grahame) is portrayed as easy in Bedford Falls and worse in Pottersville. Grahame strengthens the film’s noir credentials because she later became one of the quintessential femmes fatale in such classics as “Human Desire” and “The Big Heat.”

The trip to Pottersville was the flip side of the feel-good story that dominates the film and was the reality of the world forming outside the little town. Unlike in film noir, however, this protagonist escapes and discovers how wonderful life is, which also is a great Christmas present for us all. 

Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell, far left) and citizens of Bedford Falls
 join Mary (Donna Reed) and George for the heartwarming ending of "It's a Wonderful Life."

A House of Luxury Reborn

Lawyer and business executive Willis McCook wanted a new home for his large family, and $300,000 got him the above Jacobean mansion on Fifth Avenue in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh in 1906.

Located on Pittsburgh’s “Millionaires Row,” the mansion contained plenty of handcrafted woodwork, stained glass windows and even its own chapel.

Born in Ohio in 1856, McCook graduated from Yale, where he was captain of the university’s first football team, and studied law with a Pittsburgh firm and at Columbia University before joining the Allegheny County Bar in 1876.

McCook was a pioneer in corporate law and the personal attorney for industrialist Henry Clay Frick. McCook helped form coke companies for Frick and served as his attorney in a protracted lawsuit against Andrew Carnegie. The legal fees the attorney collected from that grudge match helped to pay for McCook’s mansion.

Scandal touched the McCook family in early 1911 when Willis Jr., one of McCook’s 10 children, ignored his parents’ objections and eloped with Margaret Norris, the daughter of a poor carpenter, and married her in Cumberland, MD.

The Catholic McCooks’ objections were centered on the bride’s Presbyterian faith. Both families initially disowned the couple, and young Willis was forced to find employment at the Pittsburgh Steel Company in Glassport.

The elder McCook eventually relented and offered his forgiveness – and his financial support – in exchange for Margaret’s conversion to Catholicism. She complied in February 1911.

The measure of McCook’s national fame was displayed by the coverage the New York Times gave to this episode.

McCook had a happier time when his daughter, Bessie, became engaged and he built a Tudor mansion for the young couple on Amberson Avenue, around the corner from his mansion. The house, now known as the McCook-Reed Mansion, was completed in 1905, a year before the main house.

The family lived in the house until the late 1930s, but the Great Depression took its toll on the McCook fortune and the city of Pittsburgh took possession in lieu of  $65,000 in back taxes.

Emil and Margaret Bonavita bought the property in 1949 and for 50 years it housed Carnegie Mellon University students. Residents included Shirley Jones, George Peppard and Andy Warhol. A February 2004 fire on the third floor ended the house’s time as student housing.

Richard Pearson, his wife Mary Del Brady and a group of investors bought the McCook Mansion for $1.4 million in 2005 with the intent of turning the mansion and the adjoining McCook-Reed Mansion into a boutique hotel.

After six years and about $8 million were spent bringing historic McCook Mansion back to its original condition when possible, the Mansions on Fifth opened in 2011. It has 13 rooms, including two suites; a 1,000-square-foot presidential suite; a small bar; a fitness room; a spa and a wine cellar.

The McCook-Reed Mansion is still undergoing renovations.

The Mansions on Fifth was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April 2011.

Visit Mansions on Fifth for information. Click HERE for photos taken before renovations began.

The McCook-Reed Mansion in 2011

Christopher Magee Memorial

Although Christopher Magee, the boss of the Pittsburgh political machine during the Gilded Age, and his partner William Flynn were called the most corrupt politicians in the country by muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, Magee still managed to receive a memorial, which stands outside the Carnegie Library's Main Branch in Oakland.

In his book “Pittsburgh: A New Portrait,” Pitt professor Franklin Toker writes that Magee's help in getting city land for the library probably explains its erection and dedication in 1908.

It also didn’t hurt when Magee, who also was the transit baron of Pittsburgh, came to Andrew Carnegie’s aid again when he offered a cabbage farm he owned for the site of Carnegie Technical School, now Carnegie Mellon University.

