# Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [December 15, 2007, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074 "2007-12-15T04:04:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Rebo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rebo)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/1 "2007-12-15T04:04:43Z")
I love that movie. I cried yet again.
I’m such a little wuss.
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### Author:  [@Defensive\_Indifference](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Defensive_Indifference)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/2 "2007-12-15T04:09:20Z")
Yeah, I really want to be a cynical jerk, but I wind up crying every time too. My favorite scene is when he is in the bar, just before he heads out to the bridge. He’s sitting there, breaking down, throwing out a desperate prayer. Great scene. I’m getting a little choked up just thinking about it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment…
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### Author:  [@Equipoise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Equipoise)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/3 "2007-12-15T05:18:06Z")
Um, IMDB link please? I have no idea what movie you’re talking about. I might even know and love the movie, but that line is so stupid I would have wiped it out of my memory.
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### Author:  [@Equipoise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Equipoise)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/4 "2007-12-15T05:21:38Z")
Ah, the “bar” clue makes me wonder if you’re talking about **It’s A Wonderful Life**? I haven’t seen it for a few decades, but I remember liking it.
That’s still a stupid line though.
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### Author:  [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/5 "2007-12-15T05:23:13Z")
We watch it every year. About time to dig out the DVD now as a matter of fact.
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### Author:  [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/6 "2007-12-15T05:41:11Z")
[QUOTE=Equipoise]
Ah, the “bar” clue makes me wonder if you’re talking about **It’s A Wonderful Life**? I haven’t seen it for a few decades, but I remember liking it.
That’s still a stupid line though.
[/QUOTE]
Stupid!?!?
I don’t know, maybe it’s that when I was down I had some unexpected friends really help me out of a few tough spots. I’m not sure what I’d have done without them, and I definitely felt that as much of a looser as I seemed to myself, I must have something worthwhile about me to inspire true kindness and altruism in my friends. I think that line, while certainly a case of, “here is the point summed up for you,” is far from stupid.
_goes and watches **It’s a Wonderful Life** _
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### Author:  [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/7 "2007-12-15T05:42:21Z")
I’m with a movie reviewer writing at the time the movie was first released - “Capra-Corn!”
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### Author:  [@ThirdCultureKid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThirdCultureKid)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/8 "2007-12-15T05:52:44Z")
Every single time I watch that movie, I sob like a little baby at that particular line… Then go find someone to hug.
```
...
```
Pardon me, have you got any tissues?
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/9 "2007-12-15T06:12:20Z")
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
“Capra-Corn!”
[/QUOTE]
Granted, it’s an irresistible line and I both admire and envy him, but it’s really, REALLY well-done corn. Yeah, I feel every nudge as Frank twists my arm, but I go willingly. Okay, not WILLINGLY, since I’m a hopeless romantic hiding (poorly) in my (not as) cynical (as I’d like) shell and hate to show the (mile-wide) chinks in my (oh yeah, you’re a Canuck) armour, but I love the movie and this is the time of year to wallow in sentimentality or you’ll find yourself doing it at inappropriate times, like during “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or a “Dukes of Hazard” Christmas episode. Better to cry for the classy stuff than to cry for shit–it’s less embarassing.
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### Author:  [@Equipoise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Equipoise)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 9:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/10 "2007-12-15T09:05:15Z")
[QUOTE=Eonwe]
Stupid!?!?
[/QUOTE]
Yes. I think it’s stupid because it implies the opposite, that if you don’t have any friends, that you ARE a failure. Maybe yes, maybe no, but a lot of shy or introverted people with no friends don’t really need that kind of slap in the face. CAN someone be a worthwhile human being without friends? Yeah, I would hope so. That line that seems so hopeful (and I’m so glad it means something to you) is very very negative. That’s why I don’t like it.
[QUOTE=Eonwe]
I don’t know, maybe it’s that when I was down I had some unexpected friends really help me out of a few tough spots. I’m not sure what I’d have done without them, and I definitely felt that as much of a looser as I seemed to myself, I must have something worthwhile about me to inspire true kindness and altruism in my friends. I think that line, while certainly a case of, “here is the point summed up for you,” is far from stupid.
[/QUOTE]
Nice and all, but WERE you a loser/failure simply because you didn’t (or thought you didn’t) have any friends?
In any case, for the most part I do like the movie. I like how dark it is through most of it even though it ends up all shiny happy cheerful. But, there’s aren’t any angels out there, and in real life the guy would have gone off the bridge anyway.
And Mary would NOT have ended up a crabby old spinster. That was the other main thing I didn’t like about it.
I love the name Zuzu though.
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### Author:  [@Defensive\_Indifference](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Defensive_Indifference)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/11 "2007-12-15T16:54:14Z")
[QUOTE=Equipoise]
And Mary would NOT have ended up a crabby old spinster. That was the other main thing I didn’t like about it.
[/QUOTE]
That’s true. She was _Donna Reed_ for Pete’s sake! Did George’s departure leave the rest of the men in Bedford Falls blind? George was a good catch and all, but I’d bet there were others willing to take his place.
Anyway, I know I’m being shamelessly manipulated by a corny, dishonest film, but, see, when he’s sitting in the bar crying…
Pardon me for a moment.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/12 "2007-12-15T17:33:23Z")
[hijack]
Has it occurred to you that one of the reasons we feel nostalgic for that film is that Bedford Falls is the kind of community that hardly exists in America any more? And that’s not because of cultural changes, it’s because of **material** changes.
