It's a Wonderful Life
(1946) The Stanford Theatre's annual screening of the holiday favorite; it sells out, so advance tickets are advised. By its popularity, this film reveals what people truly think of Christmas: in brief, that it's a guilt-haunted festival in which anxieties about money and worries about the future prey upon the mind. Our Christmas stories of ghosts and despair suggest an ancestral terror: our fear that this particular year will be the fateful one when darkness shall not cease its advance. Rather, it will rather continue that advance, tick by tick, until everything turns black forever. (How this scenario fits in with the popularity of the stop-motion cartoon Frosty the Snowman is an essay discussion for another time, although the "Island of Misfit Toys" is a philosophical concept worthy of Sartre.) 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's 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. The movie wasn't a success, and Variety said that the "public seem to have more or less forgotten" James Stewart and Frank Capra—this judgment quoted in Joseph McBride's biography of Capra. If the film alternates moments of 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. (Plays Dec 24 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

Miracle on 34th Street
(1947/1954) 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. BILLED WITH White Christmas. 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. (Plays Dec 20 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

The Shop Around the Corner/A Christmas Carol
(1940/1951) The romantic classic The Shop Around the Corner is the source for You've Got Mail. Why does this false version of Eastern Europe, assembled at the MGM studio in Culver City, seem so easy to believe? The Shop Around the Corner is a comedy without Budapest location photography, yet Ernst Lubitsch's direction makes Magyars out of Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Stewart plays Alfred Kralik, the best salesclerk at Matuschek and Company, a small notions store. A woman he thought was a customer, Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), turns out to be just another job seeker in a city full of them. The rivalry between the two clerks is the backbone of the story, yet the film is actually a heavenly romance. Both Klara and Alfred are involved with pen pals, each never realizes that their soul mate is actually the colleague they've been spatting with all the livelong day. Lubitsch was bold to make a Christmas movie about retail work—a reminder of how love and generosity must fight for a place amid pestering customers, sagging sales and mandatory overtime. BILLED WITH A Christmas Carol. Alastair Sim stars as Ebeneezer 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. (Guest review by Gertrude Himmelfarb.) 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. (Plays Dec 21-23 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

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