Holiday movies are always big at the box office, and over the years, Hollywood has given us some magic Christmastime movies: Home Alone, The Bishop's Wife, numerous versions of A Christmas Carol, and Miracle on 34th Street.
But in 1946, the year America was recovering from World War II, a couple of war veterans — Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra — joined forces with a composer who had provided Capra with music for a documentary, Why We Fight. That composer was Dimitri Tiomkin; Stewart, Capra and Tiomkin all got together to make It's a Wonderful Life.
The film was shot in the summer of 1946; however, sometime before its release at Christmas 1946, the score was overhauled, and very little of Tiomkin's original score survived.
There was a really neat CD that came out a few years ago on Telarc that features the score to It's a Wonderful Life, including those lost cues of Dmitri Tiomkin.
On this week's Flicks in Five we'll hear the finale that Tiomkin had originally imagined would conclude this iconic holiday film.
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