The Snowman (1982)

Review Essay

Friends, it’s Christmas Eve, and your taking the time to be here is such a generous gift—I hope you know how much it means to me that you read these things I write, and I hope that what I find to say adds in some measure to your enjoyment of film as a medium, of these films in particular, or of the holidays that provide the context for the works I choose to share.  My hope on Christmas Eve is to share something really meaningful with you—a film that rewards you for your gift of time.  Last year, of course, it was a movie I’ve loved since childhood: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.  This year, though the work itself is very different—a nearly wordless 30 minute short film—the reasons behind it are in some ways very similar.  I was enchanted by Dianne Jackson’s The Snowman the very first time I ever saw it, long ago, as a child, and it haunts me beautifully still.

If you do not know The Snowman, it will be a simple thing to describe it to you: the film’s power is in its simplicity.  Based on a wordless picture book by celebrated British children’s author and illustrator, Raymond Briggs, The Snowman tells the story of a child named James (whose name we only know from a gift tag glimpsed for a second or two, and yes, I’ll accept, we may have found one reason this work sticks with me in particular) who wakes on a snowy morning in a small village somewhere in Great Britain near Brighton (in East Sussex).  His response is that of almost any child to fresh snowfall: he goes out to play immediately, and fills his day with snowy escapades.  The magic of the film, though, occurs that evening, when at midnight the snowman he constructed comes to life, and James engages in some playful hijinks with his new friend, before a truly breathtaking sequence that involves a visit to the North Pole and a return home again.  It’s the story of one precious day, half down-to-earth and half fantastic.  It is an annual television tradition in the United Kingdom, as cherished there as the TV specials American children grew up with in the late 20th Century.  And it’s a tradition I would love to encourage you to begin for yourself.

The cover of The Snowman DVD is simply the title, and the snowman facing us, smiling. He is wearing a floppy bucket hat and knitted scarf, with a satsuma orange nost and coal for buttons and eyes.

The magic of this film begins for me the moment it opens.  In the only live action sequence, we see a man walking away from us on a gray winter day—he is outdoors somewhere, and headed for the woods.  As he walks, we hear a voiceover performed by the author and illustrator, Raymond Briggs, who plays the role of the older James reminiscing about the past.  Literally the only words of dialogue in the film are his: “I remember that winter because it brought the heaviest snow that I had ever seen.  The snow had fallen steadily all night long, and in the morning I awoke in a room full with light and silence.  The whole world seemed to be held in a dreamlike stillness.  It was a magical day, and it was on that day I made the snowman.”  There is something absolutely captivating to me about every single sentence—the childhood memory of snow.  A room full with light and silence.  The dreamlike stillness of the earth just after a snowfall, and the thrilling restraint of simply saying that this was the day he made “the snowman”.  He needs to say nothing else to us.  All will unfold.  And then the woods are transformed into lush, evocative animation, an owl swoops through our field of vision, and a piano starts taking us up and down in rolling arpeggios and a string section fills in behind, and we’re soaring over this moving terrain beneath us, all the way to a rural house and a boy in his second story room.

In a wordless film, of course, the music matters so much, and Howard Blake’s score is tremendously successful—sprightly when the boy’s at play in the snow, silly when the snowman first starts to make a bit of chaos inside the boy’s home, but stirring at key moments that make my heart race.  The piano theme that plays behind that opening animated sequence (a theme that returns later in the film) is, for reasons I cannot explain, an absolutely core memory for me.  The moment I hear it, I’m transported.  Maybe it’s the wordlessness of The Snowman that gripped me so much as a child: I am given the initial framing of the memorable day, but after that, it’s just the kind of experience that’s almost universal to anyone in a latitude where snow is possible.  The loose, friendly oversight of a parent who wants you to dress a little more warmly.  The snow lying before you like an untouched canvas, and the joy of looking behind yourself to see your traces in the drifts.  The odds-and-ends solution for the making of a snowman, which involves a borrowed hat and scarf, a handful of bits of coal, and a satsuma orange for a big, friendly nose.

The play with the snowman, once he wakes up, is maybe the least gripping part of the film for me: I am amused by what unfolds initially, with a polite snowman trying to get comfortable in a house full of distractions and things to explore.  Maybe my favorite sequences are the snowman trying out different fruits as noses, seemingly mostly for the boy’s amusement, and the snowman trying on a mishmash of mom and dad’s clothes in their closet, like a small toddler who’s having fun with a look hardly anyone else would think to wear.  I get slightly impatient with their ill-advised motorcycle journey, though we do get to take in a little more of the countryside in pursuit of the duo on their bike, tracking which parts of the woods (and therefore which animals) they’ve disrupted that evening.

The moment that is absolutely fixed in my imagination, though, follows all this, and while I hesitate to spoil it for you, I also can’t talk about The Snowman and not talk about this.  Without explanation, and with no apparent need to even prepare the boy beside him, the Snowman simply steps out into the yard and up into the sky, where he extends his arms forward and begins to glide freely, with James beside him holding his hand.  As they take flight, we see the English village spiraling below: slowly they soar up to heights where we see the patterns of the hedgerows and the distant steeple of the parish church, etc., and suddenly we hear the only other words we’ll hear in the film, as a boy soprano begins to sing “Walking in the Air”.  I have no way of explaining why it strikes me the way it does, but friends, even thinking about it gives me goose bumps.  The music feels ethereal, otherworldly, like some kind of song the stars have been singing all along and the boy hadn’t heard it before, but of course it’s also not anyone’s song at all but his, given the simplicity of the lyrics.  The song merely describes, in a loving but not lavish way, the feeling of being in the air, soaring above the world that humans know, kept safe by the presence of this guardian beside him.  The words are barely even poetry, they’re so direct—the most metaphorical moment is when the boy sings, “the villages go by like dreams,” and they really do, the animation throughout this sequence is fluid and captivating as we are carried through “the midnight blue” on our way to the North Pole.  The experience of all this, though, is transformative: the film is conveying something I can only barely articulate.  I am caught in its spell every time I see it, and whenever I’m watching it, I’m not a day older than I was the first time I saw it.  I have no idea what it’s doing to me, but I show up and I let it wash over me all the same.

I’ll hold off on describing the final segments of The Snowman, to ensure I haven’t spoiled every last minute of it.  As I mentioned earlier, a visit to Santa at the North Pole is a part of James’s night with the snowman, but even that doesn’t really go the way that I would normally expect it to (and Santa is drawn and depicted in a way that’s a little unexpected to me).  And the return home brings with it some unexpected uncertainty….what will happen now?  Will the snowman stay or go; remain whole or crumble?  What does the boy want, or need?  And all I will say about the final moments of the film is that, to me, they’re perfect.  They capture that balance of melancholy and delight that I get from the rest of this peculiarly potent short film—a sense that in childhood there are things to be learned, about joy and about grief, lessons that we then spend a lifetime unpacking.  Perhaps, if we are fortunate, after a long time those lessons become something we can set down in words.  As Raymond Briggs was wise enough to know (and as Dianne Jackson, the animator, was smart enough not to alter), initially these understandings are not things we can put into words at all.  They are meant to be set down, at least at first, as symbols—the wings of an owl and the feet of a fox.  The splash of the sea and the checkerboard patterns of the partitioned fields.  The blue blur of the midnight sky and the tumbling of light and dark, looking down as we soar.  The tracks our feet leave in the freshly fallen snow, traces left to a world that will erase them by taking them into itself, leaving no presence but memory.

I Know That Voice: There are only two voices we hear in this hauntingly lovely and otherwise wordless tone poem of a short film—the gruff, lyrical voice of Raymond Briggs, briefly playing the role of “older James”, and then the angelic, clear singing voice of the boy soprano, Peter Auty, who performs the piece, “Walking in the Air,” that accompanies the first rush of flight.  (You may know the name Aled Jones in connection with the piece instead…the reason is that, by the time this film became well known and the producers realized they could release a single version of the song on the radio, Peter’s voice had dropped and Aled performed the new version in his place.  If you know “Walking in the Air” from the radio, you’ve heard that version instead.)

In any case, with only two names to choose from, it’s delightful that I can connect both men to holiday media.  Raymond had, early in his career, illustrated a book I’d love to own someday, 1968’s The Christmas Book, a compilation by James Reeves that’s available at the Internet Archive.  Raymond also created two books about Father Christmas that were turned into the TV short film Father Christmas in 1991.  Peter, on the other hand, remains not just an extraordinarily talented professional singer but a man who will from time to time show up on television in Christmas contexts, almost certainly because of his connection to this staple of the British holiday season.  Over the last 25 years, he’s appeared as himself in I Love Christmas, Best Ever Christmas Films, Britain’s Favourite Christmas Songs, Greatest Ever Christmas Movies (in this one, he is listed in the credits, amusingly, as “Quite Clearly Not Aled Jones”), and lastly in 2022’s The Snowman: The Film That Changed Christmas, a TV special about this beautiful short film (I think it’s amusing that the TV special is 15 minutes longer than the film it’s based on).

That Takes Me Back:  It’s funny, the little things that take you back.  The front room in James’s house in Brighton has a crackling fireplace, and an old television that’s fuzzy when you turn it on—I may never again live in a home with a fireplace and I certainly doubt I’ll own a cathode ray tube television again, so both of these features just take me back to being young.  But I think also the simplicity and wonder of this story work their magic on me: there are other films I remember seeing more often as a child, but none of them make me feel more like a child than this film.  I hear Raymond’s aging voice and the piano starts to play and I don’t know where I am, but I’m not in my chair anymore.  I can feel how thin the veil is, I guess, that divides the now from what was, and maybe also from what will be, as my age increasingly nears Raymond’s when he narrated the introduction.  This film never fails to take me back.

I Understood That Reference: Santa Claus is, of course, an important presence here, but strangely he may be the least magical element in the story, to some extent, appearing largely as a friendly domestic figure offering hospitality.

Holiday Vibes (5/10): In such a short film, I’m trying to grade on the curve: we have Santa Claus (and what is surely in some sense a Christmas party), there’s a gift given, and at one point we see the family Christmas tree.  On the other hand, this film is really about a “magical day” unconnected with Christmas or so I’d argue.  The wintry landscape and classical boy soprano are sure things we often connect to the holidays.  In the end, I think this belongs somewhere in the middle, but I struggled to settle on a number.

Actual Quality (10/10): I couldn’t tell you a single thing I want improved in this film, other than that I want to be flying with that snowman while “Walking in the Air” plays for maybe a thousand years without stopping.  I could sit in whatever that emotional space is, basically forever.  There are other movies, obviously, that do more and say more, with a longer running time and a lot more words.  But The Snowman….there’s just nothing like it, for me.  It is a singular viewing experience and one that transports me emotionally.  It earns that 10/10, in my book.

Party Mood-Setter?  This taps so deeply into my brain that it would be very hard for me to imagine ignoring it, myself, but honestly I bet it works that way really well for some folks.  The music is lovely but not obtrusive (other than our boy soprano, whose voice is I think totally arresting), and with no dialogue, it would be very easy to let it play even on a loop behind some gathering (or while you’re focusing on hanging ornaments on the tree, etc.), I imagine.

Plucked Heart Strings?  Something happens in this story that I cannot explain.  There is a numinous quality to the whole experience, despite so much of it being silly, wacky childhood antics.  The magic of the day, the snowfall, the impossible man and his impossible flight, all add up to give me the eerie feeling that I am on the verge of understanding something important and that it is almost certainly something important about myself.  I can’t possibly say if it works that way for everybody, but for me, this film will always stir emotions.

Recommended Frequency:  It’s so brief and so beautiful.  Who among us couldn’t find a half hour free to immerse ourselves in this experience once a year?  I know it’s Christmas Eve, but I bet that, if you sit down tonight at the end of whatever your day is, and leave the lights slightly dim as you watch, this would give you more or less the perfect mood calibration for a holiday tomorrow (for those of you celebrating on Christmas Day, of course).  But I’ll add, this is not just a “Christmas” film and in fact, as I note above, I think there’s a lot about it that connects more generally with the feeling of winter in the northern latitudes, its mystery and its wonder.  If you’re someone who observes the solstice, or Yule, or any other festival of light and dark here at one of the extremes of the calendar, my guess is this would suit you just as well.

You really ought to watch this film, and I have to tell you, the only way I know how to do that is to watch it on Hoopla, a free service that most public libraries in the United States seem to offer, which allows you to stream some more obscure movies (like this one!).  Go to your local library and see if they link to Hoopla as a resource: if so, you can search for The Snowman there, and stream it (within the limits of your particular library’s contract—some of them cap individuals at a certain number of checkouts a month, or sometimes the whole system has a daily cap that resets at midnight).  You can always pick it up on DVD, though: it’s literally $7 at Barnes and Noble, which is a steal of a price, and for free there appear to be hundreds and hundreds of libraries that will check out the disc to you, or so saith Worldcat. NOTE: A friend reports that the film was available for her on Pluto’s streaming service, so you may have luck finding it places I didn’t think it appeared?

Friends, what a privilege and a joy it’s been to walk with you through these holidays again: I hope it remains interesting to see what films I come up with, and what I have to say about both old classics and movies you’ve never heard of in your life.  I seem addicted to this particular kind of work, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that I’m back at it again in 2026—drop by here in November to see what I’ve decided to go with, and in the meanwhile, I hope you catch up with a couple of the movies I’ve talked about here that you didn’t get around to yet.  Winter’s long, and most of these tales go well with a little snow on the ground (or at least a little dream of snow in our hearts).

Meet John Doe (1941)

Review Essay

In the long list of 1940s holiday movies—this is the ninth film from that decade to be featured here at FFTH, and I can assure you, I’ve got many, many more on my potential slate for the years ahead—Meet John Doe is almost certainly among the less essential by a few metrics.  Its director, its screenwriter, and both its starring performers are all better known for other motion pictures, so that this isn’t anyone’s iconic contribution to the arts.  If we think just of the seasonal material, this is one of the ‘40s flicks in my spreadsheet with the fewest minutes of running time occurring on or near any winter holiday.  It doesn’t usually get a primetime airing even for more niche audiences—Turner Classic Movies is playing it only once this December, at midnight on December 23rd.  Heck, it’s not even the most canonically important Christmas movie of the 1940s to be filed under “Meet,” as those of you who read my Meet Me in St. Louis might have suspected: MMiSL at least offers a classic Christmas song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” to the cultural stew, whereas I don’t think there’s a single line of dialogue or any on-screen moment in Meet John Doe that would trigger an “oh, is that where that’s from?” in the memory of the overwhelming majority of Americans.  And yet?  And yet: it’s possible no other holiday movie of the 1940s is more pointedly about America in 2025.  If you haven’t yet, this is probably a good year to meet John Doe.

The film’s working with a fairly high-concept 1940s premise: Ann Mitchell is a reporter for The New Bulletin who, on her way out the door after getting canned, decides to embarrass her now ex-boss by writing an incendiary article purportedly based on a letter from a desperate local man.  This letter, signed pseudonymously as “John Doe”, decries the problems in the world and concludes with a threat to commit suicide by leaping off the newspaper’s tower on Christmas Eve (which, at this point, is still an unknown number of weeks or months away).  When the article becomes a sensation, earning Ann her job back, there’s one problem: everyone wants to meet John Doe.  So Ann and her editor (and, eventually, the newspaper’s publisher, D. B. Norton) decide to hire a man to play the part, a down-on-his-luck former bush league baseball pitcher named John Willoughby.  As time goes on and Christmas Eve nears, the scheme comes under increasing pressure, not just because Doe’s threatened suicide will have to be confronted, but because in an effort to keep Doe in the public eye, Ann is forced to write (and Willoughby is forced to perform) increasingly bold political rhetoric that inspires citizens from all over the country to take action.  The film’s inevitable crises—what will happen when John and Ann’s lies are exposed; what will happen when either John or Ann figures out that the other one is falling in love with them—are of course the major substance of the third act.  So far, so good: not that Christmassy, maybe, but I’m not sure how “2025” it sounds, from this angle.

The poster for Meet John Doe depicts the two lead performers: Gary Cooper as John Doe is standing on the right side of the poster in a hat and trenchcoat, looking fearfully off to his left, while Barbara Stanwyck as Ann Mitchell leans into his chest, clutching his coat with her right hand.

