Category: Film Review

The Thin Man (1934)

Review Essay

Here at Film for the Holidays, one of my inexplicable commitments each holiday season has been to commit to watching at least one movie from every decade spanning from the 1930s to the 2020s.  Last year I cheated slightly by making my pick from the 1930s a Christmas Carol adaptation, so it’s only this year that I’m picking something just a little more unusual off of the (relatively small) pile of 1930s holiday flicks.  I am sure some of my readers will have gotten to this movie long before I did, but if perhaps you (like me) have waited until this point in life to check out maybe the first great fictional couple of Hollywood’s sound era, Nick and Nora Charles, well, I think it’s time to give The Thin Man a viewing.  Say what we will about its seasonal content—and I will say it, eventually—there’s no denying that the spark under the hood of this motion picture is the crackle of romantic banter that’s been imitated in a thousand movies, and yet there’s still something fresh and fun about encountering the original article.

Before we can revel in Nick and Nora, though, this is a mystery with a ton of characters to set up, and set them up it does—the Charleses don’t appear until a good ten minutes into this film, which only has a running time of about an hour and a half.  By then, we’ve established a wide array of characters—the brilliant inventor Clyde Wynant, his greedy ex-wife Mimi Jorgensen (and her new husband, a real ne’er-do-well’s ne’er-do-well named Chris), his doting daughter Dorothy, and his creepy son Gilbert (who, had he been born about a century later, would definitely be either a true crime YouTuber or the moderator of a deeply unsettling subreddit).  Wynant, of course, has a wider array of orbiting humans than this—a couple of put-upon employees, among them a secretary named Julia Wolf who seems to have her way with his money (and maybe not just his money, if you catch my drift), a lawyer named MacCaulay who fusses about managing Wynant’s business affairs every time he disappears, a prospective son-in-law named Tommy, and a rival for Julia Wolf’s affections in the form of the most outlandish ‘30s mobster caricature imaginable, the spitfire-talking lowlife Joe Morelli (though there’s at least one other guy lurking around in the shadows, here, whose name we don’t have at first).  I think I still haven’t listed everyone we meet in this story BEFORE we meet our detective, Nick Charles, but maybe that makes sense, since at first there’s no crime to solve….just Clyde Wynant leaving town for a while, mysteriously, having promised his daughter Dorothy to be home by Christmas in time for her wedding, so he can give her away at the altar, angering his ex-wife in the process.  But then the movie hops forward to the dining room / bar / ballroom at New York City’s Hotel Normandie on Christmas Eve, where Dorothy is nervously chatting with her fiancé about how worried she is that her father still hasn’t shown up, and we have ourselves at least some of the makings of a mystery to investigate, though it’s certainly not the film’s most pressing conundrum by the time we really get going.

The poster for the movie, The Thin Man, advertises, at the top, "William Powell, Myrna Loy, in Dashiell Hammett's master mystery". Below that, we see a man and woman, staring intently into each other's eyes as they each curl their right arm around the other's, and drink a cocktail from a small, clear glass. The woman's in black with a white collar and black hat; the man is in a black suit with a white collared shirt and striped tie. Below them, a different auburn-haired woman in a black dress and scarf faces towards the viewer and is looking down and to the viewer's left.

