‘Tis the season – for watching Christmas movies. Some are
good, some are pretty ropey and a few manage to divide opinion, in some cases
on the topic of whether or not they can even be classified as Christmas movies.
My own view on this is that if there’s a way in which a given film can be
linked to Christmas, however tenuously, then why not? I take a similar view
with literature – if a novel or short story has a Christmas link, then it can be a Christmas story.
Maybe I’m getting set in my ways in my late thirties, but
over the past few years things have evolved to the point where there are four
films, a TV show and three (short) works of literature that have to be seen or
read at Christmas time.
Let’s do the films first. We start with two old-school black-and-white classics from
the 1940s: Miracle on 34th
Street (1947) and It’s a Wonderful
Life (1946). I tend to prefer the original version of the former which has
a lot of charm with the New York department-store Santa called Kris Kringle who seems to be the ‘real’
thing – a role for which Edmund Gwynn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor,
while Maureen O’Hara (who died earlier this year, aged 95) is on top form
playing a career-oriented, divorced single mother which must’ve been very ahead
of its time in the 1940s. The court scene at the end, with the judge worried
about re-election and the posties using it as an excuse to get rid of all the
letters to Father Christmas that they’ve accumulated, is hilarious every time.
On doing some background reading for this film, I was surprised to learn that it
was originally released in the summer, with the Christmas element being
downplayed in the advertising (20th Century Fox’s logic being that
they’d make more money with a summer release).
Less overtly Christmassy is that Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, set in charming small-town
America with Jimmy Stewart’s selfless everyman standing up to the bad guy who
comes in the form of the Scrooge-esque Mr Potter. George Bailey may get the
girl but the rest of his life gets put on hold in a never-ending struggle on
behalf of the less fortunate, and it takes a heavenly intervention when he’s at
his lowest to show him how much of a positive impact he’s made on many lives. Yes,
there’s a lot of ‘life’ before you get to the ‘wonderful’ bit (it’s actually fairly
depressing in parts until the last ten minutes), but it really is a lovely film
that shows just how much of a difference one person can make.
Moving swiftly to the late twentieth century and changing
the tempo somewhat (although the notion of how much of a difference one person can make remains), it’s time for an action movie and, working on the principle
that any movie with a link to Christmas can be a Christmas movie,
there is indeed such a thing as a Christmas action movie: Die Hard (1988). Like many a Christmas movie protagonist, New York
cop John McClane just wants to spend the festive season with his family (which
is why he flies out to LA on Christmas Eve), but first of all there’s the small
matter of meeting up with his estranged wife at the Nakatomi Corporation’s
office party. If you’ve ever been to a work Christmas do that doesn’t quite go
according to plan, be thankful that you’ve not had it interrupted by a bunch of
heavily armed terrorists and then sit back and enjoy the mayhem as McClane
takes them on without wearing any shoes. This film was so big it spawned four
sequels, many imitations and redefined Bruce Willis’s career (before this, he
was apparently considered more of a comedy actor) as well as marking out Alan
Rickman as an actor who plays the baddies very well.
Finally, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least
one movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol,
and there are many options here with stand-out performances as Ebenezer Scrooge
over the years coming from the likes of Alastair Sim and Patrick Stewart. My
favourite, though, is the Muppets’ musical version from 1992 which is
incredibly faithful to the original source material to the extent of providing
much of the narrative word-for-word thanks to having Gonzo as Charles Dickens –
a truly inspired piece of casting. Elsewhere, Kermit is Bob Cratchett to
Michael Caine’s Scrooge – a rare example of a human character in a Muppet-based
film not being overshadowed by the Muppets themselves. I guess I had to have
Michael Caine make an appearance somewhere.
While we’re on the subject of A Christmas Carol, the TV show that is required viewing by yours
truly is of course Blackadder’s Christmas
Carol (1988) which inverts Dickens’s plot; in this, Ebenezer Blackadder is
a nice and generous man who gets taken advantage of by everyone except
Baldrick. A night-time visit from the Spirit of Christmas inadvertently prompts
him to change his ways. This one’s got quite a good cast; as well as Blackadder regulars – Rowan Atkinson et al – do look out for Robbie Coltraine
and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles, as the Spirit and Prince Albert
respectively.
On the reading front, I have three perennial favourites
which I (try to) read each year. Obviously, there’s A Christmas Carol which blends comedy and horror to perform two
roles – celebrating Christmas while highlighting the condition of the poor. 172
years after it was written, the name of the main character is still used to
refer to anyone who feels a bit cynical or jaded about Christmas. Dickens, who
defined how we think of Christmas to the point where most cinematic depiction
of London at this time of year tend to involve snow (despite actual white
Christmases in London being few and far between) is one of those authors who
seems to have a timeless feel, with quite a few of his books feeling
surprisingly undated when compared to some of his contemporaries; Christmas
just isn’t Christmas without a reading of the first and best of his Christmas
stories.
The other two are – not surprising given my literary
tastes – detective stories. Both happen to feature a seasonal plot based on
finding out who nicked a precious stone which has been found hidden in a
festive food item. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, Sherlock Holmes
and Dr Watson go on the hunt for whoever stole the eponymous diamond which has
been hidden in a Christmas goose which somehow finds its way into Holmes’s
possession; after some hat-based deduction, their quest takes them from Baker
Street to Covent Garden Market (which I always thought used to be a fruit and
veg market, but according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it had traders selling
poultry as well). I rather like this one because of the seemingly improbable hat
deduction sequence and the confrontation at Covent Garden in which Holmes
tricks the trader into revealing where he got the goose from. This story first
appeared in 1892 and can be found in The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Several decades later, Hercule Poirot – the little Belgian
chap with the little grey cells – finds himself staying at an English country
house during the festive season in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. He’s
there to recover another stolen precious stone – a ruby this time – which turns
up in some seasonal food (no prizes for guessing what). Needless to say, Poirot
is dealing with a criminal who, rather like Hans Gruber, hasn’t bargained for having
a detective on the scene. This is one of Agatha Christie’s later works (it
first appeared in 1960 in the short story compilation of the same name) and while
the identity of the thief is a bit obvious there’s entertainment to be had with talk of pudding-making (with reference being made to the ‘stir up’ collect which was and presumably still is said at church services on the Sunday before Advent, serving as a signal that that was the day on which the pudding should be made) and a fun sub-plot about a fake
murder alongside Christie’s extolling of a traditional Christmas at the sort of
venue where a lot of her murders took place.
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