The film’s politics, though, bring it directly to our doorsteps: this is a film by Frank Capra, yes, that Frank Capra, the director of It’s a Wonderful Life, and a number of other films slightly better remembered than this one.  Capra’s passion for civic engagement, for the role of the everyday man in the leadership of the country, and for the dangers posed by rich fat cats to the public order, are all on display here.  The film opens with someone literally chiseling the words “free press” off the sign outside the Bulletin Building, since the paper’s been bought and the new media ownership want to cut loose a lot of “dead wood” so that they can print more sensational things, regardless of how true they are.  That’s Ann’s great mistake in the film, of course—at first the John Doe letter is her mockery of her new editor’s prioritizing fireworks over facts, but when she realizes it’s her ticket not just to getting her job back but to probably a pretty substantial raise, well…she just can’t resist.  Ann’s a real journalist, but in this film, she lets herself become a political operative (but one whose political machinations aren’t really well known to the general public).  The last 12 months or so have been bad news for the freedom of the press, bad news for the independence of journalists in recently acquired media properties, and bad news for anybody who thinks political journalists can’t also be political operatives and certainly not secret ones.  A film that’s critiquing these things has something to say to me, right now.

And there’s a lot more here that starts to feel eerie: why does Willoughby agree to participate in this lie?  Well, he’s unemployed and in need of a job…having lost his last one due to an injury he couldn’t afford healthcare to fix.  Part of the bargain he strikes with Ann’s editor, Henry Connell, is that he has to get the arm surgery he needs from one of the finest doctors in the country.  The owner of the New Bulletin, too, is a magnate whose force dominates the whole country: D. B. Norton is so rich he can buy anybody, and he seems to have what is effectively his own police force in a trained security team we see in action on a couple of occasions.  His clear intention is to become President of the United States, and when he realizes how potent a political force these John Doe editorials can be, he deceitfully takes control of the scheme from behind the scenes, knowing that the entire operation is designed not to help the working man, the “average John Doe”, but rather to further entrench Norton and his cronies into positions of power that they can exploit for their own private gain.  I mean…you can’t see me but I’m just gesturing wildly in every direction, here, as if to say, “did someone make Meet John Doe in 2025 and send it backwards via time machine?”  Certainly we know something about devastating lack of access to healthcare and billionaire domination of the news media and a rich man thinking he can just buy authenticity from his dupe supporters who won’t realize the ways in which he’s using them for his own personal gain.  Capra is making a film about the knife’s edge on which American society sits in 1941, an age of progressive reform, yes, but also the age in which fascism erupted around the globe.  He knows that a “John Doe uprising” would be as potentially dangerous as it is potentially rejuvenating to the body politic—that, in the wrong hands, a populist movement that was allegedly an expression of the voice of the people (but actually a ventriloquist’s dummy in the hands of the master corporate puppeteers) could wreak great harm.  Uh…2025 says, pointedly, “you think so?”

The challenge of Meet John Doe is its intense earnestness—Gary Cooper is almost too perfectly cast as John Willoughby, since Cooper was one of the straightest arrows on the silver screen in 1940s, and making him a man who’s haunted by the sale of his integrity in exchange for a little security maybe hits the nail too squarely on the head.  The always electric Barbara Stanwyck is, on the other hand, not quite settled into the role of Ann Mitchell, I think in part because she’s got to play Ann as the deceiver who lies not just to the country but to John Willoughby while also presenting as the loyal friend and romantic interest whose sincere caring for John will be all that holds him together once the rest of the scheme is falling apart.  Sure, a lot of romantic comedies play both sides of a coin like this, but this really isn’t a comedy at all—there are occasionally fun moments, but really this is genuine drama, even melodrama, and once we understand the heightened stakes, in which Ann’s lies aren’t just little personal matters but lies that could bring a nation to ruin, it just becomes harder to know why we (and John) are forgiving her, other than that she’s Barbara Stanwyck and she’s got charisma in spades.  The earnestness does also tend to lead us to scenes in which big important things are being said, but the dialogue isn’t as true to life as the best stuff that, again, every single major contributor to this motion picture achieves in some other work.

The treasure that Meet John Doe repays us with, though, is, ironically, its intense earnestness.  The message is clear from the opening scene in which we see the frightened faces of aging newspapermen, waiting for a punk kid to emerge from an opaque office and gesture aggressively at the many people being “let go” today.  Capra sees a country that is being run on behalf of capital and not community—a society that prizes wealth over welfare—and he’s desperate to shake the viewer awake to the danger of it.  Sure, Ann’s a liar, but the opportunity she gains through her lies is the chance to tell the truth: through her pen, “John Doe” can denounce graft and corruption, and call for a spirit of moral renewal across the country.  The fundamental message of the John Doe movement, as we see it rising, is a clarion call for continuing the progress begun by Roosevelt’s New Deal: as Doe, Willoughby says things like, “your teammate, my friends, is the guy next door to you.  If he’s sick, call on him.  If he’s hungry, feed him.  If he’s out of a job, find him one.”  Or, “tear down the fence between you and your neighbor and you’ll tear down a lot of hates and prejudices.”  Or, “the meek can only inherit the earth when the John Does of the world start loving their neighbors.”  These aren’t just appealing movie principles.  They’re the principles I wish animated populism in America in 2025, when movements claiming to speak for “the common man” are far more likely to espouse principles like distrusting and fearing your neighbors who might be liberals or “illegals” or both, and are far more interested in finding ways to rebuild the fences of hatred and prejudice this country’s spent decades trying to remove (and not doing that thorough a job of it, if I’m honest).  As corny as Frank Capra and Gary Cooper can be here, what they’re saying has incredible merit.  Democracy cannot long survive in a society where we are committed to hating one another, and to the extent that we have the capacity to make democracy thrive, it’s got to have something to do with building a society where we care about and listen to one another.  And, in case you’re wondering about those all-important holidays, yeah, the John Doe speeches bring up “the spirit of Christmas” (which seems to be approaching, though there’s not a lot of sign of it on screen) as an example of the kind of selfless compassion for those around you that the Doe movement is trying to awaken.

I can’t tell you if this movie’s going to touch your heart.  It is not going to make any secret of its desire to do so, so if you prefer a motion picture with a little camouflage over its sentiments, this is going to seem much too bold.  For me, it was impossible not to be moved by what Capra presents, especially (as I’ve been saying) hearing the echoes of all these messages in the resonant chamber that is an America under siege in the year 2025.  As regular citizens come forward to thank John for his work, pushing their elected officials aside as obstacles who are out of step with what the country needs now, I think about the everyday people I’ve seen in the streets of the nation this year, demanding care for those in need, and standing up against abuses.  The vision of these John Doe Clubs springing up all over America (and their leaders gathering at a political convention that can, yeah, seem a little Riefenstahl for my tastes) might be ominous, but I also wanted to believe in what the movie was telling me, that the members of such clubs are mostly turning out because they are lonely, and restless, and what they know they need more than anything else is to care about the folks living next door to them.  I want to believe that regular Americans have that capacity for selflessness, in an age where it feels as though it has been squeezed out of us by the world, and when the film persuaded me of that, well, I was moved.

I won’t spoil the movie’s final act, but there’s so much in it that is plainspoken about what it takes to change a country, and asking whether or not we have it in us—either our leaders or the country as a whole.  This is where the movie runs right at Christmas as a narrative, embracing the idea that the incarnation of God as human was, in a sense, a John Doe maneuver.  God was down here, a character reminds us, just another joe on the street looking for a place to lay his head.  At Christmas, can we turn away from our despair, in the belief that something better has come along and will keep coming along, if we remain faithful?  This is a Frank Capra movie—of course his answer is, “yes.”  Maybe no other artist of the 20th Century believed in us more as a people.  Capra’s mouthpiece in this movie, by the end, is Ann’s editor, Henry Connell, who after going through his own transformation at one point tells John, “I’m a sucker for this country.  I like what we got here!  A guy can say what he wants and do what he wants without a bayonet shoved through his belly.”  Capra was naive, of course, about his country, in which many “a guy” could not say or do what they wanted, not in 1941, not if their skin was a different color than Frank Capra’s.  But I think Capra also wasn’t that naive, and that on some level he must have realized that these soaring odes to the country’s values were something akin to the poetry of Langston Hughes, who in the 1930s had written, “let America be America again—the land that never has been yet—and yet must be—the land where every man is free.”  And yet must be.  How will we get there, I wonder?  Henry Connell tells us, in the movie’s final line, which he shouts defiantly at his former employer: “there you are, Norton!  The people!  Try and lick that!”

I Know That Face:  Gene Lockhart, who here plays the somewhat compromised Mayor Lovett, was seen on this blog earlier this year as Judge Henry Harper in Miracle on 34th Street, and he also plays the role of Bob Cratchit in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol.  Harry Holman plays the other important civic leader we see in this film, Mayor Hawkins—in a long career of mostly uncredited roles, one of his last appearances is as the uncredited Mr. Partridge, who becomes so overwhelmed at the big high school dance that he gives up and jumps into the swimming pool in that famous scene from It’s A Wonderful Life.  J. Farrell MacDonald, who in this movie portrays “Sourpuss Sam”, a neighbor whose deafness is taken by other “John Does” for snobbery, is all over holiday motion pictures in uncredited roles: he’s an uncredited sheriff in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, he’s an uncredited policeman again in 1947’s Christmas Eve, and he gets about three lines of dialogue as the man whose “great-grandfather planted that tree” that George Bailey’s car had (or hadn’t) run into in It’s A Wonderful Life.  And of course we can’t forget Barbara Stanwyck, here in the slightly underwritten role of Ann Mitchell, who of course is so memorable in films already covered by this blog, whether we’re talking Remember the Night last year or Christmas in Connecticut this year.

That Takes Me Back:  It is wild to me, to think that once a letter to the editor might have meant anything to people in power, let alone be so persuasive that it’s plausible on any level that it would yield action on public policy.  Oh, for the age of the citizen.  I always smile a little at milk delivery (one of my grandfathers was a failed milk truck driver, who learned the hard way what happens when you forget to set the parking brake – well, his story was that the brake had failed and honestly, I wasn’t there and he was so let’s give it to him) and at soda jerks, since the image of a soda fountain is somehow both impossibly remote to me and something that would have been fairly ordinary to my parents in their youth, I think?  As a map fan, too, I always like spotting a map on screen that reveals the era: in this case, it’s a map of the United States that includes only 48 states, a then-accurate accounting.

I Understood That Reference:  The only hint I caught of it was Ann Mitchell calling Jesus Christ “the original John Doe”, though I think (especially under her desperate circumstances) even the original John Doe would be forgiving of the fact that Ann takes some journalistic license in how she retells the story of Christmas to suit the needs of her audience.

Holiday Vibes (2/10): So, Christmas is super important to the characters rhetorically at a couple of points, and certainly the timing of Doe’s alleged Christmas Eve suicide keeps the holiday a live conversation subject throughout, but it’s kind of shocking how completely absent really any of the trappings of the holiday are here.  As a measure of “vibes” I have to just acknowledge that even when it’s definitely Christmas Eve and the characters are talking about the fact that it’s Christmas, this is a film that doesn’t really lean into that Christmas feeling.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): I can’t pretend that this film is a smooth, successful motion picture in every respect: the dialogue is often clunky or didactic, the narrative is at times pretty hard to treat as plausible, and when I think of the best stuff both Capra and Stanwyck have done on this very blog, I know this isn’t either of their best work.  Again, though, I’m reviewing this film at the perfect historical moment to want to lean into it and listen—to think about how much of it is a fantasy as opposed to the kind of renewal that’s really possible.  And these are undeniably still talented folks, who, sure, have made even better movies, but those movies were GREAT, and therefore I think it’s no accident that this movie is still pretty good.  

Party Mood-Setter?  Definitely not: it’s just not holiday enough, though the film’s pleasant as a companion.  You have so many better options.

Plucked Heart Strings?  There’s something moving about the people’s faith in John, and Ann’s impassioned speech at the end.  I’m not sure how misty-eyed it made me, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that I felt a lot of the things it was asking me to feel.

Recommended Frequency:  If you’re going to watch this at any point in your life, this is a good time to do it.  The country could use a plain-talking John Doe (and a savvy newspaper lady like Ann Mitchell) and I hope we get the real deal someday.

Meet John Doe is in the public domain after a failure to renew copyright, so there’s a lot of free copies floating around (many of them from poorer, older prints of the film, so if you try out a streaming version and the quality’s poor, I’d look for another one).  If you don’t mind ads paying for your streaming, you can watch the film for free at Tubi, Pluto, Plex, the Roku Channel, or Fandango at Home.  If you’re a subscriber to Amazon Prime, you can watch it ad-free there, and I think subscriptions at some other more niche sites (like MGM+) carry it also, but I wasn’t able to check them all.  You can get it on disc, of course, if you like to own your physical media—Barnes and Noble’s got it in Blu-ray or DVD, as is almost always true.  Worldcat says there’s a disc for checkout at over 1,100 libraries worldwide, too, so I bet you can watch it for free just by using your local library!

I know tomorrow’s a busy day for many of us, but I hope you’ll have time to swing through for the blog’s final movie of the year: it’s a short film, and I think you’ll find, if you can uncover a free half hour in your Christmas festivities somewhere, the work might add something really pleasant to the experience.  I’ll tell you all about it, of course—see you then.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Review Essay

We might as well get this out into the open from the outset: I like the 2000 film, How The Grinch Stole Christmas.  That’s a semi-controversial take already: the movie has long had plenty of detractors, and in some circles I’ve seen people make disparaging swipes at movies being “like that Jim Carrey Grinch movie,” as though it was shorthand for a bad holiday flick.  But it may not be THAT controversial—the film’s a perennial holiday showing even now, 25 years (!) after it was released, and I think a lot of people have at least moderately fond memories of it.  What’s probably going to be a little more startling, though, is my argument that, in fact, I love this movie, and I think it might be one of the best holiday movies ever made.  And what will be sacrilege for at least some of you is my argument that it’s a far better film than the 1966 Chuck Jones animated version of Dr. Seuss’s original book, which a couple of generations (mine included) grew up on.  It’s how I feel, though, and however hot the take, I’m going to do my best to persuade you that I’m onto something, anyway, even if you aren’t as taken with this movie as I am.

The basic premise of the Grinch tales in all their manifestations—and I’ll acknowledge up front, I’ve not seen the 2018 animated film or the televised Broadway musical, so I’ll have to leave them for some future blog post—is well known to almost anybody in the American cultural sphere.  Somewhere in the world of Dr. Seuss’s imagination, there’s a town called Whoville, populated by the Whos, a people about whom all we really know is that they celebrate Christmas with enthusiasm.  Neighboring this bucolic village is Mount Crumpit, and on the slopes of that mountain lives a sour, solitary creature called The Grinch, who hates Christmas (and, by extension, Whoville), because his heart is “two sizes too small.”  He eventually gets fed up with the sound of holiday festivities and steals all Christmas accoutrements from the homes of the Whos, before his inevitable change of heart.  It’s a simple story, fit for a children’s picture book, and I think it works just fine as Seussian spectacle (and as a short animated special).  I wasn’t ever really in love with the original, though, I’ll admit: it’s not among my 2-3 favorite Seuss books, and of all the midcentury Christmas specials airing on my family’s TV in my childhood, it was honestly one of the least essential, as far as I was concerned.  There just wasn’t much to the story—the animation was stylish and the voice acting was fun, but that’s about as far as it went.

On the poster for How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jim Carrey in his Grinch makeup (wearing a Santa costume) is staring at the viewer with his hand holding his chin. Below his image, we see a snowy landscape, with a glowing vilage next to a thin, winding mountain peak, that establishes the scene in which it takes place.

The genius of the 2000 film adaptation, in my opinion, originates in its need to bulk up a very simple story into a feature-length screenplay.  As a result, the movie is forced to grapple with the Grinch as a character—why is he the way he is?  What’s his history with Christmas, or the Whos?  Depth is needed, and the script supplies it.  Furthermore, the only Who with any persistent importance in the story from its original book form (Cindy Lou) has to be given a sense of connection to the Grinch also, and here I think it’s managed really successfully.  The emotional investment she makes in The Grinch builds something powerful into the movie’s final act.  It all matters.