I have to admit, though, and this is me speaking as a big fan of mysteries in general (novels, movies, TV shows: you name it)—the appeal of The Thin Man isn’t really the mystery and its (somewhat creaky) solution.  It’s the effortlessly charming Nick Charles and his vivacious, cheerfully cutting wife, Nora.  The characters and their quippy, booze-soaked repartee seem to have worked in almost every format and setting from Dashiell Hammett’s original novel to later appearances in series written for radio and then television, but it’s really undeniable that the reason “Nick and Nora” still have cultural cachet in the 21st Century, whether we’re talking about a style of martini glass or an infinite playlist, is the film version of these characters as inhabited by William Powell and Myrna Loy.  Powell, a slender, coolly casual presence who, by 1934, has stepped smoothly from silent screen stardom into the talkies with such ease that he’s about to pick up his first of three Academy Award nominations for this movie, is definitely firing on all cylinders, but I’ll be honest and say that his co-star is this movie’s secret sauce.  Myrna Loy in the early 1930s is a kid from Helena who started out grabbing every bit part she could in silent ‘20s films and had mostly graduated to secondary roles as either femme fatales or “exotic” women of color—maybe only 1930’s Hollywood could look at a Montanan woman named Myrna and think “she’s believable as a Chinese villainess, right?”, but think it they did.  Anyway, this is her big swing of the bat, and she hits it out of the park like Ohtani, so fully connecting with audiences that she goes on a run for the rest of the 1930s and 1940s where she plays opposite almost every major male star of the era, not to mention demonstrating such magnetism side-by-side with William Powell that he’ll go on to play opposite her in an incredible THIRTEEN additional movies, including five more outings as Nick and Nora between 1936 and 1947.

I think what’s magical about Nick and Nora is the way they keep us convinced how much they’re in love with each other even while they are pretty verbally ruthless towards each other (and, in fairness, everyone around them, but they’re surrounded by such a cavalcade of rogues and fools that it’s easy to laugh along with the Charleses as they land jokes at the expense of the rest of the characters).  They’re helped to some extent by the fact that The Thin Man is one of the last Hollywood films to come out in a pre-Code environment: it hits the nation’s theaters in late May of 1934, right before the Hays Code takes effect on July 1st of that year, which means that every “morally questionable” element of this film, from its violence to Nick and Nora’s overindulgence in martinis to the not-too-subtle winks in the direction of their life in the bedroom, is allowed to be just a little more salacious.  It mostly does come down, though, to Powell and Loy being that good on screen together—good enough that when Nora accuses Nick a little jealously of his attentions to the starry-eyed young Dorothy, he can protest that, to the contrary, his type is “lanky brunettes with wicked jaws,” and the phrase sounds sweet as molasses.  He can shove an unwilling Nora into a taxi, telling the driver to “take her to Grant’s Tomb” to keep her out of harm’s way, and later, when he faux-innocently asks her how she liked the place, receive her reply of “It’s lovely. I’m having a copy made for you.” with a smile on his face that we genuinely believe.  Most of all, I think what works about the two of them here is that the script successfully makes them a team that completes the work of one good detective—sure, Nick’s the one with the professional experience and seemingly the skill, but it takes Nora’s persistence to get him to engage in the first place, and more than a little of her dogged resilience to get all the pieces to fall into place by the end in just the way Nick needs them.  When he says at one point, “Come on, Dr. Watson, let’s go places,” as he pulls her out the door of their suite, it feels a little less like a jab and a little more like a man starting to admit to himself that his frivolous, rich wife is turning out to be better at this private eye work than he would have thought….though this is Nick and Nora, of course it’s also a jab, and one she’ll hit back over the net at him sooner or later.

