“So mincing as to border on baby talk.”—A review in the New Yorker when the movie first came out

Some people assume that It’s a Wonderful Life was a hit from the beginning. Not so. The movie released in December 1946 with great expectations. Life magazine gave it a six-page spread. Newsweek put it on its cover. It was rushed into theaters before year’s end because it was thought that would increase its chances for winning an Academy Award come spring 1947. It did not win any Oscars. Its box-office returns were soft. And though it did win some five-star reviews, it was also scorned by many of the leftist publications.

“So mincing as to border on baby talk,” wrote the New Yorker.”Henry Travers, God help him, has the job of portraying Mr. Stewart’s guardian angel. It must have taken a lot out of him.”

Wrote a New Republic reviewer: “Hollywood’s Horatio Alger fights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the Saturday Evening Post covers of Norman Rockwell.”

“For all its characteristic humors, Mr. Capra’s Wonderful Life…is a figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes,” wrote the New York Times.

Ouch.

Reviewers seemed to either love it or loathe it. Business dropped off sharply after the holidays. RKO Pictures lost $525,000 on the film. In the 1946-47 season, it ranked only twenty-seventh among the hundreds of films released. The company that produced it fell into financial ruin and ultimately liquidation. “The film itself,” wrote John McDonough for the Wall Street Journal in 1984, “became an orphan, and passed from one corporate foster parent to another…They all ignored it.”

And yet it is now considered by many to be the best Christmas movie of all time. The movie is on nearly every top-movie list ever compiled, eleventh on the much-respected American Film Institute’s Top 100 American Films of the 20th Century.

Although it was rarely watched in the 1950s and 1960s, it rebounded in the mid-1970s. Why? Because no one remembered to renew its copyright. It went into public domain, its exclusive commercial worth irretrievably lost.

And what did that do? It infused the movie with new life. Suddenly, any television station that wanted to show the movie could do so without charge. And that’s exactly what they did. It was as if a guardian angel—television—breathed life back into a movie that, like George Bailey, had lost a sense of self-worth.

Now it’s undeniably among the most beloved movies ever. In September 2011, its title triggered 34.6 million hits on Google. Its online fan clubs are still going strong—six decades after the movie came out to so many bad reviews and low boxoffice returns.

The lesson, of course, is that, like movies, sometimes people take time to fully blossom, to reach their potential, to “find themselves.” The apostle Paul comes to mind. So does John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace.” He was a slave trader until, at age twenty-three, he realized his wretchedness and converted to Christ.

How we begin in life isn’t necessarily how we must end. Sometimes it just takes time for a particular flower to bloom.