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savage or the comical crazy Indian, which still informs McLintock! (1963, dir. Andrew V. McLaglen) to a certain extent, post-war films began to ascribe individual features to Native Americans, while also showing how, in the glorious story of westward expansion, their role was that of the victim, a vanishing race that was swept away as collateral damage by industrialisation, which forged the future of a prosperous America. This idea of the ‘Vanishing American’ (the phrase became commonly used after the title of a 1925 silent film, directed by George B. Seitz
Stewart) is granted a vision of a world in which he had never been born, preceded by a glorious, if sentimental recreation of his small but significant life. For all of its manipulative romanticism, Capra’s first post-war film anticipates the underlying political and religious ambiguity of Girlfriend in a Coma. ‘[I]n its day It’s a Wonderful Life would have encouraged a more cynical and desperate disposition in its audience’, suggests Jonathan Munby: ‘Christmas was not good enough as a salve to the social and psychic wounds of the time; that Epiphany was a fanciful
’s Othello figure, who can thus be accepted as a perfect representative of royalty within jazz society. 15 By the time of the creation of this film, Dearden and Relph had collaborated on plenty of projects, and as Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan claim, ‘a consistent theme in [their] post-war films concerns male characters forced to confront painful adjustment to new circumstances and changing social norms and expectations’. 16 Many of these films observe ‘a tragic dimension, whereby the narratives result either in the death of the main male protagonist or a significant