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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

And yet it was unsuccessful on initial release, both critically and commercially.

(And while the same can be said of several films now considered classics, such films were generally unconventional (at least for their time) in a way that It's a Wonderful Life really isn't)

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In my experience,

"A man who hates his life to the point of suicide is shown by a guardian angel how much the other people around him depend on him. As a result of seeing what the world would be like without him, he changes his mind about the suicide and ends up embracing the life he has, recognizing the simple yet wonderful things about it for what they are."

is not a conventional Hollywood story. Do you have any other examples? I'm mostly interested not because I want to prove you wrong, but because I actually want to be wrong and I want to watch these movies if they exist. Groundhog Day is the only other one that comes to mind.

The Twilight Zone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changing_of_the_Guard_%28Th...

Hey cool, thanks! Incidentally I think the time loop mechanic from Groundhog Day is also from a TZ episode.

Mr. Destiny: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100201/

Thanks to you too!

There are plenty of non-conventional Hollywood stories in movies, you just need to look beyond the usual big studio crops.

I'm also not sure that what you describe is a non-conventional Hollywood story: "Person has hard life (or a good life that hits a serious problem), is about to give up, finds something to have faith in, warm fuzzy ending" is a pretty generic tale.

Your synopsis is more general than what I'm thinking of, so of course it's going to catch more things. It's really the specific story of: 1) protagonist's life sucks; 2) protagonist gains deeper understanding about how life works; 3) protagonist sees the same life he was living before in a new light. I guess A Christmas Carol is about like that.

I've seen quite a bit of film, but honestly, if it's really that generic, what are some other examples?

Which only makes it more remarkable that its popularity continues to grow. That fact suggests there is a special timelessness to the film, since as you say most classics are either prototypical, unconventional, or artistically innovative (like, as was mentioned, Citizen Kane).

The closest analogy I can think of while remaining in the realm of the arts is Vermeer, who was a fairly typical Dutch genre painter unrecognized in his time and ignored for two centuries. Nowadays he is popular and beloved, but unlike Rembrandt who is held as a great master or van Gogh who is held as a quixotic genius, Vermeer himself is taken as wholly mundane; his works simply have some "je ne sais quoi" that resonates with the average person.

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