“…and that idiot brother of yours” The Uncle Billy Problem in “It’s a Wonderful Life”

We watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” each year, just like millions of other folks out there. There’s been no shortage of essays written on this holiday classic that stiffed at the box office when initially released in 1946. According to a December 2022 article posted on the site Digital Spy,

Bank of America's archival records show that the company borrowed $1.54 million to make the movie, directed by studio co-founder Frank Capra, on a budget of $2.3 million.
It's a Wonderful Life was released in cinemas in December 1946 (pushing it up a month from January 1947 so it would be eligible for Oscars nominations) to a disastrous turnout. By the end of its run, it recorded a $525,000 loss for the studio.

However, what saved the film from obscurity was in the mid-1970s it fell out of copyright protection and into the public domain. So, TV stations were free to broadcast the film without paying royalties. So, part of the reason why the movie has been seen by so many folks over the decades is that it was so cheap to exhibit. These days, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a holiday classic, but it was never really meant to be a holiday film. Indeed, if you look at the story, it’s mostly about a guy whose desire to wipe the dust of his small town off his feet and explore the world was thwarted at many key points in his life.

One of the obstacles that get in the way of George’s ambitions is his uncle, William “Billy” Bailey. Billy, by all counts, is a loser. He can’t keep a job without his brother Peter or George carrying him, is absent-minded to the point of almost having a disability, and is often drunk. When the wealthiest guy in Bedford Falls — the supposedly evil, but often prescient — Mr. Potter confronts Peter Bailey about delinquent payments on loans and why he hasn’t foreclosed on those who were behind in their payments, Peter Bailey asks Potter to be charitable to those who have fallen on hard times. However, Potter is a business guy who wants money that’s contractually owed to him (as an investor of the Bailey Building and Loan, Potter has skin in the game with the Bailey’s business and uses his position as a way to keep tabs on his investments, but also looking for opportunities to close the place because, well, it’s competing with his slice of the action in town). Peter Bailey tries to reason with Potter asking for a thirty-day extension so he can find $5,000 to pay Potter and others who expect returns on their investments.

                                     POTTER
                         Then foreclose!

                                     BAILEY
                         I can't do that. These families have 
                         children.

               MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT – POTTER AND BAILEY

                                     GEORGE
                         Pop!

                                     POTTER
                         They're not my children.

                                     BAILEY
                         But they're somebody's children.

                                     POTTER
                         Are you running a business or a 
                         charity ward?

                                     BAILEY
                         Well, all right...

                                     POTTER
                              (interrupting)
                         Not with my money!

               CLOSE SHOT – POTTER AND BAILEY

                                     BAILEY
                         Mr. Potter, what makes you such a 
                         hardskulled character? You have no 
                         family – no children. You can't begin 
                         to spend all the money you've got.

                                     POTTER
                         So I suppose I should give it to 
                         miserable failures like you and that 
                         idiot brother of yours to spend for 
                         me.

Potter is harsh, but he often cuts to the chase to reveal the truth about a person or situation. Prior to the confrontation with Potter, a young George Bailey ducks into the office to ask his father’s advice on what he should do about his employer who accidentally puts poison in pills that were supposed to be for a customer suffering from diphtheria. Young George doesn’t like Potter laying into his dad, but it’s the scene before George enters the office where we see the Uncle Billy problem: His cousin/receptionist Tilly reminds him of a telephone call he’s supposed to be on. It’s from a “bank examiner” — a meeting he clearly forgot about. Billy even has little strings tied to his fingers to remind him of important things like a meeting with a bank examiner, but they are mostly reminders of how absent-minded he is.

Clearly, the Baileys look out for each other as everyone in the office is a Bailey family member. Cousin Tilly appears to be a very competent employee who can see around corners others can’t. Cousin Eustace kind of suffers from confidence, but seems able to count money without any issues. But Billy? My God, the guy is a walking advertisement for bankruptcy. Clearly, Peter is doing the best he can with the crew he has. His compassion for those who have fallen on hard times is admirable, but it’s not the kind of attitude to run a successful business — especially one where the profit margins are so small that there’s very little wiggle room when it comes to financial decisions.