I suspect that one of the reasons the 2000 film takes heat from long-time Grinch fans is that it more or less up-ends the moral landscape of the original story—and in doing so, it puts our society in an unflattering light.  But that’s what I love about it.  The original tale is a simple one: us nice Christmas-observing nuclear families are the good guys, singing our little songs and having our little feasts.  The villain of the piece is the outsider: he does not look like us, he does not celebrate our holiday, and when our innocent celebration has made him angry, he tries to wreck our joy.  The fact that we continue to be happy because we have right-sized hearts convicts him at the last possible moment, so that he can repent and be integrated into the Christmas celebration.  Put it like that, and it doesn’t sound so nice, does it?  No offense to Ted Geisel, but it sounds a lot like the kind of pro-conformity message that he is otherwise famous for undermining in stories like “The Sneetches.”  The 2000 version, on the other hand, rightly understands that to the extent that there’s a plausible villain in this scenario, it’s the people of Whoville: they’re the ones whose material wealth is overflowing while a solitary creature is isolated outside their community, subsisting on their trash.  Their obsession with celebration is so all-consuming that they don’t consider the side effects of it—all the noise, noise, noise, noise!—which would be bad enough if the Grinch was merely someone indifferent to Christmas.  But of course it’s more complicated than that: from his youngest days, his experience of Christmas was isolating.  The holiday celebrated in Whoville demanded a great deal of cultural conformity that was unhealthy—the Grinch is mocked openly for his differences, and ultimately is driven out of town by bullying and ridicule at a young age.  Later, when the sound of the Whobilation’s Yuletide festivities is driving him crazy, the Grinch grabs a hammer to knock himself out with, saying, “Now, to take care of those pesky memories”: he knows that what bothers him here isn’t the noise, it’s the mistreatment that it now represents to him, because of his experience of the Whos.  And of course, most of the people of Whoville aren’t evil (their Mayor being the prime exception to the rule).  They’re just cheerfully complicit in some pretty cruel abuses out of a desire to remain comfortable and untargeted, themselves—they’ll quietly allow a powerful, arrogant blowhard to stand in public at a microphone, abusing outsiders for his own self-aggrandizement and making up passages from The Book of Who to suit his demented purposes while dismissing the one true believer willing to stand up to him in public and insist that the community’s values are actually imperiled.  Yep, if you thought you could escape the politics of 2025 here, I’m afraid I can’t let you.  What an incredibly apt movie for the moment.

And yet, what I think is most impressive about this movie is that the Grinch’s critique of the society bordering him is—for a movie in which Jim Carrey is a huge wisecracking green Yeti, essentially—pretty nuanced.  In a crucial scene, mid-film, The Grinch is given a triggering Christmas “gift” by the Mayor, in front of the whole town: it’s a reminder of the Grinch’s trauma, and the gathering treats it as a chuckle-inducing anecdote.  Remember that day where we made fun of you so badly that you fled into the mountains to live as a hermit….when you were, like, 8 years old?  Kids do the darnedest stuff, don’t they?  (I’m telling you, this film is wiser than it has any right to be about how “good” people do bad things.)  Anyway, you’d expect the guy to blow up in that moment: this is personal, it’s painful, and he could say so.  But he doesn’t confront Whoville until their town’s materialism is the thing on display, because I think on some level, the Grinch understands that that’s the real problem.  A society that’s more focused on the superficial, on presents and costumes and conspicuous consumption, is a society that loses touch with its own heart.  He doesn’t tell them it’s what leads them to hurt an outsider like him.  He doesn’t believe in their capacity to understand that truth, really—he has no faith in the Whos, and they’ve done little to deserve such faith, in any case.  This is what makes the triumph at the end of the story something powerful—it’s not just some mountain gremlin returning everyone’s Christmas ornaments so they can have the party they’d been planning on.  The Grinch comes back to them because they showed him that something he didn’t believe in was real—that this community could learn to find more joy in each other as people (him included) than they ever had in their stacks of Christmas presents.  He apologizes to them for how he’s behaved because they’ve earned his trust on a level he never imagined.

And yes, I know, I’m talking in soaring thematic terms about the ethical messages of a movie primarily intended to give us Jim Carrey making a fool of himself on screen.  Well, look, Jim’s not for everybody (and I don’t feel a ton of affection for some of his wildest comedic performances), but to me putting his manic energy inside this huge green fur suit is a match made in heaven.  My wife and I can (and do) quote half his lines all year long, from “Nice kid…. Baaaaaad judge of character.” to “One man’s toxic sludge is another man’s potpourri!” to “Oh no….I’m speaking in RHYME.”  I can imagine, of course, responding negatively to some of Carrey’s antics, but I just think it works for the character—it lightens what might otherwise be too heavy a story, honestly, to have the Grinch be someone who’s responded to being ostracized by becoming a standup comedian, transmuting his pain into a PG-friendly Don Rickles routine.

The other thing that gives this movie its needed heart is the performance by Taylor Momsen as Cindy Lou Who—sure, the character is earnestness personified, but that’s her dramatic function.  What I appreciate about Cindy Lou, and this only increases with time, is the way she expresses something far more mature than a child performance normally would.  This Cindy Lou is not merely some little kid woken up by the Grinch’s theft, as she is in the original.  She’s someone wrestling with the question of why Christmas doesn’t feel the way it used to—asking herself what the magic was, and where it’s gone.  This is not, I acknowledge, something an elementary schooler would normally feel.  But speaking as a kid who was a melancholy elementary schooler (somewhere I still have the Last Will and Testament I wrote at the age of about nine), it tracks.  More than that, though, what Cindy’s wrestling with is what we all wrestle with, no matter what holidays we do or don’t celebrate: where does our capacity for that childhood sense of wonder and delight go?  Is it just nostalgia for something that never existed and we’re smart enough to see that now, or was it real and we can find it again?  Given all that, it’s a really lovely (and touching) message that Cindy discovers that we can have that holiday happiness again, but only if we get our heads on correctly about what the holiday’s actually about.  We can’t find the joy in ever-increasing material consumption—the joy isn’t there.  It’s in the hearts of people who see and hear each other, of people who not only have the capacity to love but who put that capacity to work.  It’s in a community that, rather than seeing outsiders as threats to their stability, can look at those outsiders through the lens of the values they claim to profess, of welcome and inclusion and care.  THAT’S what can leave us singing “Fahoo, fores; dahoo, dores,” hand in hand with our neighbors.

And I think folks forget what high-quality craft goes into this film—Anthony Hopkins’s narration providing a lovely, lyrical insight into the story.  Incredible production design, from the costuming and makeup worn by the ridiculous Whos to the junkpunk vibes of the Grinch’s “lair” that’s filled with what are apparently his inventions.  A great symphonic score by the always reliable James Horner, and a sentimental song that seems to have stuck around in the Christmas pop canon in “Where Are You, Christmas?”  I think the admittedly larger-than-life presence of Jim Carrey in outlandish makeup slinging one-liners leaves people misremembering that that’s all this film has to offer.  Again, I know mileage varies.  A lot of you won’t get out of the movie what I see here.  But if you love it also, well, I hope I’m helping articulate some of the things that we might both be seeing in this film.

I Know That Face: Molly Shannon, who here plays Betty Lou Who (Cindy Lou’s decoration-obsessed mother), is a veteran of seasonal projects: she’s Tracy in The Santa Clause 2, she plays a fictionalized version of herself in It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, and in 2004’s The Twelve Days of Christmas Eve she plays Angie, a kind of angel who gives the protagonist 12 attempts to get Christmas Eve right (a la Groundhog Day).  But she can’t match the even more holiday-infused track record of Christine Baranski, the Grinch’s love interest here as Martha May Whovier—Christine’s playing Regina in 2020’s Christmas on the Square (a Dolly Parton project), she’s Ruth in A Bad Moms Christmas (a comedy I fear I’ll have to review one of these years), and she’s Lee Bellmont in Recipe for a Perfect Christmas.  Christine also voices Flo in Timothy Tweedle the First Christmas Elf, and she’s Prunella Stickler in Eloise at Christmastime, and of course as a sitcom regular (on Cybill, as Maryann Thorpe) she appears in Christmas episodes, including season 3’s “A Hell of a Christmas.”  I would be remiss if I didn’t take the chance to shine the spotlight on the director’s dad, Rance Howard, who’s Whoville’s “Elderly Timekeeper”—he voices Rudolph in Elf Sparkle and the Special Red Dress, he plays a blind man in Holiday in Your Heart (a LeAnn Rimes vehicle), and back in 1986 he was in his own Dolly Parton project, A Smoky Mountain Christmas, playing Dr. Jennings.  Lastly, we have to tip our cap to Jim Carrey, the Grinch himself, who of course got a much more negative review from me when I reviewed his work as nine different people in Disney’s A Christmas Carol.

That Takes Me Back: The whole village is wired in series, so that a single loosened bulb on the Whoville Christmas Tree turns out the lights all over town.  It reminded me, for a moment, of having to test every single bulb in the lights on the tree in order to figure out what had gone wrong.

I Understood That Reference: Of course, as the Grinch prepares to deploy his plan to steal Christmas, Santa’s been there ahead of him.  In any case, the Grinch is aware of the Rudolph narrative, since he riffs briefly with his dog, Max, about the reindeer’s having saved Christmas.

Holiday Vibes (8/10): Christmas in Whoville obviously both is and is not like Christmas anywhere else: there’s a lot here that “feels holiday” as Cindy Lou’s dad would probably have said, and of course my watching it routinely each December must add to that feeling.  To me, the feast and the presents and the decorations certainly create the right kind of feeling…but even more so, the message of love and our capacity to create community together is just what I want to feel at this time of year, and I’m glad it helps me do this.

Actual Quality (9/10): Look, I know this isn’t a flawless masterpiece—any movie where one of the jokes is getting a sleeping man (however odious) to kiss a dog’s butt is definitely not hoping to win any awards.  But I also think it absolutely deserves a much better reputation: it takes what is, frankly, a reactionary message about insiders and outsiders in the original tale, and transforms it into a much more thoughtful exploration of ostracism and its consequences.  It’s also funny, and sweet, and the whole movie takes place inside of a snowflake, like the one on your sleeve.  It’s great in my book, anyway.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s absolutely quotable enough to just be rolling in the background while you do other things, and the story’s cultural saturation is so high that a Grinch on the screen probably won’t be too distracting to party-goers, even though it easily could suck people in.

Plucked Heart Strings?  I find some of Cindy Lou’s struggles pretty easy to identify with, but they don’t exactly make me mist up.  It’s an effective emotional arc, but I think you probably won’t need to watch the movie with a tissue box next to you.

Recommended Frequency: I’m not sure how to get through a year without watching this one.  It’s just too deeply ingrained into my memory (and my wife’s).  If you’ve never seen it, or just haven’t in a while, I hope you’ll consider giving it another spin.

This movie is fairly easy to access, though not necessarily for free—you can stream it if you’re a member of Amazon Prime, or Peacock, or Hulu.  You can pay to rent it from most of the usual places too, it looks like.  Barnes and Noble will sell it to you on disc, and around 1,500 libraries have a copy to check out for free, according to Worldcat.

Scrooge (1951)

Review Essay:

Cheers to you, friends, and thanks for sticking around through most of a blog season, at this point.  The end (and Christmas!) is in sight.  It’s the last of this year’s Christmas Carol Sundays at FFTH and I knew from months ago where I wanted to finish up this sequence.  My first year as a holiday movie blogger, I wanted to finish the quartet of Christmas Carol adaptations with my personal favorite of the many I’ve seen (the Muppets), and this year, I wanted to pay homage to the one I grew up on, my mother’s favorite, the 1951 film, Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim.  I hadn’t seen it in many years, but I remembered that in my childhood, whenever it was on television, it was important to my mom to watch it, and my memory was that I’d really liked it.  I added it to the schedule and hoped it would meet my high expectations, and the great news is, I feel like it fully did so.

Every really good adaptation of Dickens’s novella has some kind of thematic hook—a way of reading his story that, both in what they include or exclude from the original tale as well as in what they choose to add to the narrative, shows what the filmmakers believe is central to its message.  The hook for this film is fear, and I think one of the things that surprised me most (in a great way) is how much the exploration of that fear turns out to be a key that unlocks a lot of really interesting elements in characters and scenes I know so well that sometimes it feels a bit silly to keep coming back to new adaptations thinking I’ll find something here.

The poster for the 2020 re-release of Scrooge depicts, in black and white, Alastair Sim's haunted face, wrapped up with a thick scarf and set under a large top hat. Snow is falling around him, and over his shoulder we can glimpse some horses in harness, and the indication of some trees and houses. The tagline, "Christmas? Bah! Humbug," appears above his head.

For this incredibly faithful rendering of Dickens’s text, the first emergence of fear as a central preoccupation is in Alastair Sim’s magnetic performance as Scrooge.  Where other Scrooges on film tend to push other kinds of emotions forward—anger, for instance, or cruelty, or arrogance—Sim’s old moneylender looks haunted from the moment he appears on screen.  Some of this is just the hand Sim was dealt by time and fate: his huge, hooded eyes (reminiscent in some ways of Peter Lorre’s) are, by the early 1950s, better at expressing that kind of paralyzed anxiety than they would be most other kinds of emotion.  But let’s not sell Sim short: he’s doing a lot of work, too, as a performer to evoke the sense of his fear.  We see him darting away from interactions (startled by the man on the steps of the Exchange, for instance, or quietly but firmly insistent that the child carolers move on from the sidewalk outside his office), and indeed, the one flash of his anger early in the story only emerges in response to the touch of his nephew Fred’s cheerful, welcoming hand on his shoulder.  Scrooge lashes out in response, pounding the desk and shouting, as though it’s that kind of intimate human contact that frightens and upsets him more than anything else in the world.  Other than that, though, the Scrooge we get in these sequences is softer of voice, more restrained than many Scrooges—still a covetous old sinner, to be clear, but it’s apparent that he’s been made the way he is, somehow, by his experience of fear.  He seems baffled by Fred’s happy, impoverished marriage more than he is wrathful about it, as though it’s not possible for him to make sense of a life lived outside of the fear of not having his wealth to protect him, and in one sad moment at dinner on Christmas Eve, we see him retract his request for extra bread with his meal once he realizes it will cost a haypenny.  It’s a reminder that Scrooge’s severity isn’t just for people under his thumb—he’s just as severe with himself.  The miserly impulses of his heart are less a cage he’s trying to trap the poor inside, and more a prison he feels chained within, as well.

Scrooge’s fears are amplified by a number of decisions made by the screenplay that I think add a lot of texture to the story: Ebenezer, in this film, had been the means of his mother’s death as she died in childbirth, and he’d lived a remote and deprived life after his father rejected him.  When his older sister (in this version), Fan, comes to get him from school, he tells her how overjoyed he is to be with her again, and she promises him that he will never be lonely again, “as long as I shall live.”  But of course Fan does not live; she dies bearing Fred as Scrooge’s mother died bearing him.  He opened up his heart once before and lost the one safe harbor in his whole world—no wonder he shrinks from humanity, and from Fred’s kind hand in particular.  Furthermore, we learn over the course of the Christmas Past sequence that Scrooge’s whole life is a kind of haunting: his pinched, chilly office was once the warm, friendly office belonging to Mr. Fezziwig, an office that young Scrooge and his partner Marley basically forced Fezziwig out of, years ago.  Scrooge’s life, too, is lived in a shadow—he inherited Marley’s house and furniture upon Jacob’s death, which means that of COURSE Marley’s haunting him here, this is literally the man’s home, and the bed from which Scrooge rises to see the first two spirits is the bed that Marley died in.  To me, this enriches the film so much: I understand better both why Scrooge doubts the apparitions he at first encounters, and why he comes to believe in them so fully.

The writing, then, is a real strength: I’ll say that, for me, the acting is a slightly more mixed bag.  Sim himself as Scrooge is really wonderful, expressive in almost every scene at a level that engages me.  Some of the supporting cast rise to his level, but others feel a little stiff or amateurish, which probably reflects just the relatively limited budget and simple approach of this small British production in the 1950s.  Maybe the worst of the offenders, for me, is the Ghost of Christmas Past, about whom my complaint really is that he’s forgettable: there’s just not that much personality here on a level that would make his work with Scrooge more memorable.  This fault is amplified slightly by the fact that the movie extends the Christmas Past sequence by quite a bit, adding in scenes to help convey how Scrooge changed over time.  But these are minor complaints: truthfully, the movie committing to a deep exploration of Scrooge’s past is really effective, because it helps me understand how a young clerk who loved the joy of his kindly boss did grow into the walking black hole of this aged Scrooge, towards whom money is drawn and out of whom no good human emotion seems likely to emerge.  And the other side benefit of this long exploration is that it gives the old Scrooge time to make sense of things—he starts to anticipate what each next scene will reveal, and he pleads not to have to face them.  This is true in a lot of adaptations, but I think Sim more than any other Scrooge I’ve seen manages to persuade me that by the time the Past section is done, he’s basically been convinced of what he’s done wrong in life.  The key to Sim’s version of the man, then, is that even knowing he’s done wrong, he’s still not ready to change, and that brings us back around to fear: Scrooge pleads with both Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come that he is simply too old, too far gone.  He begs them to leave him in peace as a lost cause and go find “some younger, more promising creature” to transform.  This is a Scrooge whose depression has so chained down his heart that even when he knows he is a bad man, he cannot believe himself capable of good.  And so the Present and Yet to Come sequences become less about punishing Scrooge and more about forcing him to understand that he has ample opportunity to have an impact, right now and before he’s in the cold ground.  It’s marvelously effective.

