The 1990 It's a Wonderful Life Spin-Off Clarence Is the Least Necessary Follow-Up This Side of Easy Rider: The Ride Back
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It’s a Wonderful Life is the story of a man who comes close to committing suicide because his life is in shambles, and he’s terrified of going to prison. It’s an impressively bleak exploration of the cruelty of capitalism and the way it destroys people with principles who care about things beyond money.
That is why it’s so resonant and enduring. The heavenly light at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life means so much more because we have to crawl through so much eviscerating darkness to get there.
As a father and husband who is always struggling, I relate to George Bailey on a painful level. Few scenes in all of the cinema affect me as deeply as the moment, late in the film’s third act, when a ragged and raw George comes home and hugs his daughter too hard with a look of soul-consuming desperation and sadness.
It’s a Wonderful Life has a happy ending that keeps it from being an outright tragedy. Yet it is nevertheless a profoundly bittersweet, melancholy movie about failure, despair, and suicide. That’s why it’s so great, and I get frustrated with people who treat it like a typical Christmas movie full of manufactured cheer when it’s such an outlier.
There is no darkness, however, in the 1990 television movie, It’s a Wonderful Life sequel/spin-off Clarence.
The Robert Carradine vehicle is the least necessary sequel to an American classic this side of Easy Rider: The Ride Back.
But where the geriatric motorcycle enthusiasts of Easy Rider: The Ride Back smoke marijuana, even though it was illegal at the time, like some real badasses, Clarence is family-friendly fluff.
Clarence opens in a blindingly white heaven, where Clarence Oddbody (Carradine) has retreated after something went wrong with the assignment that immediately followed his successful gig keeping George Bailey from jumping off a bridge to an icy, watery death.
In Clarence, if an angel succeeds, they are rewarded with wings and youth. They grow younger with each mission completed, which explains why Clarence was played by a man in his sixties in It’s a Wonderful Life, while in Clarence, the titular seraph is a middle-aged man played by one of the lesser Carradines.
Twinkle, twinkle!
Saint Joseph is consequently a child. That confused me because I would imagine that one of the great things about heaven is all of the sex everyone is having, except for Asexual people. In heaven, asexual people have a wonderful time not having sex. Not having sex is even better in heaven than it is on earth, just as heavenly sex blows the earth-bound version out of the water.
Due to what I imagine is the extremely sexual nature of heaven, you’d want to be an adult, but in Clarence, everybody wants to be ten years old. That’s kind of creepy.
Clarence’s period of self-isolation ends when he is called upon to keep Rachel (Kate Trotter), the widow of fellow angel Jeremy (Richard Fitzpatrick), from killing herself by keeping her from entering a cab that will set off a chain of events that will conclude with her ending her own life.
Good poster or best poster?
The angel is told by his pint-sized boss that he cannot tell anyone his true identity. Being an angel, he also cannot lie, but he can be extremely evasive and vague. He can’t fib outright, but he doesn’t necessarily have to tell the truth in a candid and forthright manner.
Jeremy owned a small computer company with one employee who was on the verge of a breakthrough. Then, he died at the worst possible moment. His devastated widow was left to pick up the pieces and battle the evil computer company with many employees who want to steal Jeremy’s ideas and put his company out of business.
We know that Jeremy’s rivals are evil because they all stand around looking ominous, and big boss Brimmer (Louis Del Grande) eats an entire lobster at his desk at work like a total degenerate. Also, they want to use violent computer games for evil instead of educational games for good.
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Being an innocent, wide-eyed moppet, Jeremy and Rachel’s daughter Jill (Rachel Blanchard) understands Clarence’s true nature, but she disappears for a solid hour so that Clarence can solve all the family’s problems after causing more.
Being an angel from another era, Clarence hilariously misunderstands cutting-edge 1990 technology, like a shredder he mistakes for a fax machine.
Clarence moves in with a family that, fortunately for him, just seems to accept things and doesn’t ask too many questions.
The earthbound angel tells Jeremy and Rachel’s jock teenage son that he needs to step up and be the man of the house in his father’s absence. The star football player takes his advice literally and begins ditching school so that he can seek out full-time employment.
The despondent teen’s coach tells him he’d be in deep trouble if he misses another practice, so Clarence assumes his form so that he can dazzle an English teacher with his thoughts on Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn in the teen’s absence.
Clarence doesn’t seem to know too much about football, sports, or life, really, but he has a distinct advantage in that he can evade tackles by making himself invisible at will.
For about twenty minutes, Clarence becomes a body-swap comedy, which was all the rage in the late 1980s and early 1990s thanks to Big, Vice Versa, 18 Again, and Like Father, Like Son.
Clarence can’t seem to decide what kind of bland, forgettable comedy it wants to be. Also, for a spin-off to one of the all-time great Christmas movies, Clarence is perversely short on Christmas cheer.
There is a Christmas tree in some of the shots, but otherwise, this might as well be an Easter movie. Carradine’s angel does all he can, but the plot hinges on a computer game character named Dexter being able to talk coherently rather than spouting jibberish, so we know exactly how it’s going to end.
Carradine is miscast as Clarence. In It’s a Wonderful Life Henry Travis brought an impish, child-like charm to the role. He played Clarence as someone with a twinkle in his eyes, a spring in his step, and goodness in his soul.
The Revenge of the Nerds star, in sharp contrast, delivers a comparatively dour lead performance perversely devoid of playfulness and whimsy.
Clarence never justifies its existence. It’s sub-par not just for a follow-up to one of the greatest movies ever made but also compared to other television movies from the era.
This isn’t so much as a flimsy footnote on It’s a Wonderful Life’s extraordinary legacy.
At the risk of being harsh, Clarence is not as good as the masterpiece that preceded it.
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