If you’re ChatGPTing your holiday movie recommendations this year, the list will likely include popular items like Home Alone (1990), Elf (2003), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966 & 2000), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Frosty the Snowman (1969), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992).
Metro celebrates its 40th anniversary in March. Here are a few thoughts on Christmas movies by our longtime movie critic Richard von Busack, condensed from the archives.
The Shop Around the Corner
(1940) Why does this false version of Eastern Europe, assembled at the MGM studio in Culver City and starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, seem so easy to believe? Both Klara and Alfred are conducting affairs through letters with strangers; neither ever realizes that his/her soul mate is actually the colleague he/she is spatting with all the live-long day. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)—remade by Nora Ephron as You’ve Got Mail—is a comedy without Budapest location photography, but Ernst Lubitsch’s direction makes Magyars out of Stewart and Sullavan. The Shop Around the Corner is a romantic comedy in the finest classic style—light, sophisticated and glowing with William Daniels’ creamy lighting in the close-ups.
It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946) This film reveals what people truly think of Christmas: in brief, that it is a guilt-haunted festival honoring the longest night of the year, in which anxieties about money and the future prey upon the mind. Frank Capra’s based-on-a-pamphlet fable is animated by James Stewart’s kindliness as self-sacrificing George Bailey, who decides to take his own life when he is ruined by a chortling banker (Lionel Barrymore). Bailey is saved by a silly apprentice angel (Henry Travers) who decides to show him what the world would be like without him. If the film alternates moments of film-noir clarity with more typical Capra clowning, remember that Dorothy Parker, Clifford Odets and Dalton Trumbo were among the hands that sanded up the screenplay. McBride notes that Trumbo’s version had Bailey as a suicidal politician who had gone corrupt: “He was his own Potter.” The movie has smothered such self-doubts and fantasies of celestial redemption, in such a way as to eventually make it the most American Christmas movie ever.
Miracle on 34th Street
(1947) Edmund Gwenn plays an old department-store Santa who is convinced that he’s the real Santa Claus; Natalie Wood co-stars as a little girl who believes his tale.
A Christmas Carol
(1951) Alastair Sim stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, a hard-working London financier emotionally bullied by his employees. Blinded to the genius of the free market, they make unreasonable demands, driving poor Scrooge to a night of nightmare-ridden sleep followed by a morning of unsound judgment. Usually considered the best version of this story; keep an eye peeled for James Whale regular Ernest Thesiger hanging around a graveyard, as is his wont.
White Christmas
(1954) To bail out their former officer, owner of a rural resort that is going bankrupt, a pair of song-and-dance men (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) offer to set up a show to lure in the trade. Fifteen second-tier Irving Berlin songs include “the inevitable title dirge” (John Douglas Eames); it was the first film shot in VistaVision, and for what it’s worth Rosemary Clooney steals the movie.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
(1993) Tim Burton’s twist on How the Grinch Stole Christmas was described by the director as “German Expressionism combined with Dr. Seuss” in one of the DVD interviews. The jolly, macabre king of Halloween, Jack Skellington, is depressed with the usual routine of rallying Halloween spirit. On a lonely walk, he discovers the portal to the realm of Christmas, where happiness reigns. (“Absolutely no one’s dead!” he exclaims.) He schemes to take over the job of bringing about Christmas. Despite the warnings of the woman who loves him—Sally, a ghoulish version of Raggedy Ann—Skellington follows through with his scheme. Skellington attempts to bring about a perfect Christmas, but he’s shot down. He faces the defeat with a short period of self-pity, then recovers in a burst of showman’s brio.
