Hot dog!
“Whenever the radio plays Kokomo and angel loses its wings.”
I’m not sure if that’s an actual quote from the movie, but is should be.
Aw, c’mon! George is 12 years old in this scene. Cut the kid some slack! 
Or cut the scriptwriters some slack. They wanted to establish George’s desire to travel the world, right off the bat, and the bit about coconut made a nice segue into that.
“What’s wrong with that?”
My son’s in a local stage production of IAWL*, and it’s fun to see the kids doing this scene.
*Between rehearsals, being a paying customer at a couple of performances, and manning the concession stand at a couple more, I’ve seen every scene at least five or six times in the past few weeks. Plus watching the movie on DVD with the kid so he’d have an idea of what he was trying out for. Before the past few months, I’d seen the movie probably 2-3 times in my life, and all of a sudden I know the damn thing inside and out. 
Do you have a favorite line, or scene, or character?
“Youth is wasted on the young.”
Donna Reed in this movie is as pleasant to the eye as any 40s actress, so I enjoy the film quite a bit.
I never understood why being capitalized to the tune of “two plumb nickels” after the bank run was sufficient to allow Bailey Bank to open the next day. What would George say if the very first person in the morning wants to withdraw $10 for groceries and gasoline?
“Nooooo. N-no, no, no, no, Mrs Lester, no, you d-d-don’t want to do that. Why, you want to put money INTO the bank! N-n-now why don’t you go home, get that jar I know is on your bookshelf, and deposit that in the b-b-bank, k-keeping $10 for yourself. Go on, now, see you soon!”
Don’t know if that will work. 
There are so many good lines and scenes that it’s hard to choose. The drugstore scene with George, Violet, and Mary; George and Mary after the dance; the bank run scene; the scene with George, Clarence, and the bridgekeeper; and the moment where George, restored to his life, realizes that Bert recognizes him, just to name a few. And the dark scenes where George has never been born.
As far as characters go, it’s hard for me to remember the characters as they were in the movie; they’ve almost completely been overwritten in my mind by the actors in the play, so it’s hard for me to say.
Yeah, that’s one of those places where you just have to suspend disbelief, and accept that the bank’s operating according to Movie Rules, rather than real-life ones. Potter’s told George that if the building & loan closes before 6pm, it’ll never reopen, so once they make it to 6pm with even a single penny left, they’ve beaten Potter, and made it through that crisis.
IRL, I suppose in the morning they could insist on the 60 days in the share agreement, and anyone wanting to make a withdrawal could choose between waiting, or taking their shares to Potter who’d pay 50¢ on the dollar for them.
(The guy who was first in line in the bank run, who wanted to withdraw his entire $242 balance? In George’s place (once Mary put the $2000 honeymoon money in play), I’d have told him he could choose between taking his shares to Potter and getting 50¢ on the dollar, or withdrawing half the $242, but still having the other half in his account.)
The one decision I would really second-guess George on is when Potter tries to hire George to run his affairs. This is ~1935, George is 27 or 28 years old according to Potter, and George is making $45/week as the guy who’s running the building & loan. Potter offers him a 3-year contract at $20K/year to run Potter’s businesses, and George, after only a moment’s reflection, turns him down flat.
Seems George could take Potter up on the deal, then hire someone like himself to take over the running of the building & loan, where the new guy would get George’s existing salary, plus a couple thousand a year on the side, directly from George.
Now George is netting $18K/year, the building & loan is still intact and getting people out of Potter’s slums and into homes of their own, and he’s even in a position to make Potter’s tenements more livable until they can get a home of their own, while still keeping money flowing to Potter from the operation of the bank, the department store, the bus line, and whatever else Potter owns.
Potter might well fire George after three years, but this is after 3 years of earning >8x what he had been earning, so if he’s saved even half of that, he and Mary don’t have anything to worry about, and he can step right back in and run the building & loan when the new guy moves on to greener pastures elsewhere, like everyone else does.
Back in the day of the Keating S&L scandal, someone took the scenes from IAWL and edited them to be relevant to the scandal. “Why, your money’s not here! It’s in Joe’s house.” Except the editing made George (and Keating el al) look like crooks. It’s all a shell game.
I wish I’d been able to keep a copy of that.