As a result we get a different vision of the Present than most adaptations supply: we see far more about the whole Cratchit family (and not just Tiny Tim), who really are poised to be helped by a man who can create wealth and opportunity for a bunch of young people on the verge of adulthood.  Our glimpse of Fred’s party skips the guessing game entirely (no need to skewer Scrooge further) in exchange for a longer conversation between the partygoers in which Fred can defend his belief that Ebenezer has the capacity to change, and show up as a guest someday.  Again, that party’s full of exactly the kind of young people Scrooge was once, people who, as I think he must understand, are about to make the same choices he once made, and maybe could live differently than he has.  And most poignantly (here departing again from Dickens), Scrooge’s once-betrothed, here named Alice instead of Belle, is a woman working at one of those poorhouses Ebenezer’s such a big fan of—an angel of mercy to those in desperate need.  I said critically of Scrooged that I thought giving him a love interest to reconnect with was too cheap, because it reduces Scrooge’s reforming to being transactional, something he’s doing to “get the girl”.  So what I love here is that Alice is never mentioned again—we understand, as Ebenezer surely does, that she’s out there.  That a more compassionate, more loving man might even find a bridge of connection to her, in the future.  But there’s no guarantee of this, and I think it’s quite possible he never even sought her out: that he understood that the Spirits’ message was not “hey….guess who’s still single?” but rather “you jerk, the only good thing about the poorhouse is the kindness of people too good to stand in a room with you: it’s time to grow up.”

And then Scrooge’s Christmas Day here is such a moving and happy celebration: Sim, who has played the man’s fear so successfully, can unleash the relief of this unlikely chance to live a better life with incredible joy.  I like the elevation of his servant, the “charlady” as she calls herself, in prominence as a character here, so that he can have an extended dialogue about how he’s feeling and what he’s thinking about, and apply his generosity directly to the woman he’s frightening.  And because this is a story of how a fearful man found the courage to trust other people instead of hiding from them, Scrooge’s arrival at Fred’s house has never hit me with more emotion.  Everything about it, from how gingerly he steps across the threshold to the gentle encouragement he gets from the maid at the door to Fred’s wife getting up to extend her arms to him in welcome, and lead him in a merry little dance, is so fully expressive of the gladness of complete redemption.  Scrooge can change because loving community is possible, and because (to follow the logic of Dickens’s original tale) in Christmas we are given a holiday that asks us to create that kind of welcome for others.  Even if in some ways it feels a little too easy for the old moneylender, in other ways that’s just the dream the story asks us to believe in.  As Scrooge himself comments in nearly the film’s final scene, “I don’t deserve to be happy.  But I can’t help it!”  What better description of grace could there be?

I Know That Face: Kathleen Harrison, who here appears as Scrooge’s charlady servant, is in IMDB’s credits for the 1974 TV movie Charles Dickens’ World of Christmas, but I have no idea what role she played.  Michael Hordern, who portrays Jacob Marley (both living and dead), is the voice of the narrator for the British TV series Paddington Bear, which includes the 1976 episode, “Paddington and the Christmas Shopping”.  Hordern also voices Badger in the 1980s stop-motion animated series The Wind in the Willows which aired several lovely Christmas-themed episodes, and the man wasn’t done with Dickens by a long shot, it seems, since he voices Jacob Marley again in the award-winning animated 1971 film A Christmas Carol (which I will definitely get to on the blog someday), and he appears in live action as Ebenezer Scrooge in a 1977 TV movie A Christmas Carol, one of dozens of such productions that I’ve simply never heard of.  Hordern’s joined in 1971 by Alastair Sim, in fact, who voices Scrooge in that film, reprising his role in this one.  And I learned to my surprise, in digging into this cast, that there’s a crossover I hadn’t spotted with another earlier film this year: Roddy Hughes, who here plays good-natured old Fezziwig, has I think a single line as a chemist dispensing medicine in The Crowded Day.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: This is a fairly comprehensive version of the original tale, including a lot of things I love to see.  A couple in particular caught my ear and eye: not many productions leave in the comment by Marley that he’s procured this chance for Scrooge, with Ebenezer replying, “Thank ‘ee, Jacob.”  It’s a sweet note of grace early on.  This is one of the very few adaptations that manage to leave in Scrooge being taken by Christmas Present to a coal mine where the workers are singing carols together (alas, we don’t also get their visit to a lighthouse, as in the original).  And Christmas Present here gives us a brief glimpse of those starving, near-feral children, Ignorance and Want—less unsettling than the Disney version I watched earlier this year, and I think therefore more affecting?

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: As I mentioned, we don’t get the guessing game at Fred’s where the company’s meaner to Scrooge than they are earlier in the evening: it’s an unusual cut, but like I noted, I think I get why emotionally the filmmakers wanted something else.  We also don’t get the young couple rejoicing because Scrooge’s death may give them a chance of keeping their home, exchanging that time instead for a very long dialogue scene with “Old Joe” the ragpicker, who’s buying up whatever the dead have left behind.

Christmas Carol Vibes (10/10): The evocation of the original tale, and this time and place, is so effective.  There are adjustments, as any adaptation would have to make, but here they’re so in line with the tone of the novella that I had to double check a couple of these innovations to make sure they weren’t in there and I’d forgotten them.  If you want the feeling of reading the book, this will suit you to a T.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): Thanks to a well-paced screenplay and a really effective performer in the role of Scrooge, this is a nearly perfect film to immerse ourselves in.  Sure, I complained about a couple of semi-flat performances, but really, you hardly notice: the rest of the film keeps chugging along with great skill.  I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to revisit it, since it deserves more attention than I’ve given it.

Scrooge? Sim is tremendously successful at imbuing him with humanity: making Scrooge a fearful person instead of a furious one unlocks a way of understanding him as a victim as well as a villain.  He’s younger than he looks, too—a mere 51 when this was released—and as a result he has the physical energy to be able to really leap about giddily on Christmas morning, enough that we can believe his housekeeper was rattled.  Definitely a top tier performance, and one that is the secret to the movie’s success.

Supporting Cast? This is a slightly more mixed bag—Mervyn Johns is genial but less memorable as Bob Cratchit, and I’d say both the Spirits with speaking lines are just a little underwhelming.  Glyn Dearman does a good job with a Tiny Tim who’s right on the edge of being too perfect for even this heightened fable, though, and Rona Anderson probably gives the best performance I’ve ever seen of Scrooge’s betrothed (with apologies to Meredith Braun, who does such a lovely job as Belle in the Muppet version, but Rona’s been handed more dialogue and more screen time, and that makes a difference).  Also, as I note, we get a lot more “Christmas Past” time here, which means that we see a lot of Marley and Fezziwig we wouldn’t normally (as well as the actor playing a young Ebenezer), and all of that goes really well.  I’d say that this isn’t really the movie’s strength but there’s plenty to enjoy in it.

Recommended Frequency? I haven’t been watching this version every year, given how well I knew it from my childhood, but this viewing made me feel like it really ought to make it into my annual rotation.  Sim is so good at the role, and the emotion of the story hit home for me as a result.

You can watch this film pretty easily, if you like: Tubi has a copy, as does Plex, if you don’t mind the ads.  If you’d rather pay for an ad-free experience, you can rent it from Amazon Prime.  I own a digital copy from Amazon (which I assume is the same version they stream) and I’ll mention that the audio levels are slightly off in some sections: if you notice that kind of thing more than others, I figure it’s best to be forewarned.  The film is available under its alternate title of A Christmas Carol (I wonder where they got that?) on disc at Barnes and Noble, and though it’s not as universally accessible as some films, it’s in several hundred libraries, according to Worldcat, and therefore I hope you can borrow a copy for free that way, if you so desire.

The Lion in Winter (1968)

Review Essay

It has been suggested (not unfairly) by some of this little blog’s faithful readers that I don’t have much sympathy for mean-spirited movies.  My relatively harsh reviews for films like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Mixed Nuts, and most recently Scrooged do seem to bear that out: I didn’t respond well to the tone of any of those films, which all felt to me like they were dragging me in unwillingly as an audience member to participate in some downward-punching humor.  Well, I didn’t place this film on the slate for this year thinking that it would offer a counterargument: in truth, I’d never seen it, and in my head I had imagined it would provide a little more solemnity, a perhaps slightly stiff historical drama to give some restraint to this final weekend before Christmas and the end of the blog season.  Well, boy, was I wrong…but the fiery, aggressive, and (yes) mean-spirited film I got gave me a lot to delight in.  I’ll see if I can explain why.

The premise of The Lion in Winter (a film adapting a stage play of the same name) consists of complicated family politics unfolding at a difficult Christmas gathering…only, unlike most films of this kind, the gathering occurs in a medieval castle (Chinon, in what is now France, for the Christmas feast in 1183), and the family’s internal politics govern the control of most of Western Europe.  The family in question is that of Henry II, one of the Plantagenet kings of England, who by might and savvy and deft diplomacy had maneuvered himself to such heights that by this Christmas, he styles himself the Angevin Emperor: at the age of 50, he is a man who knows that his time grows short, and his legacy needs to be provided for.  “I’ve built an empire,” he says early on, “and I must know that it is going to last.”  Now that his eldest son is dead, he’s left with three potential heirs, and he invites all of them (Richard, Geoffrey, and John) to Chinon for the feast, knowing each of them thinks they can plot their way to the crown as his successor.  Invited, too, is the boys’ mother, Henry’s rich and powerful queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he has kept imprisoned in Salisbury Tower for many years now as he’s followed his heart in pursuit of other women: Eleanor may be here as a temporarily paroled prisoner, but she is still Henry’s equal as a politician and a schemer.  Henry will, of course, have his mistress there, too: young Alais is her own complication, since she’s formally betrothed to Richard, but Henry has no intention of giving her up.  Alais’s half-brother, though, the teenage King of France, Philip, will be at this gathering also, and he intends to force the matter of her marriage or else demand her dowry back from Henry.  And you thought your family’s Christmas dinner conversations took place on thin ice, eh?

You might think, upon reading this still-insufficiently-detailed summary, that this will be far too complicated a web to make sense of as a viewer (especially if you’re not really up on your 12th Century politics) and that could be true for some, I’m sure.  But I think the film works far better than you’d expect for a couple of key reasons, and the first is the strength of the acting.  When you put Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the hands of Peter O’Toole (then at the height of his powers as an energetic British leading man) and Katharine Hepburn (nearing the end of her dominance as a midcentury actress, but still capable of enormous screen presence at any moment, as proven when she wins her fourth Academy Award for this role), you give the audience a real gift: even when we can’t follow every detail of every double-cross, the sound and fury of these characters bears us along with the plot like a boat adrift in a flooding river.  Add in a brilliant supporting cast—maybe none of them more scintillating than a young Anthony Hopkins as the brash juggernaut, Richard, whom we know best by his nickname, “the Lionheart”—and almost any dialogue would ring out like dueling swords.

The poster for The Lion in Winter depicts Katharine Hepburn, clutched closely to himself by a bearded Peter O'Toole: she looks up at him beaming a smile that could be sweet delight or poisonous malice, while he narrows his eyes looking down at her, whether in love or in contempt. Below them, we see the painted image of two medieval armies in pitched battle, and behind the couple and this battle, the poster is splotched abstractly with a red paint that suggests blood.

It’s not just “any” dialogue, though: the screenplay (also Academy Award winning) is full of the most poetically intense exchanges, written for the heightened surreality of the theatrical stage, so much so that on film it borders on camp (and might topple over the edge into ridiculousness in the hands of any less gifted cast).  I wrote down dozens of quotations as I watched, and will share examples to give you a taste of what I mean: at one point, Richard, goaded into fury by his whinging little brother John (who grows up into the tyrannical King John of the Robin Hood legends), whips out a dagger and chases John around Eleanor’s bedroom, seemingly intent on murdering his brother then and there.  John screams out to his mother for help, exclaiming in apparent shock that Richard’s got a knife, to which his mother exasperatedly flings back, “of course he has a knife; he’s always got a knife: we ALL have knives!  It’s 1183, and we’re barbarians!”  At another moment, Eleanor’s reminiscing about her first husband, King Louis VII of France, and how she accompanied him on crusade—she recalls, “I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure, and I damn near died of windburn… but the troops were dazzled.”  Did I say it “borders on camp”?  Maybe I should correct that: it takes place deep inside camp’s territory.  The writing’s not just fireworks, though: sometimes there’s a quiet weight in it that reveals a character’s inner wisdom.  Henry, at one point, defends his latest conniving by saying, “I’ve snapped and plotted all my life. There’s no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once.”  Later, in a crisis, when Richard insists that whatever comes he won’t drop to his knees and beg, Geoffrey mocks his brother, saying, “You chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.”  And Richard eyes Geoffrey, as if from a height his brother cannot touch, and replies, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

How is it that I can laugh at the soap opera of this maddening family, and a Christmas gathering in which the vast majority of the words flung between them are harsh, or cruel, or insincere, or condescending, or deceitful….and often more than one of those at a time?  Again, I think the strength of the acting and the writing help: the worst insults carry the humor a little better when they’re delivered through really high art, I suspect.  But I think it’s also that these people and their problems are so remote from me and mine: I can comprehend (after having played enough hours of Crusader Kings 3) a world in which people have these problems, betrothals lasting decades because they’re complicated feudal land arrangements, and marriages that are annulled decades after the fact but only if you effectively own the Pope, but that’s not the kind of thing I have to maneuver while eating Christmas dinner.  Moreover, every single character on screen is just that—they are self-consciously characters.  Eleanor and Henry are playing roles, roles that change at a moment’s notice depending on who’s in the room and what they want, and these children raised by them (Alais included) have learned to play the game too or else have learned how to benefit from it.  Almost none of these words draw blood because the combatants are too scarred from decades of dueling, and everyone knows that this morning’s enemy may be your ally (or at least the mutual enemy of a more dangerous foe) by day’s end.  Every bridge still up between these people was built for the sake of burning.  If you watch this film, you’ll hear people saying some of the worst things they can think of—Eleanor and Henry, in particular, are gifted at this—and only you can know if that’s the kind of thing you can let yourself enjoy as a spectacle.  I found that, more often than not, I could, and did.

I like, too, the way the movie gives us just enough to keep these characters straight: the three princes, for instance, are all introduced to us while fighting, in three quick, nearly wordless scenes.  The economy of it from a screenwriting perspective is impressive.  John (“Johnny” as Henry calls him) is dueling his indulgent father, who easily bests this teenager who seems to have no plan at all in life but to swing wildly, trusting that his father won’t hurt him really.  Richard, on the other hand, we see at a joust, effortlessly tossing his opponent to the ground like Marshawn Lynch in Beast Mode, and then moving with a swift and apparent ruthless purpose to take his life before something interrupts: we perceive that Richard is a man of action, a fellow who likes to run directly ahead and trust his strength to carry him through obstacles.  Geoffrey, then, we see perched high above a beach where his men are stationed secretly: he is never in any danger, and with a few swift hand signals to knights waiting below, he springs a trap he’d clearly set long in advance.  He is cold and cunning, a strategist who if given time can get an advantage on his opponent, and who will never ever expose himself to risk.  We’re only a handful of minutes in and we can already see the ways this family will find themselves at each other’s throats, with a kingdom up for grabs.  As Henry himself later comments, “they may snap at me, and plot… and that makes them the kind of sons I want.”  He loves the battles he fights with these young men, and he looks forward to them with a relish that suggests the energy of this conflict is what keeps him young, himself.

I know I haven’t touched on the holiday elements of the film much, but to be honest, despite the feast of Christmas being the ostensible reason for them all to be here (especially King Philip of France, and Henry’s prisoner queen, Eleanor), it comes up very little.  It provides a context for some good japes—”What shall we hang, the holly, or each other?” made me laugh—and there are moments when both Henry and Eleanor make reference to religion, and sometimes even elements of Christmas itself, to clarify something about their purpose, but they’re momentary flashes at most.  This is a story about power: “power is the only fact,” says Henry, though as the movie unfolds, we learn that there are other “facts” besides power that Henry struggles to understand.  Among them is love, though it’s love in a lot of guises, few of them deeply sentimental.  Eleanor’s seemingly deep attachment to Henry (much like his own strange, strained attachment to both Eleanor and Alais) is hard to parse: how much of it is performed for the sake of getting what she (or he) wants, and how much of it is honest?  How real are Alais’s feelings, either—the girl seems passionate, but is it a passion for the crown, for the chance to bear sons to a king, or is it love for that aging king, himself?  Surprisingly, maybe the sincerest expression of love we see in the whole film is an expression of same-sex affection: Richard the Lionheart, we learn in a couple of key scenes, is a man who loves another man, and as Richard is maybe the least subtle or deceitful of all the people in Chinon Castle this Christmas, I found it hard to interpret the things he says as being anything less than true, often painful feeling.  For 1968, it was genuinely unexpected to encounter a gay character on screen, not to mention a character who in every other way seems to avoid the kind of stereotypes that would have then been commonly believed about gay men.