But James, I hear you saying….you just keep talking about Nick and Nora.  What about the mystery?  Heck, what about Christmas?  Isn’t this a holiday movie blog?  Look, friends, if you want to know why you should watch The Thin Man, it is 90% Nick and Nora saying things like “The next person that says ‘Merry Christmas’ to me? I’ll kill him.” or “Waiter, please serve the nuts. Sorry, I mean, waiter, please serve the guests the nuts.”  But sure, let’s at least nod at the rest of all this.  The real mystery kicks into gear on Christmas Day, when Mimi Jorgensen goes to try and get some money out of Julia Wolf (since apparently, despite the divorce, Clyde Wynant has been keeping his ex-wife’s household afloat financially, and not just Dorothy and Gilbert) and finds the young woman dead.  Mimi shrieks, she calls the police….and then she surreptitiously pockets something we can’t see off of the body.  What is it?  Time will tell.  Anyway, this triggers a parade of Wynants (and ex-Wynants) to the Charleses’ hotel suite, crashing an incredibly lively, some might say “bacchanalian” Christmas party, as first Dorothy and eventually her mother and her creepy kid brother show up seeking the help of old family friend and semi-retired detective Nick Charles.  From here, the chaos never really stops—the film flips back and forth between Nick interviewing at least one potential suspect and the discovery of either a new body or a new piece of evidence.  It’s not obvious for a big chunk of the running time if this is a mystery involving where the murderous Clyde Wynant could possibly have gone or one involving who killed Clyde Wynant and then framed him for a series of murders: the film will of course tell you by the end, and so there’s no need for me to do so.  To be honest, the mystery isn’t paced particularly well, since we learn some information so early that it doesn’t create a ton of suspense and some fairly key details emerge so late that there’s not much hope of an audience member solving the case through anything beyond a lucky (if semi-educated) guess.  The investigation of one or more crimes serves more as the backdrop that allows Nora to pester Nick (and Nick to infuriate Nora), with just enough twists along the way that your interest is held.  It’s been years since I read Hammett’s original novel, but my memory of it is that it’s slightly better as a mystery than the movie is, but that it also is fundamentally a detective story that is at least 75% about the vibes and not the plot (unlike, say, a Hercule Poirot).  When you get to the final scene where all the suspects are in one room together, sure, you’re looking forward to the resolution of the mystery, but honestly I think most of the fun even then is coming from the cheeky asides Nick and Nora are making to each other at the expense of the folks around them.

As far as Christmas goes, well, we meet Nora in the first place as a woman stumbling back from holiday shopping, who subsequently wakes up with a horrible hangover on Christmas morning, mumbling about the urgency of “trimming that darn Christmas tree”.  I mention Nick and Nora’s anarchic Christmas party earlier in the review, and really it’s the one seasonal element in the whole film: the party is a set piece that lasts long enough to be memorable, but it’s not exactly central to the story, either of the mystery or of Nick and Nora’s relationship.  The party is full of characters we never meet who will never play much of a role in the story beyond creating some nucleation sites for locating a great one-liner, like the fellow who tells Nora, “I think your husband’s great!”  She throws him back that feline smile of hers as she replies, “Well, I’m glad somebody does.”  Near the end of the gathering, as Nora and Nick watch the revelers belting out a very inebriated version of “O Christmas Tree”, she turns to him and says “Oh Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people.”  And it’s a slam on Nick’s truly depraved social milieu from the rich woman who married him, while also being the bubbling up of genuine admiration from a woman who seems to feel like, after years of ease and wealth out west in California, this return to the seamy, seedy underbelly of Prohibition-era New York City is thrilling on a level she never anticipated.  In the end, though, this is far less a Christmas movie than it is a movie about mobsters who say “yeah, see?” right before pulling out a revolver like a cartoon character trying to threaten Bugs Bunny, or molls who, when they realize they’ve been dating an informant for the cops, burst tearfully out the door rather than remain in a relationship with a stool pigeon.  Not everyone will want this film bellying up to the bar alongside some much more evergreen-bedecked and candy-cane-fueled festive fare, but if you’re inclined to let it in the door, I think you’ll find it (like both Nick and Nora) is a charmer.

I Know That Face: Porter Hall, here playing MacCaulay, Wynant’s lawyer, appears, of course, in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street, recently chronicled on this very blog, where he plays Sawyer, the malevolent psychologist who tries to get Kris Kringle locked up at Bellevue.  Edward Brophy, portraying the street tough Joe Morelli in this movie, swaps sides of the law to play a patrolman, Cecil Felton, in 1947’s It Happened on 5th Avenue, which I wrote about last year.  Myrna Loy, irreplaceable here as Nora, will later portray Mrs. Anna Smith in the TV movie version of Meet Me in St. Louis (1959), and at the start of her career she’d been an uncredited slave girl in 1925’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which of course stages the first Christmas in the early going.  And, in a real blink-and-you-might-miss-it appearance, one of the Christmas merrymakers at Nick and Nora’s party is played by an uncredited Charles Williams, who will, much later in a career that was otherwise mostly full of similarly uncredited performances, make his way into a film’s credits as Cousin Eustace, one of the fretful employees at the Bailey Savings & Loan in 1946’s It’s A Wonderful Life, which I covered for you all here last year on Christmas Eve.

