It is easy to dismiss It's a Wonderful Life, and indeed, people have been doing so since the film's release in 1946. Too sentimental, too hokey, too loaded with Frank Capra's hopeful humanism -- all these complaints, and more, have been fired at It's a Wonderful Life over the years. People still watch It's a Wonderful Life, sure, but you have to ask how much of this is based in the two most corrosive reasons to watch a film -- camp and tradition. Watching a film only so you can dissect it with the sharp blades of irony can blind you to its real virtues; you look for stereotypes, not performances; listen for often-quoted lines of dialogue without ever hearing them; see scenes in the context of their pop-culture parodies instead of as what they are.

So, the virtues of It's a Wonderful Life are often ignored by detractors. I'd also put forward that the virtues of It's a Wonderful Life are, in some way, occasionally ignored by the people who love it. It's a Wonderful Life is part of the American film canon, sure, but the canon is a cage -- placing movies on pedestals can put how good they actually are out of our minds. And hurling a film on every year because you're used to doing so can turn it into something seen but unwatched, the cinema equivalent of a nativity crèche or an artificial tree: It gets pulled out every December, put away soon after, forgotten until next year.

One of my favorite movies ever is Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. When I was growing up, every holiday season my grandmother would scour the TV Guide for It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas, and I'd sleep over at her house and we'd watch them together. This was back in the olden days before cable television, in the very early days of the VCR. My dad was an early-adopter of the VCR -- we had one of the very first $1,000 VCRs on our block -- but it took another decade or so for my grandma to trust those newfangled recording contraptions.

Back then, It's a Wonderful Life came on once a year, and if you missed it you were screwed. So my grandma and I would make sure we knew when it was on, and I'd cuddle up on her couch under the afghan, and she and I and my great-grandmother would watch George Bailey's life unfold again on the television screen.

In recent years, of course, we've been able to get more than our fill of It's a Wonderful Life as it's shown a lot more, and there have been a couple of versions released on DVD, but now we have the "Special Collector's Edition" two-disc collector's set.

I'm going to work from the assumption that I don't need to go into a great deal of detail here on the plot of the film: George Bailey (James Stewart), a nice guy who runs a savings and loan and has four kids with his lovely wife, Mary (Donna Reed). After some bad luck (aided and abetted by the local evil rich guy, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), with his savings and loan on the brink of collapse and under investigation, George makes a wish that he'd never been born -- and with the help of a bumbling angel named Clarence (Henry Travers), he gets to see just what the world would have been like without him.

Trying to figure out how many prostitutes have turned up in the movies is a mug's game, but let's play it a little, shall we? James Robert Parish's 1991 Prostitution in Hollywood Films (McFarland) lists 389 films in which prostitution is a subject or subplot. Parrish includes everything from Porky's to all six versions of the penthouse-to-pavement melodrama Madame X. The IMDB tops this number by claiming about 800 movies with prostitution as a subject. Ever since the first important film on the flesh trade -- the 1913 Traffic in Souls, just inducted into the Library of Congress -- the subject of the Fate Worse Than Death has fueled comedy, drama, and film noir. Oh, and science fiction -- remember the "Furniture Girls" in Soylent Green? Playing a hooker is also good Oscar fodder. So far it's gained six Best Actress awards and 15 nominations, as well as seven Best Supporting Actress wins and five nominations.

This count requires some give and take: Madeleine Kahn's Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles (an Oscar nominee) was officially a dance hall girl (wink, nod). Sally Bowles in Cabaret didn't make the count, though it's fairly clear how she paid the rent. Ditto the no-visible-means-of-support Holly Golightly. Hey, we're all prostitutes! So the top seven below need kibitzing and counter suggestions, and perhaps some flame-broiling. The idea here is for time-tested films, meaning that more recent working girls aren't aboard, despite impressive acting by Sophie Okonedo in Dirty Pretty Things, Taraji P. Henson in Hustle and Flow or Morena Baccarin in Serenity. (And Brittany Murphy was no slouch as The Dead Girl.) Let's overlook Reagan-age free-market propaganda disguised as sex comedies, and pass on that famous trio of savvy businesswomen Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places and Rebecca de Mornay in Risky Business. (How about Kathy Baker in Street Smart, Marilia Pera in Pixote and Louise Smith in Lizzie Borden's neo-doc Working Girls instead?)


Janet Gaynor, Seventh Heaven (1927) The ultimate Victorian-era victim of circumstances, gold heart beating under a manhandled breast, pursued by the same hypocrite society that drove her to a life of crime. And now I'm making this really beautiful film sound terrible. Gaynor, a small and frail-looking actress--a shadow of the streets, as Edith Piaf put it--is teamed with ultimate woman's-film director Frank Borzage. And Borzage was one of the few men who could make a movie that you'd weep at without hating yourself for it in the morning. Matching her here is frequent co-star Charles Farrell, who plays a Parisian sewer worker who wants to rise out of the depths to the open air. Some (Catholics, probably) would make the mental connection between Seventh Heaven's pairing of the two trades and St. Thomas Aquinas's cold-blooded comment that prostitutes were like sewers: despicable but necessary to society.