I could keep talking about this film for a long while—there are so many splashy scenes to comment on, so many lines of deliciously wicked repartee to quote—but I doubt that really serves you as a reader.  If by now I’ve persuaded you to try the film, you’ll get more fun out of these things happening without my advance notice, and if you’re pretty sure it’s not for you, you should probably not be subjected further to my secondhand version.  It’s probably just as polarizing a film as A Christmas Tale, which I wrote about earlier this year—shockingly similar, in fact, since in this film as in that French arthouse picture, we get a son asking his mother why she doesn’t love him, and we get to hear her complicated answer—but it’s just that somehow in this situation I “get” the film, in a way that I never “got” the other one.  It’s not that this film is historically accurate, to be clear: none of this happened.  These people existed, in one form or another, and they were almost certainly all schemers and plotters who played politics with each others’ lives, but they didn’t have a Christmas at Chinon Castle, in 1183 or at any other time.  The resolution we get from the film’s final act is a resolution that deepens our understanding of these characters, but it’s not giving us much sense of what would happen next in a tumultuous era in medieval history.  The truths that The Lion in Winter has to tell are truths about people, and the ways we lie to ourselves and each other to get what we think we want.

I Know That Face: Peter O’Toole, here the larger-than-life Henry II, appears later in his career as an elderly artist mentor named Glen in Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage, and lends his voice to Pantaloon, a toy soldier general, in 1990’s animated film, The Nutcracker Prince.  John Castle, who in this film portrays the cold, scheming Prince Geoffrey, shows up in 2013 in one episode of the TV series A Ghost Story for Christmas as John Eldred.  Nigel Stock, Henry II’s loyal servant William Marshal, plays Dr. Watson in a 1968 British TV episode of a Sherlock Holmes series, “The Blue Carbuncle,” which is the Holmes mystery set at Christmas (Star Wars fans may enjoy that Peter Cushing, Grand Moff Tarkin, plays the great detective in this episode).  Anthony Hopkins, an electric presence in this early career-making role as Richard the Lionheart, at nearly the end of his career turns up as an aging and violent king—King Herod the Great—in the 2024 television movie Mary.  He’s also an often-forgotten presence as the unseen narrator in the Jim Carrey How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I’ll review here in the final days of this blog season.  And of course blog readers will need little reminder of Katharine Hepburn’s other holiday performances, but in case you do, here she is obviously the Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most skillful of schemers, but we’ve seen her recently as Bunny Watson in 1957’s Desk Set, and as I remarked at the time, she also appears as Cornelia Beaumont in the 1994 TV movie One Christmas, which I kind of doubt will make it to FFTH anytime soon, and as Jo March in 1933’s Little Women, which I think stands a slightly better chance (though it’s undeniably less of a “holiday movie” per se).

That Takes Me Back: Haha, despite the jokes sometimes told by young people about my advancing age, no, I am not nostalgic for the High Middle Ages.  I mean…given my personality, I suppose I kind of am.  But I don’t have anything here I can point at, saying, “can you believe they’re chanting in plainsong, haha, remember the days before polyphonic harmony?”

I Understood That Reference: At one point, Eleanor slips into Alais’s room and hears her singing a carol—she praises the young woman’s singing as the only thing that keeps the castle from feeling “like Lent”, and goes on to comment that, growing up, she was so conscious of the earthly king’s power (as opposed to God’s) that when she was little she was never sure if Christmas was the birthday of the King of Heaven or of her Uncle Raymond.  Shortly thereafter, Henry steps back inside the castle, having stood outside on the ramparts for a while and looked up at the great sea of stars in the night sky, and comments, “What eyes the wise men must have had, to see a new one in so many?  I wonder, were there fewer stars then?  It is a mystery.”

Holiday Vibes (2.5/10): As I mention above, we know it’s Christmas, but very little celebration occurs: I’d expected a Christmas mass or a big feast, but the events of the story either skip or preclude such gatherings, and as a result, though we do see wrapped presents and hear a little talk of the holiday, it’s not much at all to go on.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): This is a big, loud, well-acted and well-written royal soap opera.  It’s probably about the best version of such a thing I can imagine, but it’s also not really high art.  I found a lot of it fun, some of it confusing, and at least a few moments were pretty uncomfortable—especially when characters find ways to hurt one another that really do cut to the bone.  I mostly loved the fireworks, though, and honestly, so do these characters.  Eleanor and Henry are like bitter athletic rivals, who at the end of their careers can take some delight not just from their own remaining talent but from seeing it still burning in their ancient foe: game does not always respect game, maybe, but here, these competitors are happier when they’re getting as well as they give, for the sake of the sport.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s either too complicated to follow or too involving to watch: I don’t think I could leave it on the background of a gathering, though I guess maybe I could be decorating Christmas cookies while laughing at the banter between these spoiled princes and their seasoned warrior parents.

Plucked Heart Strings?  Not even Eleanor herself, I think, has any idea how many of her tears are real, if any, and though Alais is badly treated by Henry, in time we see her true colors as a schemer, too.  Maybe a person with a very particular romantic history could find themselves leaning in and feeling Eleanor’s attachment to Henry in spite of it all, but it doesn’t resonate for me.  If I can feel it in any part of the film, I think it is in Richard, and what little we are shown of a love he knows must remain a secret.

Recommended Frequency: It’s a lot of fun, but there’s so little Christmas content here that I really think this is best left for whatever time of year you feel like picking it up, especially because it’s not just that we’re missing much in the way of references to the holiday, but because I feel like most of the thematic content runs counter to the best holiday narratives we’ve got to work with.  It’s just out of step with the season, I feel like, though if you feel like trying it out once to see if a wintry medieval castle is close enough to the holiday spirit for you, I don’t think there’s any harm in it.

There doesn’t seem to be any free streaming option for watching The Lion in Winter, but you can rent it from all of the usual streaming services, it appears: pick your favorite.  Or, of course, you can get it on disc: Barnes and Noble would be happy to sell you a copy, obviously.  The easiest approach, though, might just be to trust your local public library—Worldcat promises that over two thousand libraries have a copy of this on the shelves, and my guess is that of all the “holiday” movies I review here, this one might not be in quite as high demand at this time of year.  If ever you watch it, I hope you can get the entertainment out of it that I was able to find.

Last Christmas (2019)

Review Essay

One of the American authors who has written the most widely in connection with Christmas is the science fiction grandmaster Connie Willis, one of the most award-winning writers of her generation and a personal favorite of mine.  Connie’s a big reason this blog exists, in fact, but I won’t distract myself down that road in this post, anyway.  The reason I’m bringing her up in connection with Last Christmas is enough of a story.  I had the good fortune to get to speak with Connie this August, after having “won” the opportunity in a fund-raiser: she was a delightful and effusive conversationalist, and happily engaged with my questions on a variety of subjects.  One of them, naturally, was the subject of “the real Christmas movie,” as Connie referred to it: I asked her what she looks for in a great holiday film, and she said a lot of wise and thought-provoking things.  One of her observations was about the holiday romantic comedy: she thought that a lot of modern holiday rom-coms seem to approach the subject matter thinking that the point of the movie is to find someone to love, whereas what distinguishes a great romantic comedy is that the journey is about self-discovery.  You find your true self through the encounter with the person you love…whether or not you even get them in the end, in fact, since it’s finding yourself that matters.  And, in addition to a number of great older classic films she encouraged me to watch, she suggested that Last Christmas was really a good modern example of exactly the kind of self-discovery she was talking about, so I put it on this year’s slate.  (To be clear, I am obviously paraphrasing here from my memories of our conversation: I may well not be capturing Connie’s message perfectly, though I certainly felt I learned a lot from the talk!)

Maybe the most immediately interesting element in Last Christmas is how completely and disastrously self-sabotaging the main character, Kate, is: she lost her last living arrangement and is so desperate to find a new one that doesn’t involve slinking home to her immigrant family (who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia to London in the late 1990s) that she’s throwing herself into ill-advised one night stands and making selfish demands of the few remaining friends who will pick up the phone when she calls.  She’s a terrible employee at a Christmas shop run by a long-suffering Chinese woman Kate calls “Santa”, and she’s perhaps doing an even worse job of trying to make it in musical theater, running late and unprepared into the rare auditions she figures out how to get to at all.  Kate’s a hot mess…but let’s give it to her, she’s a self-aware hot mess, exclaiming out loud after one of her early failures, “why is my life so shit?”  Well, let’s give it to her that she’s aware things are not going well—how aware she is of the ways she’s contributing to the problems is a little less clear, at least at first.

The poster for Last Christmas depicts Emilia Clarke in her elf costume, sitting on an outdoor park bench and smiling next to a grinning Henry Golding: the background is an out-of-focus snowy forest, it looks like. Above their heads floats the movie's tagline: "sometimes you've just gotta have faith"

The romance in this romantic comedy comes along eventually, though, in the shape of a nice young fellow named Tom who keeps running into her.  Sure, in some ways, he’s a little too good to be true, since he always seems to know some lovely secret alley to stroll down, he appears to spend all his free time volunteering for the homeless, and he is patient and cheerful in the face of all of Kate’s frustrated exasperation with the world around him and sometimes with him, himself.  He sees something in her that she hasn’t figured out yet how to see in herself.  And though it’s not totally clear how this is working, contact with Tom seems to bring a little needed stability into Kate’s life.  She relents and finally goes to visit her impossible mother, Petra, who insists on accompanying Kate to a doctor’s appointment she clearly would rather skip: while there, we see the two women for who they are, confident and unyielding ladies who know everything in the world other than the woman sitting next to them.  There’s a weight on Kate, who seems to resent how much she already owes everyone in her life, how fragile she feels when she looks backwards and sees only the life of a first-generation immigrant kid on whom her parents placed too much pressure, not to mention the survivor of a serious medical emergency on whom now there’s even more pressure to eat right and live healthy in order to keep herself out of the hospital again.

One of the reasons all of this works is just a tremendously gifted cast of actresses: Emilia Clarke as Kate is maybe not quite up to the level of the supporting cast in talent, but this role seems to be right in her wheelhouse, playing the charisma someone this calamitous would have to have in order to survive, but also the woundedness that would live underneath that charisma.  She can’t quite rise to the level of a Barbara Stanwyck in Remember the Night, for me, but that’s a high bar to clear and Clarke’s getting close.  And the folks around her are justly famous: the always-brilliant Emma Thompson inhabits the role of Petra with the baffled dignity of a woman who intends only to understand enough of her new country and the new century to just get by.  Michelle Yeoh is frankly too much talent for the supporting role of “Santa” but all that means is that the store subplot, which would probably otherwise feel undercooked, actually carries a little dramatic weight…especially once we add in the explosively bold Patti LuPone as Joyce, a difficult-to-satisfy customer.  It would be hard to put these four women on the screen and not get something worth watching out of it.  And another key element here is just what Connie pointed out to me in recommending the film: if this was just a movie about Kate falling for Tom, it would be too slight to matter.  The fact that it’s about Kate as a holistic person—coming to terms with the damage she’s done, trying to rebuild a few bridges she’s burned, learning to find joy in places she wouldn’t have looked for it before—makes the Tom and Kate scenes sing a lot more sweetly.

I mentioned singing just now and of course you might expect this to be a musical, since it’s a film named for the Wham! holiday pop song, after all, and Kate’s interested in musical theater, and also we’ve got Patti LuPone, a Broadway and West End legend, in the cast.  I think it’s to the movie’s benefit that it doesn’t try to force that onto itself: music matters here, of course, and we do get some musical performances scattered throughout.  We also get a lot of George Michael / Wham! on the soundtrack, so much so that it can feel a little like a non-diegetic jukebox musical, and I’d say that it both doesn’t really work and it doesn’t hurt the film too much: again, luckily the movie isn’t forcing it too hard, and therefore the songs don’t always fit the story, but I prefer those slight mismatches to a situation where they’re twisting the plot around to try to hit a couple more song lyrics.  And it’s hard to complain about a movie dropping a lot of George Michael at me as an audience member, since that man knew his way around a pop song, and when the connection’s there, it really does enhance the experience.

One of the things I appreciated most about the film was its modest aims: for all that the screenplay starts us with a woman whose mistakes and faults are comically exaggerated, from then on, I thought it took an increasingly realistic tack.  Kate’s going to change herself, but it’s slow.  She makes the kind of amends a real person who’s made these mistakes might be able to make.  In one key conversation, in which she confesses to Tom that she’s “a mess”, he tells her to focus on the everyday, because every little action in our day makes or unmakes character.  And we start to see those dominos fall, as Kate seizes the little opportunities.  There are times when the situations that arise (or the dialogue exchanges within them) felt slightly cringey, but romantic comedies are always at risk of that kind of awkwardness.  It’s not a deep flaw of the film that at times it’s susceptible.

And while maybe you’ll see this movie’s ending coming, I didn’t.  I thought I understood where we were going and I was expecting to be happy about it.  But the layers that are applied near the end of the film really help me reconsider what the film’s ultimate message is, about what it means to reckon with who we are (and how complicated it is to answer the question “who am I?” honestly).  There are some genuinely moving moments as Kate takes hold of the understanding she’s being given, and we get more politics than I think I was expecting, as one of the things she really comes to terms with is her identity (and her family’s) as Croatian immigrants to the UK.  The true self she discovers is a beautiful one, one that is loving and therefore so easy to love.

I Know That Face: Margaret Clunie, a woman named Sarah who accidentally discovers Kate taking a shower after an overnight fling with (it turns out) Sarah’s boyfriend, also appears as Sherry in 2015’s Christmas Eve, a film about New Yorkers trapped in elevators on Christmas Eve in a power outage.  Margaret’s clearly typecast as someone having a bad holiday season, I guess?  Emilia Clarke, this movie’s star, of course, as Kate, recently voiced the Queen of Hearts for the animated TV movie, The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland.  The always funny Sue Perkins, who pops up here in a cameo as the director of an ice show Kate’s auditioning for, is of course best known to Americans as a host/presenter on The Great British Baking Show, including the two-part Christmas special that first aired in 2017.  And you likely don’t need the reminder that Emma Thompson, this movie’s difficult and overbearing immigrant mother, Petra, is no stranger to holiday fare: she plays Karen, a woman confronting infidelity while trying to manage parenting two children, in Love Actually, which this blog will someday cover, and she’s the uncredited narrator of a very short film based on the book Mog’s Christmas Calamity (a “short film” that was really mostly an advertisement for Sainsbury’s), which I highly doubt I will get to if I run this blog for twenty years, but I hope they paid her well..

That Takes Me Back: I don’t know that I was taken back anywhere—this is so close to the present.

I Understood That Reference: They say “Santa” all the time, of course, given that Kate treats the moniker as though it’s her boss’s real name, and the screenplay makes a ton of elf jokes, but they don’t deal too much in the Santa mythology, really.  That’s about all the film wants to do with any pre-existing Christmas texts, that I noticed.

Holiday Vibes (8.5/10): We don’t just have a Christmas setting (and many different versions of a classic modern Christmas pop song), but we have a main character who literally works in a seasonal retail environment.  Add in reluctantly reconnecting with family and some preparations for a big Christmas celebration, and we get I think a very Christmassy rom-com, and one that will please a lot of viewers.

Actual Quality (9/10): I think folks are going to be pleased by the quality of the film, too: if the romance seems a little too pat initially (Tom’s almost a Manic Pixie Dream Boy), just hang in there.  Trust me, it gets more complicated in time.  Honestly, with really good performances and a script that manages to spin a few plates at once because they feed into each other (rather than the more disjointed modern rom-coms I’ve tried lately), I found myself happily settling in for this one.  It delivers what a movie like this promises us, for the most part, which is a rare enough gift that it’s worth celebrating.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s a great fit for cookie baking, I think, or a party where you don’t have anybody innocent enough to be scandalized by Kate jumping in and out of bed with all sorts of men, in the early going.  The extensive George Michael and George Michael cover soundtrack works to its advantage in this context, too, since you can hum along as you decorate.

Plucked Heart Strings?  I really wasn’t expecting this film to hit me, but it does succeed, maybe a little like the Remember the Night experience I allude to in the review above: watching a character’s tough exterior (whether Stanwyck or Clarke) slowly lower to reveal what their real pain is, and accept the possibility of love, is really powerful.

Recommended Frequency:  I wouldn’t say this was a home run for me, a film I’ll want every year.  But the leads are incredibly charismatic and the message of it is heartwarming enough that I think it would be welcome almost anytime I encountered it at the holidays: I’m sure I’ll return to it at least once every couple of years, if not more often.

