From roaring fires and spruced-up firs to bloody feet and frostbitten fingertips, and from run-down shacks and corporate tower blocks to leased apartments or homely fixer-uppers, Culturedarm’s selection of seven of the best Christmas films spans customs and milieus, epochs and continents. Stretching from Bedford Falls and the Nakatomi Plaza to Budapest and a little match girl who hallucinates in the hiatus between Denmark and France, these silent shorts, animated features, and blockbuster films are enough to fill anyone’s stocking.
* * *
The Little Match Girl (1928)
Before the class struggles and wartime escapades of La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game brought Jean Renoir international renown, the fledgling director was selling his father’s Impressionist paintings to fund small silent films starring his wife, Catherine Hessling.
The Little Match Girl, a featurette of thirty-four minutes, serves as an adaptation of the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Set somewhere in the distant north on a New Year’s Eve blanketed with snow, a young woman roams the streets struggling to make ends meet by selling matches. Without selling a single match, she hunkers down in the cold, knowing that to return home would be to subject herself to the wrath of her abusive father.
Lighting matches in a futile effort to keep warm, as hypothermia sets in she begins to see visions. The little match girl hallucinates about all of those things she could only half glimpse through the frost-covered windows. There is dancing and juggling, a toy store which springs eerily to life, and romance foiled by a horseback pursuit through the clouds which reaches a fateful conclusion. The Little Match Girl then in Renoir’s hands is a danse macabre, but as the white rose petals which would commemorate her death turn back into snow, scant sympathy is shown by the world-weary onlookers.
* * *
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The romantic comedy lay at the heart of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and its master was Ernst Lubitsch. Admired for his light wit and urbane sophistication, after he died in 1947 at the age of just fifty-five years old, Billy Wilder hung a motto on the wall opposite his desk which in gilded letters posed the question, ‘How would Lubitsch do it?’
The deft trickery of Trouble in Paradise and shrewd satire of Ninotchka won popular acclaim, but the director’s own favourite among his films was The Shop Around the Corner. Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart play Klara Novak and Alfred Kralik, two clerks at a leather goods store who cultivate a stormy relationship in the run-up to Christmas. They quarrel over stock and vie for sales and seem utterly opposed in style and temperament, not realising that they have matched up through the mail, and are the recipients of each other’s love letters.
Based on a Hungarian play which would later serve as the inspiration for In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail, the setting is Budapest, but Lubitsch conjures a world of thrifty commerce and courtly romance which wafts breezily over the Atlantic. In their third of four collaborations on film, Stewart provides the hearth and Sullavan the spark, delicately poised as she veers between amorous and grief-stricken. The critic Pauline Kael summed things up when she described The Shop Around the Corner as:
‘Close to perfection – one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made in this country. It is set in the enclosed world of the people who work together in a small department store; Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart are the employees who bicker with each other, and in no other movie has this kind of love-hate been made so convincing.’
* * *
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Come in from the pouring rain and leave your preconceptions on a hatstand by the door if you’ve never truly seen It’s a Wonderful Life. A flop at the time of release, the film stayed the course to become the most cherished of seasonal classics, but it’s not all ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and festive bonhomie. Instead Frank Capra and James Stewart dabbled in dashed hopes, with a lump in the throat which can taste like embitterment.
George Bailey wants to travel the world and build things, but he keeps getting snared in his small-town nets. The family building and loan is perennially under threat thanks to the malign efforts of the wealthy banker Mr. Potter. In the end Potter will go unpunished for a brazen act of theft, while driving George Bailey to the brink of suicide. A Dickensian twist and a romp through a snow-covered Bedford Falls belatedly provide the festive cheer on the eve of Christmas.
When It’s a Wonderful Life failed to break even after premiering in late December of 1946, Stewart’s postwar career stalled and the studios took it as a sign that Capra’s best work was behind him. Now the film stands as a living testament, affirming the small graces of the spirit in the face of life’s cruel disappointments. See the small prayer which George delivers in Martini’s bar, or the staggering pronouncement of love as George clutches Mary, played by Donna Reed, on the verge of tears as he rails against ground floors and plastics.
* * *
Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul (1958)
On 19 December 1958, Walt Disney presented television audiences in the United States with From All of Us to All of You, combining clips from vintage shorts and feature films with new animations in a Christmas special hosted by Mickey Mouse, Tinker Bell, and Jiminy Cricket. The special has shown intermittently in America ever since, but starting the following year became a fixture across screens in Scandinavia.
In Sweden Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul (‘Donald Duck and His Friends Wish You a Merry Christmas’) airs at 3 p.m. every Christmas Eve, commencing the opening of presents. Regularly reaching an audience of more than 3.5 million, Kalle Anke remains one of the country’s most-watched television shows annually. Donald Duck became so popular in Sweden that a political party bearing his name won 1,535 votes at the 1991 general election.