That Takes Me Back: When, near the end of the film, Nora hosts a dinner party, it was fun to see her and Nick talking about putting down little name cards at places around the dinner table: maybe there are still some folks out there doing dinners like this (if so, invite me over!), but for me it feels mostly like a pleasant throwback to holiday dinners when I was a kid.  And it doesn’t matter how often it comes up, as it does during Nick and Nora’s Christmas party, but it will never fail to take me back in time when I see a character making a long distance call (especially when, as in this case, it’s clearly part of the joke to think about how wastefully expensive it is).  In a world where we basically never think about “long distance” anymore—so much so that I’m not sure my 12 year old would even know what the phrase means—it’s wild to think of how universal that experience once was.

I Understood That Reference: The only real reference to anything textually Christmassy is a quick back-and-forth quip between (who else?) Nora and Nick, when on Christmas morning she hears a knock at the door.  “Who’s that,” she asks Nick?  And he replies, “Probably Santa Claus.”

Holiday Vibes (2.5/10): As I cover in the review, really we get all of Christmas in just a couple of scenes—Christmas Eve down at the bar/ballroom portion of the Hotel Normandie and then Christmas Day up in Nick and Nora’s hotel suite, neither of them really classic depictions of holiday joy.  I have to give a little bit of credit to the party for at least being so exuberant that it really does feel like every two-bit ex-con and dipsomaniac in the five boroughs has found his or her way to reconnect with Nick Charles this holiday, but ultimately if you want a seasonally festive film experience, this isn’t going to deliver much.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): It’s hard in some ways to really rate the quality of a movie that is all about the energy and dialogue and not really at all about the plot, especially when the movie’s at least pretending to be primarily a mystery, a genre that is ordinarily heavily dependent on a successfully intricate plot.  It all really hangs on how much fun you’re having with Nick and Nora: if you find them more tedious or mean-spirited than I do, this could drop to a 7.5 or a 7 if we’re just judging it on the basis of “how good a detective story is this?”  And if the rat-a-tat of both comic delivery and 1930’s mobster gunfire is the music you love to hear, I can imagine this film climbing to a 9 or higher: Roger Ebert, the noted critic, listed this as one of his “Great Movies” of all time.  I think the fairest assessment is somewhere in the middle of that curve—I didn’t have quite as great a time with this flick as I have with a number of others I’ve reviewed for the blog, but I enjoyed myself, and I think you likely will too.

Party Mood-Setter?  The answer’s definitely “No,” not only because it’s not as “holiday” a movie as you’d really need for a seasonal celebration, but also because it’s so dependent on rapidfire banter and quick turns of phrase that to get the fun out of it, it really needs at least most if not all of your attention.

Plucked Heart Strings?  It’s just not that kind of movie.  The emotional register here is delight at how fun it is to watch Nick and Nora be semi-spitefully in love with each other, not pathos as you get in touch with wistful joy (or deep sadness).

Recommended Frequency: This one definitely rewards rewatching, since the first time through, there’s no way to avoid being mostly caught up in trying to track all the characters to figure out suspects and subplots and red herrings.  Once you’re freed from worrying about the mystery, a second viewing lets you settle in to just enjoy what the movie’s doing best—and I’d say that the end of the movie is what helps cement my certainty that Nick and Nora are actually good together (and genuinely attracted to each other), which altered to some extent my reading of their interactions the second time through the film.  I would definitely tell you to watch this one once, if you haven’t seen it (or haven’t in a long time), though I’ll admit that I think it would work almost as well in June as I find it does in December.