However, according to Toker, the powers that be — possibly Carnegie  himself — vetoed the addition of a bust of Magee to the monument.

Noted architect Stanford White designed the base. But after White's 1906 murder at the hands of crazed Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw at New York’s Madison Square Garden, it was left to Henry Bacon, who later was the architect of the Lincoln Memorial, to execute White’s design.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the creator of the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, the Sherman monument in New York and the nude statue of Diana on the tower of White’s Madison Square Garden that scandalized Manhattan, designed the bronze relief.

Unfortunately, both Magee and Saint-Gaudens were dead before the monument’s dedication July 4, 1908. Henry Hering, Saint-Gaudens’ longtime assistant, completed the work.

A 2008 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story published for the memorial’s centennial offers more information about Magee and Saint-Gaudens, whose studio and home in Cornish, N.H., is a National Historic Site. 

The Christopher Magee Memorial
features lines from Shakespeare's
"The Merchant of Venice."

No Happy Ending for Bogart

Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame)
share a touching moment on the beach in "In a Lonely Place."

In a Lonely Place (1950, Columbia)

Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame,

Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid;

Screenplay by Andrew Solt; Directed by Nicholas Ray

Screen legend Humphrey Bogart gave magnificent performances in a number of iconic films, such as “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Big Sleep,” “The African Queen,” and, of course, “Casablanca.” His portrayal of Dixon “Dix” Steele in “In a Lonely Place” deserves to be among them.

An often dark story about a man who pays a terrible price because of his inner demons, “In a Lonely Place” also shines a less-than-flattering light on Hollywood and celebrity in a film powered more by character development than plot.

Dix is an antisocial, down-and-out screenwriter whose violent tendencies are displayed shortly after the credits end when he gets out of his car to fight another motorist. They turned up again a few minutes later when he punches a bar patron. Although he hasn’t had a hit screenplay “since before the war,” Dix bristles when his agent brings him an offer to write a script based on a trashy novel.

That doesn’t stop him from bringing home a hatcheck girl to tell him the plot of the novel so he doesn’t have to read it, however. When she’s found dead the next morning, the police take Dix downtown. Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), his neighbor across the courtyard, lifts the suspicion briefly when she tells detectives she saw the hatcheck girl leave Dix’s apartment that night. But despite an attempt by his cop friend Brub (Frank Lovejoy) to take some of the heat off of him, Brub’s captain (Carl Benton Reid) believes Dix is guilty and works hard to get the proof.

In many films, that plot line would be center stage. But here it takes a backseat to the love story that grows between Laurel and Dix. She tempers Dix’s dark side, takes care of him and becomes his muse as he writes a script that towers above its source material. The lovely Laurel inspires him to write this line: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me,” which I dare anyone to top.

But pressure from the police investigation begins to ignite his temper and Dix reverts to his old self. Those episodes prompt Laurel to believe that Dix is capable of murder, and she begins to fear that soon she will be a target of his wrath. It all culminates in one of the saddest film endings ever, one that touched me personally because my own demons cost me the love of a good woman as well.

As good as Bogart is, the quality of Grahame’s performance matches his. Known mostly for femme fatale roles in film noir, she is wonderful in the role of the sympathetic Laurel because she also makes the bitter Dix sympathetic. Even though you know their love is doomed, it’s hard not to root for things to work out.

I know I did.

Pardon me, boy, is that the Pennsylvania Station?

In 1898, Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and brother of painter Mary Cassatt, commissioned Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham to design a station/hotel/office building to serve Pittsburgh.

Burnham, a skyscraper pioneer who created the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, and supervised the "White City" of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, designed this classic structure for Cassatt and the PRR.

The finest feature of Union Station, which was completed in 1903, is the elaborately styled rotunda that sheltered passengers dismounting from their carriages.

Above is a view of the rotunda and its skylight. Below is a design element inside the rotunda that features Pittsburg with its missing "h," which was removed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names in 1891. It was restored in 1911.

The building was converted to apartments and ground-floor office space in the mid-1980s, and a rudimentary station serves Amtrak.

