In search of Bedford Falls and the spirit of Christmas

For five days every December, the signs that mark the border of the upstate New York town of Seneca Falls are quietly overlaid with new lettering. Workers at the post office dust off stamps reserved for use just once a year and emblazon outbound mail with the name of a town that cannot be found on any map. Shopkeepers and bar owners hang new placards in their windows, becoming “Nick’s”, “Ma Bailey’s” and “Martini’s”. 

Just before thousands of visitors descend on its brick-built main street, Seneca Falls completes its charmed transformation. In the centre of town, a white wooden sign tells arrivals: “You are now in Bedford Falls.” 

Bedford Falls is fictional, the all-American town where Frank Capra set his Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Yet Seneca Falls, five hours north of New York City in the Finger Lakes, lays claim to being the “real” Bedford Falls.

Each December, the town’s It’s a Wonderful Life festival celebrates this claim. Surviving cast members, fans of the film and those looking for a concentrated dose of Christmas cheer descend on Seneca Falls. There are meet-and-greets and autograph signings, film screenings (both black-and-white and colourised versions), a five-km race and lectures about niche topics such as the snow in the film (Capra refused to use the traditional cornflakes because they were too loud). Over the past 25 years, the event has grown in both size and duration.

No part of the 1946 movie was shot in Seneca Falls — the picture was filmed entirely in California. Nor did Capra ever mention Seneca Falls in any records the town has been able to recover.

If the original film brought comfort to difficult postwar days, perhaps this year’s festival feels especially needed after the pandemic

Indeed, Capra always denied that Bedford Falls was real. Seneca Falls has an answer to that: “Perhaps his silence was deliberate,” reads the Bedford Falls Sentinel, a local news bulletin produced specially for the festival. “Making it known that his set design was based on one place would have compromised its universal appeal. We just can’t know for sure.”

The most obvious similarity between Seneca and Bedford Falls is the steel truss bridge that stretches across the canal. That the film’s hero George Bailey, a disappointed dreamer played by Jimmy Stewart, jumps from the Bedford Falls bridge to save someone is another breadcrumb for the real town’s historians.

On the Seneca Falls bridge is a plaque dedicated to a young Italian labourer named Antonio Varacalli, who jumped from it in the freezing early spring of 1917 to save a teenage girl who had attempted suicide. Varacalli saved the girl, but himself drowned during the rescue.

There are more clues too; the film references other towns in upstate New York such as Buffalo and Rochester. But it was the testimony of a Sicilian barber called Tommy Bellissima that clinched the private suspicions of Seneca Falls’ residents — in 1945, Bellissima gave Frank Capra a haircut.

Bellissima remembered Capra because his surname, in Italian, means “goat”. Capra, already in development for the film, asked Bellissima about Seneca Falls, its people and, “What’s the story with Antonio and that bridge?” The town has corroborated that Capra was visiting family in New York state at the time.

But visitors say it is more than a set of clues and coincidences that brings them to Seneca Falls. It is sense of nostalgia, a feeling that this must be the place. When she first visited Seneca Falls, Karolyn Grimes, the actress who played George’s six-year-old daughter Zuzu, says she was a cynic. “But then it started to snow. I knew at that moment this was the town.”

In the film, it is George who is contemplating suicide on the bridge. The man he rescues from the water turns out to be his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, who proceeds to show him how different this small town would be if he had never been born. Thus George realises that his uneventful life has been worthwhile and decides he wants to live.

The ending may be happy, but the subject matter is dark for a Christmas film — as well as suicide, it deals with financial crises, loss and the agony of life not turning out as we had hoped.

The film, which is 75 years old this year, is the first that Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra made after returning home from the second world war. After its horrors, both felt ambivalent about creating films merely for entertainment. Stewart considered returning to rural Pennsylvania to take over his father’s hardware store. They wondered if it was possible to reach people in a meaningful way, to say something about the world. Then they found It’s a Wonderful Life, based on a short story called “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern, itself loosely based on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

It is the film’s darkness, Capra’s message that the beauty of life cannot exist without the bedfellows of pain and disappointment, that has cemented the movie into the hearts of so many fans, and draws thousands to Bedford Falls each December. And if the original film brought comfort to difficult postwar days, perhaps this year’s festival feels especially needed after the pandemic.

“We thought, let’s not put it off anymore,” says Nick Taranko, who had talked about attending the festival for years but never made the trip. The ritual of the film felt important: “The past two years have been so not normal, and the movie is a return to something normal. We need it. To move forward.”

Attendance has the hallmarks of a pilgrimage. Visitors want to touch the place that means so much to them, to make it real.

“People always tell you about their reason for coming,” says Diane McConnell, who runs Barrister’s bed and breakfast with her husband Ken. One guest had just finished his final round of chemo. Another had just lost a father. “A lot of people are coming with a heavy heart, hoping to be lifted up a little,” she says in her cosy chintz living room. For this week, they usually book up two years in advance.