“But, George! It’s Mr Potter! How could you do this to the memory of your father by working for that man?”
“It’s n-n-not personal, Uncle Billy. It’s only b-business.”
And, re-linked for the 2018 Holiday Season, here’s this SNL fave: https://youtu.be/vw89o0afb2A
"Uncle Billy, remember a couple years back when Mary and I gave* the building and loan the $2000 we’d saved for our honeymoon, in order to keep it afloat when we had the bank run?
“Well, I’d be able to loan the building & loan a lot more than that, if something like that should ever happen again. By taking Potter’s money as salary, I’ll be guaranteeing that the building & loan won’t ever have to crawl to Potter for money to stay afloat. Potter can’t tell me how to spend the money he pays me.”
*There’s no indication in the movie that George and Mary ever got that money back, or even thought that they might.
IIRC, wasn’t Potter’s job offer contingent on George giving up the B&L?
He never really says. George asks, “Well, what about the Building and Loan?” Potter quickly changes the subject. “Oh, confound it, man, are you afraid of success? I’m offering you
a three year contract at twenty thousand dollars a year, starting today. Is it a deal or isn’t it?”
Still, the fact that he doesn’t answer makes me suspect that the papers he was going to draw up would in fact involve shuttering the the Building and Loan. That is, after all, what Potter is actually after.
The contract could certainly require that George no longer be employed by the B&L, but that’s all. After all, he’s an employee, he’s not on the board AFAWK. He wasn’t in the room when they voted on Potter’s motion to dissolve the B&L after George’s father died, and they hired George as ‘Executive Secretary.’ Unless things have changed since then, he doesn’t have the authority to shutter the B&L.
No, but it was established earlier in the movie that they did not trust Uncle Billy to run it and Harry is not around.
I suppose that George could have hired an outsider and still lived pretty well, but then what would Potter gain by hiring George? His goal was a monopoly and shuttering the B&L. Yes, he would get a talented guy in George, but he’s too cartoonishly evil to allow that.
OK, but how does he prevent it?
He’s only got one path as far as I can see: since he’s on the B&L’s board of directors (not the brightest move by George’s dad), he can once again move that the B&L be dissolved, as he did after George’s dad died. But if George lets the other board members know that he’ll surreptitiously support the B&L with his windfall, they’ll be in a position to tell Potter to fuck off.
George could hire an outsider to run the B&L in his stead, and that might be necessary as a stopgap. But unless the talent pool has gotten much worse in the past few years (he’s 27-28 years old at the time), Bedford Falls seems to produce a decent number of capable young men: not just George and Harry, but also Sam Wainwright and Marty Hatch, in the span of a few years.
Unless they were some sort of fluke, there should be more Georges and Harrys and Sams and Martys growing up in Bedford Falls at any given time, and presumably some of them would stay if they didn’t have to leave town to find a good professional opportunity. George hasn’t had the money before now to hire a local boy to groom as his successor, but now he’s got the money to offer a good bit more than $45 a week to the next likely candidate that comes along.
First, if I understand the structure of the B&L correctly, in the rules of the movie, each depositor owns “shares” in the B&L. Potter has made enough deposits or has had his cronies made enough deposits to own a minority interest in the B&L. He has enough of an interest to get himself elected to a seat on the board of directors which is something George’s father could not stop, it being a corporation and not a sole proprietorship.
Potter, however, keeps making a play for majority ownership so he can shut it down. He almost does so after George’s father dies, but the rest of the board votes to keep it open only on the condition that George runs it. Remember when George is leaving and says no and points to Uncle Billy and says “He’s your man” and then we get the famous line, “But they’ll vote with Potter otherwise.”?
Potter again made a play for majority ownership during the bank run. He was offering 50 cents on the dollar for the depositors’ shares. If George had not talked them out of it, they would have all ran to Potter and he could have controlled the board and closed down the B&L.
Out of options, Potter offers George a huge (for the time) salary with the preface of “You have beaten me, George.”
Given the history as played out in the movie, I see no reason why Potter would offer George such a large salary, yet allow him to maneuver behind the scenes to keep Potter from the only thing he wants: control of everything in town, especially the B&L.
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? George would have to be all sneaky-like. Not sure how capable he is of that, though…