Hold the front page! George Bailey's a crook! All these years we've figured him for a swell guy, but now we learn the truth! He's an embezzler and a cheat! There's $8,000 missing from his building and loan company and we all know where it's gone -- didn't everyone see him giving money to that hussy, Violet Bick? Hot dog (as George would say), what a story!
This morning's Bedford Falls Sentinel looked like this:
Tomorrow's front page is also going to be about one of the Bailey boys, but the story won't be so pretty. Old man Potter's sworn out a warrant for Bailey's arrest and the newspaper's sent a reporter to get exclusive on-the-scene coverage of the apprehension of gigolo George, the building-and-loan bandit!
Here's the reporter, on the left, waiting in the Baileys' house with the bank examiner and the sheriff:
He feels pretty bad. His editor might think that this is a great story, but he doesn't. He should be talking to the other two, trying to get the low-down on Bailey's secret life of crime, but, darn it, he just can't bring himself to do it. No one seems very talkative anyway.
Sometimes, being a reporter means being the biggest heel in town, and this is one of those times. He knows he's got no business being here. So what if George Bailey skimmed a little bit off the top here and there? Can't we give the poor guy a break, at least for a day or two, instead of hounding him like a gang of savages? It's Christmas, for crying out loud! Bailey knows he's trapped. The last time anyone saw him, he was staggering off into a heavy blizzard after drunkenly crashing his car into a tree. Before that, apparently, he got liquored up in a bar on the edge of town, where he got into a fight. Poor sap.
There's been some talk about Bailey's shameful, dark depressions before. Might he kill himself? Sure, it's a possibility. Who knows what a guy'll do when he's in a corner? The road he was last seen on leads out to the bridge over the black, icy river. Bailey wouldn't be the first to take that lonely route out of Bedford Falls. No doubt the Sentinel will get a call on Christmas morning from some guy a few miles downriver who's just hauled a frozen body out of the water. And guess who'll be sent to cover the story...
But what's this? Suddenly, George Bailey burst in the door!
Our reporter rises to his feet, amazed at this apparition. George is jubilantly whooping and hollering like a madman and running up and down the stairs, hugging his wife and children and crying for joy. This is utterly bizarre, thinks the Sentinel's man on the spot. Perhaps, he reasons, the best thing to do is to stand here dumbly like a stupefied ox and do absolutely nothing at all.
He decides to maintain this usefully blank demeanour as, inexplicably, dozens of people suddenly show up and start spontaneously giving Bailey money. Then, as more and more townsfolk rush in to throw money at George, our reporter -- feeling either like he's dreaming or like he's just woken from a bad dream -- forgets his code of journalistic impartiality, takes off his hat, and makes his way through the crowd to add a wad of dollar bills to the already huge pile on the Baileys' table. He has no way of knowing what's going on, or why he should be joining in; it just feels like the right thing to do.
Here he is, smiling as he squeezes into the space behind the sheriff, who has just (illegally?) torn up the arrest warrant and started to bellow, "Hark, the Herald Angels":
Life sure is wonderful, isn't it?
I could be wrong, but I suspect that this small role in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is the high point in Franklin Parker's career, whether he knew it or not. Of course, he might have disagreed, but I'm certain that, given that he'd played bit-part reporters in 30 films in the years leading up to his brief appearance in this film, his performance must surely be one of the most finely honed portrayals of an insignificant background journalist character that you're ever likely to see.
More than two decades earlier, Franklin had arrived in Hollywood from Lincoln, Nebraska, determined to parlay his years of experience in student drama into a career as a great movie star. He would act in films written by his old Lincoln buddy, Joe Marsh, and directed by his other Nebraska pal, Box Cox, who had both come to Hollywood with him. Tagging along was another Lincoln High alumnus, Bill Moran, who wasn't exactly sure what he wanted to do but knew that he'd better be around when his ambitious young friends hit the big time. (1)
Of course, the big time is pretty hard to hit, even for a bunch of boy wonders whose high school and college dramatic productions had received rave reviews in all the local papers, and, after failing to get any film work whatsoever, the friends quit Hollywood. The other three had had enough, and headed for home, defeated, but Franklin didn't give up. Okay, so he wasn't ready for the movies, but there were other places a guy could act. He set out for Phoenix, Arizona, where, he'd been told, a stock theatre company needed a juvenile, and spent the rest of his 20s on the stock theatre circuit, honing his craft, extending his range and trying to perfect a subtle, nuanced style of acting that, he was sure, would be in demand once the talkies took over from silent film. (2)
In 1931, he returned to Hollywood -- this time bringing with him a now impressive résumé that included appearances with major Broadway stars such as Lenore Ulric and Marjorie Rambeau (3) -- and again offered himself to the casting directors, who finally realised how foolish they had been to overlook this young man before. They took a long look at his face in this new light and decided that it would be perfect placed somewhere in the background of a shot, preferably under a generic reporters' fedora. Whatever had happened to him since he'd left Hollywood in the 20s, it had evidently made him uncannily well equipped to play bit-part newspapermen, and he ended up pretty much stuck in that role -- he might escape it for a while and go wild with the novelty of playing a press photographer or a newsreel cameraman, but, sooner or later, he'd find himself tucking the press card back in his hatband again.
Franklin had a good voice, though, which led to a lot of fairly easy work(4). Here's a scene in The Blue Dahlia (1946), that's typical of the use to which this facet of his talents was put:
He's not actually in the still -- he played the police stenographer on the other end of the phone: one line; zero screen time.
He might not have had the sort of career he'd hoped for when he and the guys caught the Greyhound bus out of Lincoln all those years ago, but at least he wasn't a quitter like Joe, Box and Bill, which meant that, when he made a victorious return visit to his hometown after a couple of years' steady bit-part work, the local paper could print this headline:
(5)
and puff him up by writing excited things like, "The Brown Derby, the Cocoanut Grove, and Sunset Boulevard aren't just words to Franklin Parker, for he dines and dances and promenades there with the others of the movie lights"!
Franklin retired in 1953, at the age of 50, after his first and only appearance on television, when he had a small role in an episode of Mr & Mrs North as, of course, a reporter.
Sources: www.imdb.com; (1,2 and 3)Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, June 4, 1933; (4 and 5)Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, December 31, 1933 (via www.newspaperarchive.com); stills from 'It's a Wonderful Life' and 'The Blue Dahlia'(c)Paramount Pictures.
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