From James Howard Kunstler’s online column [“Clusterfuck Nation,”](http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html) December 18, 2006:
> [@](#):
>
> Here’s the weird part though. The main business of Bailey Building and Loan was financing the first new suburban subdivisions of the automobile age. In one of the movie’s major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s, (with George Bailey now a doddering Florida golfer), we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey’s good intentions. We also would have witnessed the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, when changes in federal regulation opened the door to an orgy of looting and grift (acted out largely in suburban development scams) so extravagant that a quarter-trillion dollar federal bail-out was eventually required to cauterize the economic infection.
>
> ```
> At a crucial point in the story, Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born. Only the town is named Pottersville now. Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) Prostitutes ply the busy sidewalks. Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place -- the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts -- a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale. Frank Capra could imagine vibrant small towns turning their vibrancy in the direction of vice -- but he couldn't imagine them forsaken and abandoned, with the shop fronts boarded up and the sidewalks empty, which was the true tragic destiny of all the Bedford Falls in our nation.
>
> Most ironically, today America's favorite main street town, Las Vegas, is Pottersville writ large, and most Americans see absolutely nothing wrong with it. How wonderful is that?
>
> ```
[/hijack]
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### Author:  [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/13 "2007-12-15T17:37:50Z")
[QUOTE=Equipoise]
Yes. I think it’s stupid because it implies the opposite, that if you don’t have any friends, that you ARE a failure.
[/QUOTE]
Ah, and here I thought it was stupid because I’ve known a few total failures and wastes of oxygen who did have friends. Spouses, even. Getting someone to put up with abusive shit is depressingly easy.
Merry frickin’ Christmas.
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/14 "2007-12-15T17:56:44Z")
[QUOTE=Equipoise]
Yes. I think it’s stupid because it implies the opposite, that if you don’t have any friends, that you ARE a failure.
[/QUOTE]
You do know this is a [logical fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent), don’t you?
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### Author:  [@Will\_Repair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Will_Repair)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/15 "2007-12-15T19:02:57Z")
[What’s so good about it?](http://www.orlandosentinel.com/services/newspaper/printedition/wednesday/opinion/orl-wunnerful1207dec12,0,1156484.story)
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### Author:  [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/16 "2007-12-15T20:28:41Z")
Every time SWMBO turns that movie on, I leave the room.
Barf…
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/17 "2007-12-15T20:35:57Z")
Obligatory links to the Lost Ending:
> **[Lost Ending To "It's A Wonderful Life" - SNL Transcripts Tonight](https://snltranscripts.jt.org/86/86hlife.phtml)**
>
> Lost Ending To "It's A Wonderful Life"
[![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbSBqwM3_2c)
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### Author:  [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/18 "2007-12-15T20:45:52Z")
[QUOTE=Equipoise]
Yes. I think it’s stupid because it implies the opposite, that if you don’t have any friends, that you ARE a failure.
[/QUOTE]
Nonsense. It doesn’t exclude being “not a failure” for other reasons.
“Remember, no man is a failure who has a million bucks in his checking account.”
“Remember, no man is a failure who bangs a Playboy bunny every night.”
That doesn’t exclude the former: you could be a man with a million bucks in his checking account, who bangs a Playboy bunny every night, with no friends at all (not even the bunnies), but you’d still not be a failure, because the statement to which you are objecting doesn’t exclude alternatives.
Me, I love the movie, but only in small bursts. It’s kinda… slow.
And the ghastly child at the end with the near-ultrasonic “Remember daddy, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings” makes me puke. If I had a kid that said that, _I’d_ throw myself off a bridge.
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### Author:  [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/19 "2007-12-15T21:09:15Z")
I agree **jjimm** , it is slow at times, but I love the ending and it makes me all weepy too.
I also love the quote, not least because of what happened to me about 6 years ago. I had been laid off from a startup. We tried to make a go of some of the software that was developed during the course of the startup and that failed too. I was not yet too terribly in debt, but I was broke.
I was at a party and one of my friends came and offered me 5 grand to hold me over. He said not to mention it to his wife. She later offered me 5 grand too and said not to mention it to him (they both make great money. I dunno if they \*really \*were hiding it from each other or if that was for my benefit.) One other man from the party offered me money. I didn’t accept it, but I remember thinking to myself: How can a man count him self poor who is so rich in friends?
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### Author:  [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)
#### Post date: [December 15, 2007, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/remember-no-man-is-a-failure-who-has-friends/430074/20 "2007-12-15T22:33:57Z")
It’s not “slow.” It takes its time and lets you know and become so familiar with the characters that you feel like you live in Bedford Falls and know them yourself.
BTW: The scene of the high-school dance, when Carl Switzer, who used to be Alfalfa in the Our Gang series, opens up the floor. That was filmed in a real high-school gym where the floor really was like that. However, on our DVD’s special features, Tom Bosley claims it was Beverly Hills High. However, my father used to tell me it was HIS old high school, Hollywood High, which he was attending when they filmed it. (And assuming it really was Hollywood High, the school doubled for alt Whitman High in the old \*Room 222 \* television series.)
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