If you’d like to try it out also, Netflix has it waiting for you: you can also rent it on streaming from basically all the places you’d think to look.  Barnes and Noble will sell you a hard copy, but if you’re thinking of snagging it for free at the local library, Worldcat suggests you have almost 1,400 options.  Happy viewing to you!

A Midnight Clear (1992)

Review Essay

It’s in some ways remarkable how powerfully the World War II experience looms over American Christmas movies.  Just in the last two years, this blog has run the gamut of possible intersections—the war is the context for Christmas in Connecticut even though it’s not being commented on, and the legacy of the war haunts Dan Grudge in Carol for Another Christmas.  The war is a locus for slightly premature holiday celebration for Wallace and Davis in White Christmas, and a distant field of glory from which George Bailey’s brother Harry makes his heroic return in It’s A Wonderful Life.  It is a system that subjects men to torture in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and it creates the post-conflict hardships that the veterans band together to overcome in It Happened on Fifth Avenue.  I came to A Midnight Clear thinking that I basically understood what I might get from a WWII Christmas movie.  I was wrong.  This movie surprised me, and then devastated me.  It is an incredibly powerful anti-war film, and it’s also a holiday film, and I’m not going to forget it, and I’m not totally sure when I’ll be ready to see it again.  It earns its place in the FFTH canon.

A Midnight Clear doesn’t waste any time—the opening sequence establishes us in the Ardennes in December 1944, and suddenly we follow the sound of a howling scream to find an American soldier bursting out of his snowy foxhole to run heedlessly through the forest, stripping himself naked as he stumbles between the trees, chased by his panicked comrade who is trying desperately to corral him.  We come to learn that these are members of The Squad, an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon formed of the soldiers from various outfits who had each scored at the top of their unit on IQ tests.  The Squad, as we meet them, has lost half its strength in brutally violent combat, and the surviving six men are all, in various ways, already broken by their experience of the conflict, not least among them Vance Wilkins, the man we just saw crumbling before our eyes as he fled through the Alsatian woods.  Even so, in some ways none of them have yet seen the worst of war’s horrors.

The DVD cover for A Midnight Clear depicts six weary soldiers in full combat gear, standing in a snowy, wooded place, all facing the camera somewhat defiantly. Beneath them, two critic quotes are given: Richard Schickel of Time Magazine calls it a movie to seek out and treasure, and Siskel & Ebert give it their patented two thumbs up.

We learn, partially through retrospective voiceover narration, the ways in which the Squad has tried to insulate itself from what’s going on around them.  The guys call Vance Wilkins “Mother” for the ways he, a practically elderly 26 year old, tries to protect them all, and Paul Mundy, a fellow who dropped out of training for the priesthood, they call “Father”—Father and Mother have certain expectations, among them the avoidance of profanity, and the rest of the unit tries to live up to them.  As our primary POV character, William Knott, observes to us via narration, “we want to make it clear we’re not actually a part of this army.”  Knot is the Squad’s formal leader, the recent recipient of a battlefield promotion to Sergeant, but between his certainty that Mel Avakian’s a better soldier than him and his respect for the moral leadership of Father and Mother, Knot seems totally incapable of wielding the office, and hasn’t even bothered yet to sew the stripes onto his uniform.  The guys have figured out his name, abbreviated, is “Will Knott” and have taken to affectionately calling him “Won’t”.  In a sense, that’s what all of them—the four I’ve named, plus Bud Miller (“mechanical genius and resident wit”) and Stan Shutzer (“our avenging Jewish angel”)—are trying to say to the war.  They won’t.  But this isn’t a kooky countercultural comedy about opting out of being a soldier: these aren’t Kelly’s Heroes.  The Squad is simply a group of men too conscious of themselves and the world around them to go to battle calmly, and when they’re ordered to do so, the emotional and psychological consequences are profound.

The cast of this strangely forgotten 1990s film is almost a who’s who of gifted young character actors—Mother is played by Gary Sinise with incredibly brittle, fragile composure; Father’s presence is warmer and stronger in the hands of Frank Whaley, who’s the kind of actor you think “I don’t know that name” and then you look at his credits and realize you’ve seen him six times and he’s been good each one of them.  The list continues here—brash, cheerful confidence from Peter Berg; quiet, sure competence from Kevin Dillon; an over-the-top bullying commanding officer who’s right in John C. McGinley’s wheelhouse—and even granting that all of these dudes are basically perfectly matched to their roles, it’s still probably true that the best performance in the film is a young Ethan Hawke as Will Knott.  Hawke’s been one of the finest actors of his generation basically since his generation started taking adult roles on film, and in 1992 he’s poised between memorably great roles as a kid growing up fast in Dead Poets Society and White Fang and his entry into life as an adult leading man in films like Before Sunrise and Gattaca…perfectly poised, in other words, to play a nineteen year old shoved by the Army into responsibility for the lives of five other men, none of whom really think of him as the man in charge.  We feel this film’s urgency, its tragedy, its moments of relief, and its profound grief and loss because these actors know how to take us there, and they do so unflinchingly.

I know, I’m doing a lot of table-setting here, but it’s because I’d like to persuade you to watch the kind of movie you almost certainly won’t seek out at the holidays.  The fact of the matter here is that The Squad receives orders (from McGinley’s Major Griffin, whom we instantly understand is the kind of self-important fiend who not only considers his men expendable but takes a certain amount of pleasure from reminding them that they are) to advance ahead of American lines to an abandoned chateau which intelligence suggests may be poised near the source of a pending German counteroffensive.  He’s already sent one patrol out that way and nobody came back.  So, why not send the battalion’s wise guys—what else are these eggheads for?  And off they roll (in two requisitioned Jeeps) into the quiet terror of no man’s land, where they almost immediately encounter the truly unsettling tableau of two dead soldiers, one German and one American, whose frozen bodies have been propped up on their feet and posed as if in an embrace.  What in God’s name is this, the Squad asks themselves?  Nazi obscenity?  Bleak comedy by soldiers as broken as they are?  An ironic mockery of armed conflict?  Father blesses the bodies and lays them to rest.  They continue forward, edgier than ever.  It feels like nothing about this is going to go according to plan.

I want to hold back a fair amount of what they find at the chateau and in the woods surrounding it, since much of the movie’s power for me comes in its surprises—the pleasant and the blood-chilling alike.  The film makes it clear, though, that we are entering a strange world: Knott comments at one point, “I’m not exactly sure what country we’re in.  I don’t know what day it is, or what time it is.  I don’t even know my name.”  He says this to set up a joke, but he’s also telling us where this story is happening: this is a placeless place.  A timeless time.  Whatever it is that happens here, it is removed in some ways from the outside world, or at least it is until that world comes crashing back in around them.  Part of what unfolds in the movie’s second act is in flashback—we see these men developing connections to each other, and the efforts a handful of them made to lose their virginity back in the States before they shipped out to France.  There’s a gentle quality to the interactions they have with the woman they encounter that tells us something about these men—the still-living ones we’re watching in the snowy Ardennes but also one we’ve never met, since by now his body is buried back behind them somewhere, underneath that same snow.  Back in the movie’s “real time”, we watch an unfolding set of encounters with a perplexing, mysterious German unit in the woods surrounding the chateau (and The Squad’s internal conflicts over what, if anything, to do about what they’re encountering).

Last year I watched a film similarly set at Christmas somewhere in eastern France, and there’s no denying I found something powerful and moving in Joyeux Noel, a film about the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in World War I’s first December, 1914.  But I think there’s a way in which I find the encounter with Christmas here—as experienced by both American and German soldiers—more honest and therefore more moving.  What little happens in connection with the holiday here has an authenticity because of how sparse the joys are for these men, and because of how much we know they’ve already lost.  If they even make it to Christmas, there’s not a whole lot left inside these guys to release themselves into that kind of festivity—and when, late in the film, one soldier tells another, “Merry Christmas”, it is an irony more than a salutation, an acknowledgement that in war we are given very little to celebrate, even in a “good war” like the Second World War.

I don’t want to sugarcoat this film at all: it is more than willing to present you with violence and violence’s aftermath.  Most of the soldiers we meet are going to die, and if there are military heroes in the Battle of the Bulge, I think we never really see one here, though the heroic challenge of resilience in these events is real, and I admire the hell out of these guys, both the ones who survive and the ones who “join the great majority” as Corporal Avakian calls it.  After all, he comments, most of the people who ever lived are dead.  To some extent, coming to terms with death is what each of these men is trying to do.  Coming to terms with the deaths we see on screen—making sense of them, making sense of what they might mean—is our work, as an audience.  Unlike many war films, you feel the weight of every body that falls here.  No one is truly anonymous, on either side. Even after their death, their bodies remain present in the film to an unusual degree, and the intimacy of being in that proximity to the dead and feeling an obligation to them is an almost unbearably heavy burden.  The weight of those losses won’t just be felt on the battlefront; it’ll be carried home, too, by men too young to know how to shrug it off their shoulders, or else men old enough to not want to shrug it off.  And it matters, friends, it matters.  This screenplay is adapted from a novel written by William Wharton, a man who was severely wounded fighting in the Ardennes in 1944.  He knew better than any thousand Americans in 2025 with cocksure, vapid  “FREEDOM ISN’T FREE” bumper stickers just exactly what the cost of even a just war really was, and in A Midnight Clear, we have to look his truth in the eyes.  Especially for anyone who fell in that forest and never got up to come home again, I think we owe it to them to consider what it was for and what it was worth.  This film helped me do that.

I Know That Face: Despite being a cast that’s stacked with great actors, both leading men and character actors, hardly anyone here ever appeared in a holiday-themed production again, that I can find.  The big exception is John C. McGinley, who here plays the arrogant and brutal Major Griffin: McGinley played Chuck Manetti-Hanahan in a 2024 Hallmark miniseries called Holidazed, as well as appearing as himself in It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie in 2002, which is one of the few Muppet films I’ve never seen (I really ought to add it to next year’s slate).  McGinley of course is also a veteran of TV acting, in particular his role as Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs, where he appears in multiple Christmas episodes, maybe most memorably the first season’s “My Own Personal Jesus.”  I can’t check every single TV appearance by hand in the filmographies of the other guys, so I’m assuming there are possibly more matches like that—the only one I know for sure is just my memory of Peter Berg (here playing the bold, confident Bud Miller) as Dr. Billy Kronk on Chicago Hope for several seasons, which I know encompassed an appearance in at least one Christmas episode.

That Takes Me Back: This isn’t nostalgic for me, obviously, but at its most powerful, the film reminds me of the worst of the war stories I heard from one of my grandfathers, whose recollections of the agonies he saw at the end of the war were too painful for him to share in full.  At most, I heard from him the whispered, tearful memories of the people he couldn’t save, and I learned from him at a young age the toll of war’s echoes in those who have lived through one.  I wish I could have understood him better and I also know that I never, ever could have: it was a mercy, probably, that I couldn’t.  I thought of Grandpa, though, watching this film, and I wonder what he would have told me about it, if he could have sat through it and then spoken at all once it was done.

I Understood That Reference: The story’s too bleak for Santa jokes, and nobody gets to any other Christmas story that might be a little more emotionally taut or sober for the circumstances.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): There are a couple of scenes in which Christmas and its celebration are fairly central to what’s happening, both in terms of plot and of thematic arc, and they’re incredibly moving.  Beyond them, though, the only seasonal element really is the ever-present snow.  If you’re looking for a classic holiday movie experience, this isn’t the place to start.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): I found this movie profoundly affecting and effective—tremendous performances, dialogue and narration that sometimes bordered on the philosophical, and an effective cinematic use of an evocative landscape.  There were, at a few moments, some pieces that felt slightly too convenient (or too implausible), but I can be pretty forgiving of those elements when I can see where they take me, and here I developed a high level of confidence that the movie was taking me someplace worthwhile.  It’s a powerful film.

Party Mood-Setter?  No, absolutely not.  There’s nothing casual or cozy about this movie’s experience.  Whatever you’re getting from it is going to have to be faced head-on.

Plucked Heart Strings?  It’s a profoundly emotional viewing experience: you may or may not tear up, given how inevitable so much of the film’s saddest moments come to feel.  I can’t imagine, though, sticking with this movie without becoming so invested in these men that their demises (or survival) are a matter of profound importance.  You’re going to feel something about the events of the movie’s third act.

Recommended Frequency: I have no idea how often I could watch this movie, but I am so glad I’ve seen it, and I will watch it again.  If you’ve not seen it, it fully deserves your attention.  Just don’t try to write Christmas cards while it plays out in front of you.

I know I may not have won you over about watching a bleak, violent anti-war film, but I hope you’ll at least consider it: it’s an easy one to watch in terms of access, at least.  Amazon Prime subscribers can watch it ad-free, and if you’re willing to sit through ads, you can catch it on Tubi, Pluto, The Roku Channel, or Fandango at Home.  Apple, Google, and Amazon would be happy to rent it to you, if you’d prefer to stream it that way.  Barnes and Noble is happy to sell you the film on disc, and Worldcat reports that about 450 libraries have physical copies, too, so you may have luck borrowing it for free.  I hope you’ll seek it out, though, if you’re ever in a mood to receive the kind of messages I’m suggesting it can send you.

The Crowded Day (1954)

Review Essay

One of the gifts I get from writing this blog is tracking down films I’ve never heard of before, just out of a desire to add to the diversity of what I’m getting to watch as the marathon continues.  Today’s motion picture is certainly a prime example: The Crowded Day is, as far as I can tell, a nearly forgotten glimpse of post-war Britain, a movie that doesn’t even make most of those “Fifty Forgotten Christmas Movie” lists that proliferate across the Internet.  I had never heard of it before, at least—the cast is (with one or two exceptions) totally unknown to me, too—and so I’m hoping that, in sharing it here, I give it a slightly wider audience.

The Crowded Day delivers the viewing experience that the title promises: we see one truly crowded day of the “Christmas rush” at a central London department store, which in the movie is named “Bunting & Hobbs” although, as the signage visible in the film even reveals, it’s shot on the premises of Bourne & Hollingsworth, an iconic Art Deco department store building on Oxford Street in Soho.  Our primary characters are an ensemble of shopgirls who work at Bunting & Hobbs while living nearby in a boarding house operated by the store—one of the department heads in women’s wear, Mrs. Morgan, seems to double as a hostel matron, barking orders at the girls whether they’re at work or at “home”.  Over the course of a full day that includes the B&H Christmas party, we follow the ups and downs of life as young single women caught up in a modernizing Britain, a cultural landscape that seems to expect a certain amount of pre-war decorum while also accommodating the changing post-war mindset of these young folks.  The generational gap between the shopgirls and the older managers and executives is vast, and a source of both comedy and drama as the day unfolds.

This DVD cover for a two-film pack advertises The Crowded Day and Song of Paris, both films directed by John Guillermin. The image is from The Crowded Day: a black and white image of a stiff, proper British man looking mildly horrified as he holds clothing in his hands while standing next to a naked mannequin. Staring at him are one of the shopgirls along with two lady customers: the shopgirl is smirking slightly, while the customers look puzzled and curious.

The light-hearted comedy is certainly where the movie spends the bulk of its time.  Young Peggy French’s storyline, for instance, is definitely a comic one—her beau, Leslie Randall, is too obsessed with his car, and so she engages in a little performance art to convince him that she’s ditching him for the store’s dignified and somewhat older personnel manager, Mr. Stanton, in an attempt to make Randall jealous enough to sell his car and devote himself to her.  Peggy tries to pull all this off without telling Mr. Stanton, which creates some amusing moments tinged with cringe as she insinuates herself into Mr. Stanton’s day repeatedly so as to make a spectacle of her apparent attachment to him, and the older fellow tries in every possible polite and civil way to keep her at arm’s length.  And there’s a lot of comedy here and there around the store, as shopgirls quip to each other (one tells another, in reply to a complaint about the supervisors, to vote Labour in the next election), and in particular in an extended sequence where one girl, Suzy, manages to trick Mrs. Morgan into wasting the afternoon on a fool’s errand so that she’ll stop stealing Suzy’s commissions.

The film walks a line, though, between the fun of this shopgirl life and its tragedies.  The heaviest story by far is that of Yvonne Pascoe, whom we’re introduced to as she’s getting out of bed and is clearly under the weather.  We gradually come to realize, through hinted comments and eventually plain statements, that Yvonne is secretly pregnant, and is desperate to make contact with the baby’s father, Michael, whom she hasn’t heard from in many weeks.  In this time and place, Yvonne has few options—she knows there’s no job for a pregnant shopgirl—and the movie does not shy away from how negatively people would respond to her revelation (Michael’s mother in particular is shockingly cruel), nor how desperate Yvonne would feel.  I was impressed that a film of this era would depict someone wrestling with the appeal of suicide as an escape from a life that feels “ruined” at such a young age, and it does so with some real gravity.

The film walks other tightropes in its balancing act, too: there are times, for instance, when the life of these shopgirls isn’t glamourized at all, and we understand how little they live on and how much they prize tiny victories and indulgences.  But there’s also at least a little fantasy here—certainly the opening sequences, in which these attractive girls are all running around in nightgowns teasing each other and interrupting each other’s baths, etc., feel more like the director wanting to imagine something idealized (and appealing to an imagined male gaze).  Sex and sexuality certainly is an undercurrent through a lot of the film: Yvonne’s aforementioned predicament, of course, but we also see several different variations on these young women and their relationships to men that remind us of the full range of treatment the shopgirls can expect, from gentlemanly to predatory.  It’s 1954, though, so the film is only going to explore these things in limited fashion, of course.  And I think the film’s premise is, itself, a balancing act: how do we tell satisfying stories that still feel like they could fit within the confines of one day, even if it’s an unusually hectic one?  There are times when I wish there was a little more air to breathe in the movie, and more of a chance to connect with these characters, who can become interchangeable, or who simply aren’t very easy to understand because I don’t know enough about most of them.

In the end, I’d say that the movie delivers on the simple promise of immersing me in this world and the lives of these characters, but it doesn’t quite reach the level of profundity it might have achieved if it could have helped me become more invested in most of their stories (Yvonne is a notable exception).  For people who, like me, find both the 1950s and British society fascinating, it’s a great period piece that will leave you wanting to see more of the world inhabited by the young women who work at Bunting & Hobbs.  One character, for instance, who doesn’t live at the shopgirls’ hostel, goes home instead of attending the staff Christmas party, and I get such a revelation about her life that I suddenly wanted a film just about her.  As Christmas films go, this one fits the genre really well—almost all the activity we see on screen is connected with holiday celebrations of one kind or another—while also not really giving us a traditional holiday experience, since the titular “crowded day” concludes before the celebration of Christmas has really commenced.  It’s not the first film from this year’s list that I would urge you to see, but if you try it out, I think it’ll be worth your time.

I Know That Face: Prunella Scales, who here is a customer named Eunice in search of a white nylon wedding dress, has some holiday media connections—she is young Vicky Hobson in Hobson’s Choice, my mother’s favorite film and one set partly on New Year’s Day, and she plays Kate Starling in two TV episodes of A Christmas Night With the Stars—but she will be most familiar to most of us for her work as the put-upon hotelier Sybil Fawlty in the classic comedy series, Fawlty Towers, which really ought to have had a calamitous Christmas episode but never did.  In The Crowded Day, Prunella shares the screen again with Richard Wattis, performing here as a bewildered man trying to manage a mannequin, who earlier in his career had also been cast in Hobson’s Choice, playing the part of Albert Prosser, the young solicitor.  John Gregson, appearing in this film as the gearhead Mr. Randall whose obsession threatens to lose him a girlfriend, showed up last year on the blog in The Holly and the Ivy, playing the role of David Paterson, the ambitious engineer in love with Jenny Gregory.  

That Takes Me Back: I know department store shopping still exists, but that crush of Christmas really feels like a childhood memory, to me.  The way we shop has changed so much, due to the Internet, the rise of big box retailers, and the pandemic, and while I don’t want to idealize old department stores as some kind of wonderland (this film sure confirms that they were never that), there’s a charm to it that makes me smile and think of the past.

I Understood That Reference: I detected no references to Christmas stories, even when one character’s stop inside a church gave us an opportunity for some holiday-specific messaging, and a more heavy-handed film probably would have seized such an opportunity.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): Holiday shopping is very much on display, but that’s most of what we get—there’s surprisingly little talk about Christmas presents or traditions, and we basically never see anybody with their family doing more ordinary kinds of Christmas observance.  If you’re someone who still goes out and Christmas shops in person, or even if that’s just a memory of yours but a clear one, you’ll find resonant moments here.

Actual Quality (8/10): The film’s most effective, as I describe above, at evoking the world inhabited by the shopgirls, and whether it’s the screenplay’s dialogue or the acting performances, I think the film is least successful at helping me invest deeply in most of the individual characters.  Sometimes the film’s surprisingly strong at evoking feelings just through the editing and cinematography (there’s pretty intentional and effective use of Dutch angles, for instance, in the final act).  I think the overall effect is solid though not really spectacular: I can imagine many of you would get something good out of the movie and I would be surprised if it was (or became) anybody’s favorite holiday film.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s a slightly missed opportunity, since I’m certain that portions of the film definitely could do this, with bustling store aisles and light-hearted banter, but the suicide subplot is much too intense for this purpose and would be very hard to ignore or set aside.

Plucked Heart Strings?  It’s impossible not to have some feeling for Yvonne’s plight, regardless of how you feel about how she’s choosing to handle the stresses she’s under.  It’s the strongest element in this film, there’s no question, for me.

Recommended Frequency: This film, as I’ve mentioned, was an unknown one to me, and therefore interesting to see.  I would certainly watch it again someday, but it’s more a social document of the 1950s in the UK than it is a holiday movie, and one I probably won’t return to all that often at this particular time of year.

How are you going to watch it, yourself, if you decide to do so?  Ol’ Reliable has our backs again—I don’t know how Tubi manages to get all these relatively unknown holiday flicks onto its roster each December, but I’m grateful for it.  If you’d rather avoid the ads, though, this one’s a very cheap rental right now, available for a couple dollars at Amazon, Google Play, or YouTube.  This is a rare film that’ll be nearly impossible to get on disc: there doesn’t seem ever to have been an American release, so Amazon will sell you an expensive copy but one you will only be able to watch if your player can handle discs from Europe, and Worldcat reports a mere 7 libraries seem to have this disc available in their collections.  I complain sometimes about our overreliance on streaming, but this is a perfect example of a film I basically could not have seen were it not for the streaming services.

A Christmas Story (1983)

Review Essay

I know plenty of people grew up watching A Christmas Story, but I have to emphasize, whatever it meant in your family, it was almost surely a more central media experience in mine.  Much of that owed to my father’s interest in Jean Shepherd, the writer of the short stories on which the film was based (and the man who narrates the film from the perspective of a grown-up, nostalgic Ralphie).  I can close my eyes and instantly picture the covers of his short story collections, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash or A Fistful of Fig Newtons, sitting on our bookshelves.  I still vividly remember a 1988 TV movie about Ralphie and his friends and family, set a few years after A Christmas Story during summer vacation—it’s called Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss and it’s a sweet, silly good time (also narrated by Shepherd) that I definitely saw multiple times as a child, as well.  From 1997, the first year that TNT started airing A Christmas Story for 24 hours, from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, I know a lot of families started building holiday memories with this film on in the background, and make no mistake, mine did also.  “The Old Man” (as Jean Shepherd would call my father) turned it on the moment it started airing and I feel like there were years when he just left the TV on TNT until the marathon was over.  It certainly was the backdrop for gift opening on Christmas Eve evening, or sitting by the fireplace the next morning eating Christmas cookies, in my years of  transition from teen into adult, but again, I was well familiar with the movie and with Jean Shepherd long before that time.  It’s baked into my brain—so much so that I didn’t even try to write about it last year, intimidated by the prospect of trying to make sense of how I feel about the film.  But it’s a new year, and I felt like I finally had a handle on what the movie meant to me, so let’s see where the journey takes us.

The setup, if you’re one of the people who has somehow made it this far in life without seeing A Christmas Story, is straightforward.  Our protagonist, Ralphie Parker, is a 9 year old living in small town Indiana as Christmas approaches in 1939, and we follow the ups and downs of his life as narrated through the gauzy, heightened nostalgic memories of an older man who’s transforming his childhood into a set of fables as he speaks.  Ralphie’s central preoccupation is the acquisition of the perfect Christmas present—an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot, range model air rifle—but the film encompasses other intense childhood experiences, from being bullied by Scut Farkas (he had yellow eyes, so help me God, yellow eyes!) to being cheated by the producers of the Little Orphan Annie radio serial and the makers of Ovaltine.  The secondary unfolding storyline is a strange mirror of Ralphie’s—his father, who presumably has a name but whom the credits and narrator consistently refer to as The Old Man, who just wants a little material satisfaction of his own at the holidays, whether we’re talking about him basking in the erotic glow of his “major award,” a lamp shaped like a woman’s leg in fishnet stockings, or him wrestling amid exuberant profanity with the house’s cantankerous furnace.  Everybody wants something, in A Christmas Story, but what they get….well, that’s the movie’s genius, I think, or at least it’s part of why it works so well.

The DVD cover for A Christmas Story features the large, bespectacled, smiling face of Ralphie looking at the viewer in the lower left. Extending up and to the right from Ralphie are his smiling parents, his brother Randy wrapped up like a tick about to pop, and above Randy, a wild-eyed Santa Claus and his dismissive helper elf.

There is no question that one of the things the movie gets right (for those who love it) is the perfectly balanced tone of wistfulness and wry observation.  Any American who feels a little hankering for the “good old days” sees a beautifully sanitized version of it in the old house on Cleveland Street, and the mythologizing of everything from the toy display in Higbee’s department store corner window to the soft crackle in the voices on the radio.  Ralphie’s world is one adrift in time—in part because it sits neatly between a Depression that’s mostly past and a war that hasn’t yet filled the papers with death and loss, but also just in part because it is the world of a nine year old’s memories.  There is a simplicity to the world we see through those eyes that Shepherd captures beautifully.  But Shepherd’s good, too, at reminding us how deeply we feel the highs and lows of life as a child, as his narrator spins out phrases like, “in our world, you were either a bully, a toady, or one of the nameless rabble of victims.”  The amused notes in his voice as he narrates extend to us a gentle ironic distance from the events—we can both sympathize with Ralphie’s indignant feeling that “mothers know nothing about marauders creeping through the snow,” while chuckling as adults who know that Ralphie’s mom actually has a pretty accurate sense of how “important” it is that he get a Red Ryder BB gun (which is to say, it’s not at all important).  This keenly honed voice that ties events together, offers us context, and interprets the otherwise inscrutable aims and intentions of 9 year old Ralphie is the movie’s secret sauce, and it goes well with everything, including an adult’s deeper understanding of how Ralphie’s mother might have felt about the “major award”—at one point, Shepherd comments, “my mother was trying to insinuate herself between us and the statue,” and the grin we hear on the other side of his microphone tells us how to feel about the passive aggressive battle that emerges around the electric red light district that her husband insists on displaying to the neighborhood in the front room’s picture window.

A consistent theme the film explores is the way a child’s life unfolds at the mercy of powers too great to be controlled, with which we are in constant effort to appease and to cajole in the hopes of catching a break.  Ralphie’s kid brother Randy can’t even walk to school unaided, once his mother has bundled him so tightly that, in Randy’s iconic whine, “I can’t put my arms down!”  His mother, wearily, simply retorts, “you’ll put your arms down when you get to school” and shoves her helpless kindergartener out into the snow to be absent-mindedly looked after by his gun-obsessed older brother.  Ralphie’s friend Flick can’t seem to buy a break—a sequence of childhood dares, culminating in the unstoppable force that is a triple dog dare, leaves his tongue stuck to a flagpole at recess, abandoned even by his closest friends.  Later, he’s left behind again, sacrificed to Scut Farkas and Grover Dill to experience man’s inhumanity to man.  Poor Schwartz, of course, has his own scene in which to cry “UNCLE!” as his arm twists, and moreover is the target of capricious (if technically accurate) accusations in Ralphie’s desperate attempt to deflect blame for a poorly timed F-bomb.  Ralphie himself feels perpetually thwarted by every adult in his life, and lives in fear of violence that’s not just the Old West outlaws of his fevered imagination, given his daily sprint to escape random acts of harm at the hands of the local bullies, not to mention his fear of total “destruction” by The Old Man after Ralphie finally snaps in a flurry of thrown punches and hurled obscenities.  Again, the narrator’s irony lets us choose how deeply to feel any of this—do we chuckle at Ralphie running from Farkas, or do we remember painfully those kids from our own childhood who wielded violence as a weapon in the spaces where they could get away with it?  Maybe we do both.

But the film’s primary interest is materialism, and it’s where I think our cultural memory of this motion picture sells it a little short, thematically.  Ralphie’s whole world revolves around his desire for the Red Ryder BB gun—it’s the first thing we hear him mumbling about when we meet him, and it’s certainly still his monomaniacal fixation at the movie’s end.  Materialism isn’t just for Ralphie, though: as I mentioned earlier, The Old Man is tangling with it also.  One of the first things we learn about The Old Man is Ralphie’s solemn commentary that “some men are Baptists; others Catholics; my father was an Oldsmobile man.”  The beloved retail good as an object of worship is what both of them are contending with, and it’s reinforced by everything that surrounds them.  Like, we might largely remember Ralphie’s teacher as an obstacle to his materialism, one of many adults who responds to his Red Ryder enthusiasm by calmly stating to him, “you’ll shoot your eye out.”  But if we reflect on it, she’s told the whole class to “write a theme: ‘What I Want for Christmas.’”  The materialism, in other words, goes all the way to the top.  We are being presented the holiday primarily as an opportunity to express desires and have those desires fulfilled.  On Christmas morning, surrounded by gifts, all four members of the Parker family “plunge into the cornucopia quivering with desire and the ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” as the narrator remembers it.

That’s why I think the movie has something to say, because, having established the central importance of material satisfaction, Shepherd undercuts it throughout the film’s final act.  One of the movie’s most haunting lines, if we can lift it away from the glossy, warm Christmas feelings that surround it and hear it for what it is, is the adult Ralph telling us, “sometimes at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.”  The Bumpuses’ dogs, for instance, in this movie are not really neighborhood dogs—we never see the Bumpus family, for one thing, and the dogs do not exist as actors in the film with any perceivable motives or desires.  They simply appear at the worst possible moment, like the hands of Fate.  They portend ill.  The dogs emerge from the world outside the story to remind the characters within that we are all at the mercy of forces we cannot contain—this isn’t a childhood experience, it’s a human one.  We laugh at the dogs because, in their tongue-lolling destruction, we come face-to-face with the absurdity of the things that rob us of tangible joys.  The material world in A Christmas Story is both satisfying and fleeting.  We can admire our major award but, sooner or later, it’s going to break.  The gun of our imagination is a happier (and less painful) experience than the gun of reality.  We can taste the roasted turkey but we will not get to sit at the banquet table and eat it.  A Christmas Story can, at times, drift into the moral landscape of Ecclesiastes: all is vanity, it seems to say.  Nothing lasts.

And yet.  The experience of all this doesn’t seem to have wounded Ralphie permanently—to the contrary, the narrator reminds us at times how he walks away wiser from his losses.  As the film draws to a close, what the characters have been given, really, is a deeper understanding of what it is that really matters to them.  Ralphie’s world of imagination gives him more delight than the corporeal things he’s been expecting to enhance that world.  His parents’ love for each other, snuggled beside one another as “Silent Night” plays on the radio, supplies a peace neither of them have felt all movie long.  The family’s Christmas dinner (which does, alas, include a joke or two that are insensitive, though not outlandishly so) is not what they planned for, but they’ll remember it for much longer than the one they would have eaten.  I don’t want to turn this movie into Citizen Kane—it is a funny, nostalgic romp through midcentury American suburban childhood, and it’s more cohesive as a collection of stories that give us Jean Shepherd’s perspective on the world than it is anything else.  But I think part of why we can watch it over and over, and so many of us do, is that underneath the hood of its effective aesthetics and its very quotable one-liners, this is a movie that has something to tell us about ourselves, and about Christmas.

I Know That Face: Perhaps obviously, several of these performers reprise their roles almost 40 years later, when Peter Billingsley, R. D. Robb, and Scott Schwartz return in the same roles in 2022’s A Christmas Story Christmas as adult versions of Ralphie, Schwartz, and Flick (yes, it’s wild, but the actor who plays Flick is surnamed Schwartz, which surely causes some kind of confusion on set).  Billingsley has a short acting career but one that’s heavily Christmas-inflected: he’s a ticket agent in Four Christmases, an uncredited “Ming Ming” in Elf, which is one of those modern “classics” I have to cover here someday, and amusingly in his very first role back in 1978 he had appeared as “child at Christmas party” in If Ever I See You Again.  Robb goes on to voice Miguel in 1985’s He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special, while Schwartz, after trying to make a career out of being an adult film star, appears as Ronald in A Wrestling Christmas Miracle, which looks….I’m going to say, “horrible”?  They’re not the only returning characters, either: Zack Ward, who plays the yellow-eyed bully, Scut Farkas, returns in that role in A Christmas Story Christmas also, with a career about as Yuletide-infused as Billingsley’s.  Ward appears as David Briggs in A Christmas in Vermont (I’ve made this joke before, but streaming fans, seriously, are there fifty of these?) and as Dave in 2nd Chance for Christmas.