The rotunda entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 while the entire building joined in 1976. Both also have been recognized by the Pittsburgh History and Landmark Foundation.

For more on Burnham's fascinating career, see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham

A Romance for all Time

It Happened One Night (1934, Columbia)

Starring Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly;
Screenplay by Robert Riskin; Directed by Frank Capra

Romantic comedies have been a staple for decades because the usual plot of boy and girl who “meet cute,” struggle through difficulty and find themselves together for the mandated happy ending, is timeless. From There’s Something About Mary to Sleepless in Seattle to just about every movie with Drew Barrymore, audiences still enjoy these films. Those titles, as well as hundreds of others, owe a huge debt to a nearly 80-year-old film, It Happened One Night, which helped launch the genre and quite possibly is the best example of it.

Spoiled rich girl Ellen Andrews (Colbert) runs away from her father (Connolly) by diving into Miami harbor and swimming to shore, where she meets cynical reporter Peter Warne (Gable) on a bus leaving Miami for New York. They take an instant dislike to each other, but when he discovers Ellen’s identity, Peter offers to shepherd her to New York and to her “front-page phony” husband if she gives him an exclusive story.

Most of the movie from this point on details the mishaps and escapades the couple fall into as they make their way up the East Coast. In the process, Ellen’s exposure to regular people and real situations brings her down to earth. Peter sees this happening, which causes him to soften his prickly attitude toward Ellen. They even collaborate to throw the detectives sent by Ellen’s father to find her off the scent by staging a loud shouting match between “a plumber’s daughter” and her “husband.”

Of course, Ellen and Peter eventually find themselves falling in love, until a misunderstanding tears them apart and pushes her into the arms of her smarmy husband. At a lavish formal wedding (they had first been married by a justice of the peace), Ellen’s father talks up Peter as he escorts his daughter toward the altar. Before the “I Wills” are exchanged, she flees the outdoor altar and speeds away toward a reunion with Peter.

Again, it’s a very familiar scenario for us, but the execution here is so nearly perfect that few RomComs have ever come close. The writing is superb, the dialog sparkling and witty, Gable is the perfect man’s man to make it work, and Colbert pulled off the tough task of making the snooty woman likable. Although he had only four weeks for filming, Capra brought it all together so well that the film attracted Oscars for Gable (his only win), Colbert, Riskin, Capra and the prize for best picture.

Some might be put off by the age of the film, and there are parts that are rooted in the time it was produced. But this tale of two people who find love in an unusual, and very funny, situation will never grow old.

Schenley Farms

As part of developer Franklin Nicola’s plans for Oakland that I touched on in the previous post on the Schenley Hotel/William Pitt Union, he desired a residential district that would fit his vision. He got it with Schenley Farms

The area is chock-full of well-maintained, early twentieth-century domestic structures that feature a variety of architectural styles, such as the above-pictured Tudor.

Nicola insisted that the homes laid out on wide streets named for British and American literary figures be well-crafted, including 13-inch thick brick walls, and plenty of attention was paid to the slightest detail. Beautiful wooden floors and wainscoting, as well as a finished basement, were part of the houses designed by the cream of Pittsburgh architects.

Modern conveniences also were part of Nicola’s strategy to attract the middle-class buyers who were his targets. The plumbing was state of the art and every structure had refrigerators with an entrance door connected to a porch (to keep the iceman from walking through the house), four telephones, lighting fixtures that used both gas and electricity, and a central vacuum cleaner system.

One of the best innovations was Nicola’s insistence that wires be buried and not hung overhead as is still the custom today. For those buying the houses, Nicola saw the buried wires as a way to save on insurance. But I’m sure all who have lived in the them through the years have appreciated that the visual beauty of the neighborhood wasn’t marred by those wires.

Bigelow Boulevard, once called Grant Boulevard, provides a City Beautiful-inspired buffer between the residential area and the civic and educational sections that make up the Schenley Farms Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

For a glimpse into a more genteel past and to see gracious homes that would take the price of two or three McMansions to re-create and that have many times more charm, take a walk down these leafy streets.

Here is an elevated view of Schenley Farms I captured from
the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning.