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.
It's a Wonderful Life — Trailer
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