Dubbing the voice of Jiminy Cricket, the original narrator Bengt Feldreich remains the host, presiding over many of the same films with contemporary addenda. Shorts include Santa’s Workshop, Clown of the Jungle, Pluto’s Christmas Tree, Mickey’s Trailer, and Ferdinand the Bull, while clips are shown from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, Robin Hood, and The Jungle Book. Recent years have added teasers from films like Frozen and Coco.
* * *
The Apartment (1960)
In the tradition of The Shop Around the Corner and It’s a Wonderful Life, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is another Christmas film which manages to wring heartfelt romance out of stinginess and dejection. Calvin Clifford Baxter – condescendingly called ‘Buddy-boy’ by the higher-ups, and known simply as Baxter by his acquaintances, for he has no friends – works at an insurance firm as a servile careerist. His managers take turns borrowing his Upper West Side apartment for their extramarital affairs, and the noise through the walls has Baxter down as a rat by his neighbours.
On some nights he mills about the stoop of his building with a sniffle in the cold, waiting for leave to return to his apartment. But life has a knack for a funny turn, and when Jeff D. Sheldrake takes an interest in the ruse, as the insurance firm’s prestigious director of personnel he possesses the power to offer Baxter a promotion. Career-wise things are starting to look up, though love-wise they remain hopelessly complicated.
The climax of The Apartment takes place over Christmas and the New Year, with an office Christmas party and soiree on New Year’s Eve playing host to moments of profound realisation. Three small exchanges around a cracked compact mirror turn the main characters on their heads, in one of cinema’s most eloquent sequences of exposition and deflation.
The Apartment is sometimes absent from lists of Christmastime fare, perhaps because the season seems to play an incidental role while the film itself arrived at the height of summer. Carried by the cool jazz score of Adolph Deutsch, the atmosphere is pensive and noirish. Eschewing the comforts of other Christmas films, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine remind us that fresh starts rarely depend on the turning of the calendar.
* * *
A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Producer Lee Mendelson had originally conceived a documentary film which would cover the rip-roaring success of the comic strip Peanuts. Yet when Coca-Cola came calling in the middle of 1965, hoping to sponsor an animated special for the holiday season, Mendelson and the strip’s creator Charles M. Schulz devised an outline in less than a day, consisting of ‘winter scenes, a school play, a scene to be read from the Bible, and a soundtrack combining jazz and traditional music’.
From the first bars of a children’s choir singing ‘Christmas Time Is Here’ while Linus, Lucy, and the gang skate out over their small patch of ice, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a festive hymnal. In accordance with the wishes of old Charlie Brown, the special provides respite and reflection amid the hubbub of the season. With its timeless jazz score and cast of precociously flawed voice actors, the spare tree stands proud. And good grief! Of all Christmas films, at least one has the good sense to be the Charlie Browniest.
* * *
Die Hard (1988)
To witness the Christmas tree in the lobby of the Nakatomi Plaza, the Santa hat and scrawled ‘Ho-ho-ho’ which mark John McClane’s first kill, and a score featuring ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Let It Snow’, and ‘Christmas in Hollis’ is surely to embrace Die Hard as a Christmas picture, despite the office palms, orange-purple skies, and distinctly off-brand sentiments.
From its disposable Japanese corporate boss to its retinue of radical German and Eastern European villains, Die Hard exudes a dubious politics. John McClane’s sidekick, the off-duty Los Angeles Police Department sergeant Al Powell, has been stuck behind a desk following the wrongful shooting of a thirteen year old. He conquers his fears and finds redemption towards the end of the film by raising his pistol once more, this time against a genuine criminal. Violence serves as a balm in the world of Die Hard, but the nihilistic perspective is offset by elements of self-referentiality and farce, while in his rugged white vest Bruce Willis keeps the stakes sweaty and primal.
Die Hard inhabits the buddy cop genre from a distance. Its pleasures come from John McClane’s spare and solitary pursuit of Hans Gruber and his henchmen, aided by the amiable Al Powell and Argyle over walkie-talkie. Alan Rickman as Gruber proves a fine Christmas ham, with a penchant for long falls and a preposterous American accent. From shattered glass and SWAT vans to rooftop chases and leaps down elevator shafts, the action sequences remain vital.
A contractual quirk meant that the role of John McClane was initially offered to Frank Sinatra, who had starred in the 1968 crime drama The Detective. Perhaps the presence of Ol’ Blue Eyes would have settled the debate once and for all, but the sight of Willis scampering about barefoot always makes for a meatier Christmas.