When George becomes an adult, he works with his father at the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan Association all the while saving money so he can travel to Europe, then go to college, then get a degree, and become a civil engineer so he can build “modern cities.” Well, that dream gets quashed when his dad asks if he’d like to work at the Building and Loan permanently — presumably because George was pretty good at running things. When George tries to get out of his dad’s offer by kind of insulting the family business, his dad gets it: George is out, so there’s no hope of keeping this thing going. Billy’s incompetence is implied by the fact that his dad never mentions that he and Billy can manage things while George goes to Europe. And Harry (George’s younger brother) is given a pass when Peter says he’s “pretty young for that job.” Harry is another problem in this story, but focusing on Billy is key to showing how keeping him on with the Building and Loan proved to be the worst decision George made after his father died from a stroke later that night.

At every inflection point, Billy can’t take the pressure. When the run on the bank happens after George and Mary got hitched, Billy’s response was to close the Building and Loan, hide in his office, and drink. When Harry gets back from college as a “Phi Beta Kappa All-American” and springs it on George that he won’t be running the Building and Loan because he got married and has an opportunity to be a researcher at his father-in-law’s glass factory, Billy revels in the news by falling comfortably into what truly makes him happy: eating, drinking, and partying. He brags to Ruth (Harry’s new wife) that they are “going to give the biggest party this town ever saw.” For a guy who can’t manage his business affairs, it’s a wonder where Billy will get the money to throw this party. Certainly, he has very little of it, so it’ll likely come from George — which it appears it does.

All of these “Uncle Billy moments” leads to the biggest blunder he makes: losing $8,000 on his way to deposit it in the bank — a bank owned by Potter. This is where Potter shows himself as less of a soothsayer and more of a common crook. Potter knows that Billy is an idiot, so idiotic that Billy can’t even remember that he was counting the money in the bank prior to absent-mindedly folding it into a newspaper that Potter was reading and handing it back to him. Potter holds all the cards now to destroy the Bailey Building and Loan, but it’s almost absurd that George trusted the idiotic Billy to make a deposit this big in the first place. I mean, Billy is a guy who can’t remember anything important, has strings tied to his fingers as reminders, and yet is put in charge of one the most important deposits the company is making; a deposit that will be part of an audit by a bank examiner who is waiting at the Building and Loan offices to look over Bailey’s yearly receipts. Why George, Tilly, or Eustace ever trusted Billy with such a job seems unconscionable. But, people make mistakes, and the Bailey’s mistake is that they kept Billy employed at the business…for as long as they did.

Even in the alternate universe where George sees what life is like in Bedford Falls (now known as Pottersville) if he’d never been born is not that different when it comes to Billy. When George’s alternate universe mother says that Billy’s “been in the insane asylum ever since he lost his business,” it’s a fairly consistent arc we see in the non-bizarre-o universe. And what I mean by that is if George hadn’t stayed on to work at the Building and Loan when his father died, Billy would have gone crazy with the responsibility of running the business. He always seemed to be teetering on the edge of insanity, and a turning point like George bolting for college would have been the death knell for both the Bailey Building and Loan and Billy’s sanity.

So, while every story needs conflict to drive the plot, George Bailey could have saved himself from possible suicide and ruin if he had just found a way to get Billy to retire from the business, forced Harry to work in it, and used some of Potter’s business acumen to beat him at his own game. Sure, it would have been a different movie, but every time I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Uncle Billy problem is one that makes me wonder why no one — except Potter — could see Billy for what he is. Ah well, charity begins at home, and George was very charitable to Billy. Even when the townsfolk came to is aid by offering cash to close the $8,000 deficit that Billy created, it wasn’t Billy who spearheaded the bailout. It was George’s wife, Mary who called Billy to find out what was wrong with George. Mary was the one who “told a few people” George was in trouble, and “they scattered all over town collecting money.” Who were “they?” All the people George helped through the years; all but one: Uncle Billy.