Thursday morning of the festival began with a breakfast in the local church rectory, hosted by Karolyn Grimes. Guests ate “Zuzu’s gingersnaps” off paper plates. Among the audience was Jennifer Bennett, here for a bit of Christmas comfort, as well as distraction; the next day was the first anniversary of her husband’s death. Watching the film together on Christmas Eve had been their tradition.

What the film means to her has shifted in her grief. “When I was younger, I hated the end,” she says. “But now, it shows how important one life is, and what a big hole it leaves.”

If the festival is a pilgrimage, then Grimes is its messiah. Aged 81, she exudes so much star wattage that it is difficult to believe she left Hollywood not long after her turn as Zuzu. Her personal memorabilia seeded the town’s It’s a Wonderful Life Museum, now a sprawling collection of artefacts. “Zuzu is a godsend to this town,” says lifelong Seneca Falls resident and nurse Michelle Devine.

The museum displays letters from Stewart and Capra, photographs, pages from the film script, a cigar lighter like the one George wishes on in the film, and letters that Donna Reed (who played George’s wife Mary) received from lonely soldiers. Brass bells from the same manufacturer as the bell on the Bailey family Christmas tree are available for purchase.

The six surviving cast members were all children in the film, and are mostly in their eighties now. “Janie” became a schoolteacher. Zuzu became a medical technologist. The twins who played “Little Pete Bailey” as infants did not find out they were even in the film until they were teenagers. They pose with the original 1919 Dodge touring car from the film. They sign autographs. They talk to visitors about the film, and its abiding impact on their otherwise ordinary lives.

“I enjoy that I don’t know the answer to why these people are all here,” says Michael Chapin, 85, who played one of George’s childhood friends in the film. “They feel a real connection to the movie, and it is our job to respect and honour that.” 

It is unclear what the festival will do when there are no more original cast members left. Perhaps it will fall to their descendants — already Capra’s granddaughter Monica and Donna Reed’s daughter Mary Owen are here to introduce screenings. Or maybe the place itself will be enough.

“The movie is almost like a religious experience for some people,” Owen says. “There’s not really much evidence linking Seneca Falls and Bedford Falls, but people . . . they just want to be here.”

In the evenings at the local bar, festival guests chew over the new trivia they will unleash at family viewings of the film. They strike up conversations with people next to them, united by an infectious small town familiarity. “We got to meet Zuzu,” says one man from South Carolina, “we got snow — we’re happy.”

Seneca Falls was already famous — it is the birthplace of women’s rights in the US, and has a rich history. Gift shop windows display T-shirts with It’s a Wonderful Life quotes beside shirts bearing the face of suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“We will always be most proud of women’s rights,” says Fran Caraccillo, a board member for the It’s A Wonderful Life Museum. “It’s just another layer of pride.”

Capra’s Bedford Falls portrayed America the way America wanted itself to be seen — with ideals more durable than that which threatens to destroy them

Even without its claims to fame, Seneca Falls is adorable. Visiting feels, as one visitor put it, like stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting. I took pictures of everything but could never seem to capture it in one frame. Gingerbread-style Victorian houses with wraparound porches, filigreed with Christmas decorations, spoke of a time when America’s eyes were on westward expansion and this gateway to the Erie Canal had more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the country. I walked down the main street and fantasised about owning one of the many broad mansions, some in need of loving restoration, but still cheaper than a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

At the festival’s opening ceremony, local business leader Bruce Bonafiglia addressed the volunteers and regional TV news crews. “Capra saw more than a bridge,” he said. Capra saw how many native sons and daughters had given up their own personal dreams — and still do — to stay “and make a difference here”. 

In Seneca Falls, everybody knows everybody else, and everybody else’s business. If they don’t know you, they’re likely to lean across the aisle at Connie’s diner and ask you about your waffles. The waitress remembers your order from the day before. There are meal chains for neighbours when they get sick, or lose a loved one. There’s no such thing as a brief conversation.

Through his Bedford Falls, Capra portrayed America the way America wanted itself to be seen, holding fast to its principles, proving that ideals are more durable than that which threatens to destroy them.

“There are still people in town who doubt the connection,” says Caraccillo. “But if you believe in the spirit of Bedford Falls, then it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Everyone needs that Bedford Falls feeling once in a while.”

On Saturday evening, the festival’s penultimate night, nearly 5,000 runners gather on the famous bridge and set off on a 5k through the snowy dark. The starting bell is rung by Zuzu. She chimes the film’s famous refrain: “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”

When the runners have gone, the bridge is quiet. The only sound, when the wind blows, is the subtle tinkling of bells. Like the padlocks on Paris bridges to declare eternal love, small brass bells etched with names of lost loved ones are tied to the railings. Somewhere, a record player is whispering a song from the film: “Buffalo girls, won’t you come out tonight?”

It’s difficult not to buy in. Something about standing on the bridge, watching snowflakes disappear into the black canal, makes a fantasy filmed thousands of miles away feel like history. As if George Bailey was real, and once stood right here. It’s hard to know if Seneca Falls’ transformation is because of the magic of Christmas, or the magic of Hollywood. Maybe a bit of both.

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