Schindler's List, the 1993 film by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of a businessman and member of the Nazi party who finds moral purpose through the discovery of his altruism towards Jews in wartime Poland both before and during the Holocaust. It was a film that famously divided the critics, particularly its tearful ending and its alleged descent into bathos and sentimentality. At this point in the film, the Schindler Jews have been saved from extermination at Auschwitz, the Allies have finally won the war, and so Schindler (Liam Neeson) decides to take his leave. Before doing so, however, Schindler tearfully berates himself for not having saved more Jews with the remainder of his wealth. This takes place in front of the Jews he has saved, including his closest aid Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who are there to present him with a collective symbol of their gratitude (a gold ring forged from a Jewish man's gold tooth) and to bid farewell to their benefactor. This scene confirms Schindler as a good man who realises the moral stakes of what he has successfully or, in his estimation, unsuccessfully achieved. The film as a whole has taken Schindler through a narrative of redemption, from the charming, egocentric, and self-serving entrepreneur at the film's outset to a heroic, self-sacrificing man of compassion at the end. For the critic David Thomson, however, this scene is excessive. He argues,

Thomson's mention of Capra immediately invokes a tradition of sentimental narrative and characterisation in Hollywood cinema that, for Thomson, hangs over Spielberg's film.