View from the bridge

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Impossible to watch this this time around without thinking of what I'm currently reading, Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, who, like George Bailey, was determined to shake the dust of his crummy little hometown (New Haven, in Moses's case) and build big, amazing things in a big, amazing world. So is Moses, who is responsible for most of the parks and bridges and roads of New York City and Long Island--and for the destruction of neighborhoods and other environments that his sometimes myopic vision demanded--simply George Bailey without a Mary Hatch to keep him from his dream? That would make this story a little less depressing.