That Takes Me Back: The number of things this movie could make a person nostalgic for is exhausting, so I just jotted down some observations along the way: I’m sure you have your own lists!  Ralphie’s parents have twin beds in their bedroom, which are kind of a funny nod to the past, to me, since I think of that as the 1950s sitcom concession to morality expectations for broadcasters.  Were real married couples in the 1930s routinely sleeping in twin beds, or is this a case where an adult Ralphie’s memories of his family are getting overlaid with his media impressions of days gone by?  It’s wild to think that there was a time we might have had 3rd graders reading Silas Marner: post-pandemic, I’m not even sure we can get college freshmen to read George Eliot, though I suppose we can get them to ask ChatGPT to pretend they did.  Young people may think it’s comedic exaggeration but I can affirm: that’s about how many electric plugs we used to cram on the same outlet—old houses really were like this, and we were ridiculously reckless with extension cords into extension cords.  I do remember drinking Ovaltine once, I think, maybe at my grandparents, though even then, it was a novelty, something I was doing mostly because I had grown up watching A Christmas Story and I wondered what it tasted like.  Do kids today still cry “uncle” when they’re under duress and trying to tap out, or has that gone the way of Ovaltine?  Oh, and lastly, I definitely have long childhood memories of someone needing to “play Santa” and distribute gifts for opening (though “Santa” is not what we called it, I feel like?  Though what else would we have said?).

I Understood That Reference: Obviously, the one Christmas media figure who matters in this story is that jolly old elf himself, as Ralphie realizes when exclaiming, “Santa!  I’ll ask Santa!”  After that point, of course, there’s emphasis on seeing Santa in the parade and inside Higbee’s, though we don’t get a ton more Santa mythology—Ralphie seems to have a more mercenary perspective on Saint Nick.

Holiday Vibes (10/10): As always, my rating here is influenced by how I’ve experienced this movie, and again, it’s the literal soundtrack of Christmas Eve to me: even holiday movies I love more than this one are not “more holiday” to me than this.  Even if you don’t have that background, though, this is a film about a thoroughly American Christmas—tree haggling, parade going, gift lists and appeals to Santa, the decoration of a tree and the preparation of Christmas dinner.  The holiday is, as adult Ralphie observes early on, the high point of “the kid year” and the movie treats it as such.

Actual Quality (9/10): It’s a very effective movie, given what it wants to do.  There are elements I wish it would explore more deeply—the fixation on the Red Ryder BB gun is perfectly honest but it becomes dramatically a little boring in the last half of the movie, and I’d rather find out about lots of other memories instead.  Mostly, though, it’s just a delivery mechanism for nostalgia, but a nostalgia seen through the lens of an experienced humorist who knows how not to make it so sentimental that it becomes tedious.  Instead there’s a slight countercultural undercurrent, the suggestion of sympathy with some of the more scoundrelly (and less squeaky clean) sides of all these characters, that lets us both enjoy the memories and smirk at the ways we can identify with people who really aren’t even a little bit perfect.  I know it’s not for everyone but it still, after all these years, works for me.

Party Mood-Setter?  I mean, it is absolutely a movie you can put on in the background while celebrating almost any kind of holiday event.  This is not just because it’s marathoned on Christmas every year, or at least I assume it still is, but I’m sure those experiences help add to the feeling that it works as a soundtrack.  The film is also episodic and very quotable, so that we can enjoy it very much on the surface level as we walk by, leaning in for a couple of minutes for favorite scenes or lines, and then ducking out since, after all, we know where it’s going.

Plucked Heart Strings?  Nobody involved with this film expected us to get tearful, and it sure doesn’t happen.  Even if you agree with me that the movie’s exploring the edges of the darker truths about being a human being and the ways we are at the universe’s mercy, it’s doing that through humor and detachment that blunts much possibility of deeply felt emotion.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t count how many times I’ve seen this one: I basically have it committed to memory.  And it still is a lot of fun to watch, when I do.  It’s not quite an every year movie for me, anymore, but there’s nothing quite like it, and I’m sure I’ll see it many more times in my life.  And if I did end up seeing it every single Christmas from now on, there’s no way I would get tired of it: it’s A Christmas Story.  It’s part of the holidays.

You’ve got lots of ways to watch this one: are you a Disney+ or Hulu subscriber, or maybe HBO Max?  If you still pay for cable (and heck, millions of Americans still do, it seems?), TNT or TBS will show it to you for free.  You can rent it from basically any service, of course, or buy it on disc from Barnes and Noble.  Though if you just want to check it out at your library, that’s exactly what you should do: there are almost 2,500 libraries with a copy on their shelves, according to Worldcat.  I hope you’ll track it down, one way or another!

Black Nativity (2013)

Review Essay

It’s often the case at Film for the Holidays that I’m criticizing (if not lambasting) some movie that other people really love, sometimes a lot of people.  Yesterday’s salvo at Scrooged, for instance, presumably ruffled at least a few feathers: that movie has its fans, and I get that I might have irritated some of them with my reading of it.  So sometimes it’s good for me instead, I think, to try to make the case for a movie that most people don’t like very much, since I don’t just want to seem like a guy taking potshots.  Certainly that’s the context of today’s post, in which I really had a good experience watching Kasi Lemmons’s adaptation of the Langston Hughes play Black Nativity, a film that seems to have left audiences and critics alike feeling disappointed at its mediocrity.  I’ll confess, I’m not sure I get why people disliked it, and I’ll do my best at least to explain what it is that moved me about the film.

This movie adaptation takes the Hughes original—a retelling of the original narrative of Jesus’ birth through the lens of the Black experience in America and richly infused with gospel music—and encases it in a new narrative written for the screenplay, the story of a fatherless boy named Langston, growing up on the streets of Baltimore.  When he and his mother, Naima, are about to face eviction from their home, Langston is packed off via Greyhound bus to New York City, where the grandfather he doesn’t know presides over a thriving Black church in the heart of Harlem.  Langston doesn’t understand a lot of the context of his life: who was his father, anyway, and where’d he go?  Who are his grandparents, and why have they been estranged from his mother for so long?  How can he, a boy on the cusp of manhood, stand up for himself and his mother, and provide the home he knows they both need—can he, in fact, do that at all?  And, speaking of context, what does it mean to him and to those around him to be Black Americans at this point in history—why is he named Langston, and what does the legacy of the civil rights era mean to people living generations in its wake?  It’s a film trying to do and say a lot…and I think it succeeds.

The poster for Black Nativity calls it "The Musical Event of the Holiday Season". The six main cast members all appear, superimposed on each other, in a column in the center of the poster, flanked on either side by colorful, snowy New York City streets. Above them, in a dark blue night sky, a light shines down on an angel with her wings outspread over them all.

One of the ways it succeeds is by building a lot of thoughtful complexity into the conflicts between characters.  As Langston goes unwillingly out of Baltimore via bus, we get to see his mother Naima (played by the multi-talented Jennifer Hudson) singing about the challenges of parenting that she keeps navigating because she believes in him more than she believes in herself, while also seeing his POV, in which he assumes his mother thinks of him as an obstacle and a burden, sent away to relieve herself of a problem.  The duality of that parent/child misunderstanding is going to be revisited, of course, when we eventually contend with the much more deeply embedded divides between Naima and her parents (Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett—friends, if this movie fails its audience, it’s sure not for lack of on-screen talent), and by then we’ve got this lens to help us anticipate that neither side sees the whole story.  And even the parents’ side is complicated—a simpler, less thoughtful movie would likely give us a couple upset at their runaway daughter, waiting for her to apologize to them for all the grief they put her through.  But here, when Langston starts to get some answers out of his grandparents, his Grandma Aretha says that they’re waiting for Naima to forgive them.  And when he painfully confronts them about their absence from his life, almost shouting, “What kind of parents are you?” he hears the pain in their own experience, in the words of the reply: “We’re the broken-hearted kind.”  This is a family so haunted by regret and so walled in by grief that they don’t know how to stop hurting each other, yet they also clearly have the capacity to understand that this isn’t a case of the right and the wrong—at least Langston’s grandparents get it on some level from the beginning, and he and his mother are on a journey towards understanding.  As Aretha says, herself, at a later moment, “We’re so human.  We’ve all done things.  That’s between us and God.”  Is that an acceptance of blame, though, or an evasion of it?  Given her tone and her body language, I see Langston’s grandmother as accepting the reality of what she’s done wrong; her husband’s a more complicated guy, maybe in part because as a minister he’s a little more liable to moralize or try to explicate some ethical truth, but I also see him owning some part of the harm he’s done.  When I compare this family and their emotional landscape to the much better reviewed A Christmas Tale, which I wrote about a few days ago, I don’t know—I just find this film a lot more thoughtful, and more willing to believe in our capacity to understand ourselves and each other, which is what I want this time of year, maybe.

Some of the elements in the movie, I’ll acknowledge, are a little too simplified for the sake of the screenplay: Langston’s arrest right after his arrival in New York City feels implausible even for a justice system that’s biased against Black suspects, given what we and the characters in that scene can clearly observe, and the connections he makes with the criminal side of NYC, both in the jail cell and then persisting on the sidewalks of Harlem once he’s free, might be a little too sanitized and convenient.  The setup, though, is meant to keep Langston poised between pathways in life.  Is he going to be a young man who’s proud of his heritage or one who’s ready to sell his birthright for a bowl of pottage, to use an analogy his grandfather, Reverend Cobbs, would appreciate?  Is he going to walk down the sidewalk to the church where he’s the beloved (if wayward) grandson of a family he isn’t sure he belongs in, or to the street corner where, if he plays his cards right, he can pick up the weapon or the illegal goods that maybe can make him the cash he needs to halt eviction proceedings?  Everywhere he goes, from a jail cell to a pawn shop to the front pew of Holy Resurrection Baptist Church, he is confronted by not only his legacy, but what his legacy means to generations of older Black men who are putting a burden of expectation on him that he’s not sure he wants (or is able to carry).  I’m sure there’s a lot to this context I don’t understand as a guy who hasn’t lived Langston’s life (or Reverend Cobbs’s), but what I could understand of it had a lot of power.  I’ll also accept that musicals are hard for a lot of modern audiences, especially musicals set in the real world—it can be a strange juxtaposition between gritty life in the street and a character singing their feelings, and if that’s part of what people reacted to negatively, well, I get it even if I think the musical elements are good more often than they are cheesy.

The movie reaches its high point on Christmas Eve, when Reverend Cobbs insists on Langston accompanying his grandparents to church.  From the pulpit at Holy Resurrection, we develop a deeper understanding of what Reverend Cobbs means to his community, as he begins to expound on the story of Jesus’ birth, “according to my brother Luke.”  Langston falls into a bit of a reverie here—a dream? A daydream?—and his dream sequence consists of elements of the original Hughes play, staged dramatically all around Langston as though the events of the gospels were happening in the streets of Harlem.  The young pregnant woman his grandfather tried to help with a little money is the Virgin Mary; the crook he met in jail has a makeshift tent in an alleyway that Langston pleads for him to share so that the baby can be born.  We get an angel and a promise, and as song and dance start to involve all of these characters, even Langston, in the narrative, the events and the words combine to present one of the movie’s basic thematic claims: that Christmas is about a baby who came to put right a world broken by sin, and what “sin” means here is the weight of having done things you regret, things that hurt others and left their mark on you too.  From that perspective, we all need the opportunity for a renewal that hardly ever comes back around to lives that missed their chance at it the first time.  This is a deeply religious claim about the metaphysics of salvation, of course, but it’s also a simple secular truth that in each new generation—the birth of Maria’s baby, the birth of Langston to Naima—there is a chance of healing where there once was harm.  And it’s so overwhelming an experience for Langston that it shakes him right out of his pew.  He won’t believe in redemption when he lives in such an unredeemed family; he can’t accept grace in the world if it’s so obvious there isn’t grace for him and his mom.  He sprints out the doors of the church into the cold of a Christmas Eve night in New York City, alone.

And even if this movie’s not as good as I think it is, I’m not going to spoil for you what happens then.  Black Nativity has a lot to say about it not being too late for any of us, if we’re willing to tell the truth, not just about the hurt done to us but the ways we’ve hurt others.  We can be failures by plenty of society’s metrics without being unredeemable—in fact, I’d say this is a film that argues there’s no such thing as “unredeemable.”  And an act of unexpected mercy can re-order not just one life, but the lives of many.  Sure, there are ways that some of the film’s final confrontations are too clean, too simple.  Family is messy, and so is the kind of sin that several characters bring to each other to acknowledge, to accept, to make amends for, and the movie pretends for our sake that it won’t be all that messy in the end if we can be grateful for what we have.  I don’t think that’s true enough to the story this film has been telling.  I’d say that, far more than “be grateful,” the message we need echoed back to us in the end is that, yes, broken people break those around them.  But it is only people who can be authentic in their brokenness who will have the capacity to bring the kind of healing we all need.  Regardless, though, the end credits roll on a Black church in the heart of Harlem, a community that knows a thing or two about injustice and hope and dreams deferred, where the choir and congregation are on their feet singing about the troubles of the world and what’s coming to end them all.  It’s an exhilarating feeling, for this audience member, anyway.  I hope it will be for you, too.

I Know That Face: Forest Whitaker, here playing Reverend Cobbs, Langston’s grandfather, was of course a different kind of distant grandfather as Jeronicus in Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, which I covered last year.  Tyrese Gibson, who plays Tyson (or “Loot”) in this film, appears in the role of “Bob” in The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, the second in a series of Kurt Russell / Goldie Hawn Santa Claus movies that, I suspect, I will have to surrender to and watch at some point.

That Takes Me Back: There’s a pay phone in this motion picture….and it WORKS.  I wonder if 2013 is nearly the last year you could put a working pay phone in a movie and not have it feel like a period piece.  It sure took me back to having to carry around 35 cents in case I needed to call home.  Oh, and one of the ways Langston learns something about his mother is that, when he gets to his grandparents, Naima’s room is full of CDs she left behind her, which express her musical taste (and how young she must have been when she left).  I wonder how a modern movie would handle that….stumbling into your mom’s teenage Spotify playlists?

I Understood That Reference: This is the most elaborate / stylized “original Christmas” story I’ve seen in a movie – Joseph and Mary, the innkeeper, the stable, an angel speaking to shepherds in the field, etc., but all of it transformed by this gospel fantasia lens into the story as Langston understands it.  That’s certainly the Christmas tale that Black Nativity is in conversation with, as the title makes no disguise of.

Holiday Vibes (7.5/10): We don’t get a ton of “holiday gathering at the family home” stuff, since this family’s in such a weird place, but New York City at Christmas is a pretty powerful energy all of its own, and for anybody who like me grew up with church experiences at Christmas being pretty formative, the experience at Holy Resurrection Baptist Church is very resonant.  It’s good at evoking the time of year in lots of ways.

Actual Quality (9/10): Like I said, not a whole lot of people agree with me on this one, but I’m sticking with my own experiences here, and I thought this was a really powerful film.  Some wobbles here and there, as noted above, but overall I felt really moved by the characters’ relationships to each other, I enjoyed the gospel music thoroughly, and I think if you’re either someone whose experience of Christmas is similar to the Cobbs family (lots of praying and singing) or if you at least can be culturally curious about the experience of Christmas in the Black American church as an outsider, I think this movie has a lot to say about how those spaces can and ideally should give life to people.  2025 has been a rough year and I’ll take the hope I’m given.

Party Mood-Setter?  I’m leaning no, since so much of it is more emotional and intense than I’d normally look for in a background movie, but it’s also true that one of the movie’s big strengths is its gospel soundtrack and you can get plenty of joy out of that just letting it play in the background, I bet.

Plucked Heart Strings?  I’ve got to admit: I was genuinely caught off-guard by the movie more than once, with a moment that felt emotionally real in a way I was not expecting.  I was tearful by the end, and my guess is that lots of people might feel similarly moved: the emotions being tapped into here felt pretty universal to me, though as I’ve noted, apparently this is not a well-reviewed movie, so there’s something I’m missing (or something others are).

Recommended Frequency: I’d say that this is one I’d love to work into an annual rotation, and certainly one I think you should return to regularly, especially if you’re someone for whom the original story of Christmas “from brother Luke” is a meaningful part of your holiday experience.

Subscribers to Peacock can watch this one ad-free, and if you are happy to watch it with ads, our old standby, Tubi, has got your back again.  All the usual places will rent you a streaming copy for about four bucks, and ten dollars will get you a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack at either Amazon or Walmart (Barnes and Noble didn’t have it when I checked).  Worldcat says you public library users have options, though: about 700 libraries hold it on disc.