The Weird Story of the FBI and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ | Smart News | Smithsonian

The Weird Story of the FBI and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ | Smart News | Smithsonian:
"It’s A Wonderful Life bombed at the box office before becoming a Christmas classic.
Along the way, it also caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
...However, writes scholar John A. Noakes, the agent “also identified what they considered a malignant undercurrent in the film.” 
As a result of this report, the film underwent further industry probes that uncovered that “those responsible for making It’s a Wonderful Life had employed two common tricks used by Communists to inject propaganda into the film.”
These two common “devices” or tricks, as applied by the Los Angeles branch of the Bureau, were smearing “values or institutions judged to be particularly American”–in this case, the capitalist banker, Mr. Potter, is portrayed as a Scroogey misanthrope–and glorifying “values or institutions judged to be particularly anti-American or pro-Communist”–in this case, depression and existential crisis, an issue that the FBI report characterized as a “subtle attempt to magnify the problems of the so-called ‘common man’ in society.”...
Read on and fear the power of government over our lives!