The Thin Man is still a few years away from the public domain, so your free options for streaming it are Tubi or Fandango at Home, both of them ad-supported, of course.  You can pay to rent it digitally from all the places you would normally think to do that.  The film’s widely available on disc, too, of course—just The Thin Man on Blu-ray if you like, or you could pick up all six films if you’re a real Nick-and-Nora-head.  And I’m nearly willing to issue a guarantee that you’ll be able to get the movie at your local library, since Worldcat says there’s over 1,600 libraries with at least one copy of the DVD.  If you want to try this movie out, it won’t be hard to do, and I encourage you to give it a try if it sounds remotely interesting.

Single All the Way (2021)

Review Essay

I’m going to open with the caveat that this is a movie living on the outskirts of a massive holiday movie industry that is absolutely serving a big and happy audience, and that I am not a part of that audience.  I’m not trying to get in anybody’s way as they consume the delightful fluff of Lifetime/Hallmark/Netflix Christmas flicks (and yes, diehards, I know that there are real tonal and stylistic differences between these channels/streamers when it comes to holiday media), and honestly, I’ve seen so few of them that even calling them “fluff” is probably unfair since if there’s some non-fluff in there, I wouldn’t know it.  My guess is that the movie I’m talking about today will work a lot better for folks who receive the tropes of the TV/streamer holiday romantic comedy like a warm hug.  For me, this is something less successful, but I’ll try to be generous where I can be.  That said, good grief, does Single All the Way feel like an extended Christmas episode for a cheesy sitcom that doesn’t exist.

The fundamental setup of the movie is trite but not necessarily doomed at the outset: Peter is a guy born in New Hampshire who escaped to the high-fashion world of models and marketing in Los Angeles years ago.  He’s headed back home to his small town for Christmas, accompanied by long-time best friend and roommate Nick who just dumped his trash fire of a boyfriend.  Peter’s family are (delightfully and not at all expectedly to me, given other films of this kind) really accepting of his identity as a gay man, even if they seem pretty clueless about LGBTQ+ folks in general.  So this isn’t a trek back home to the closet, as in Happiest Season, which I did genuinely appreciate.  But instead, alas, it’s a trip home to a family desperate to get Peter hitched to somebody—initially to his mom’s spinning instructor, James, via blind date, but then the family rapidly shifts to urgent, manic match-making maneuvers in an attempt to get Peter and Nick to fall for each other, despite their never having had any apparent romantic chemistry or tension in years of living together.  It’s a surprisingly exhausting experience, and if you think you know where it will end, yeah, you sure do.  Regardless of whether the ending makes any sense for these characters.

A promotional poster for Single All the Way depicts two men in their late 20s or early 30s standing together in the middle, looking upwards and smiling. The man on the left is a Black man with short hair and beard; the man on the left is a clean-shaven white man wearing large earmuffs. Above them are five inset portrait photographs, two of them photos of the two men and the other three images of smiling middle-aged white women. The tagline reads "Peter and Nick are just friends. Peter's family knows better."

The tone of all this is, as I mentioned up top, really sitcom.  Like, really, really sitcom.  Jack from Will & Grace could wander into almost any of these scenes and not be totally out of place.  I don’t know at what point my eyes permanently rolled out of my head at the dialogue—I think I made it through “don your gay apparel” without collapsing, and I gritted my teeth through someone quipping that HGTV was the “Homosexual Gay Network”, but when someone described themselves as a “FOMO-sexual”, I was done.  And I want to emphasize that I love a good sitcom, so this isn’t me sniffing that the movie isn’t dark or artsy enough for me.  But the tone is so often broad and silly that it becomes incredibly hard to be invested in the emotional wellbeing of these characters when suddenly the screenplay expects me to take them seriously as people with hopes and dreams and baggage.  The antics they get up to—blind date hijinks for Peter, lots of home improvement work by Nick helping Peter’s father (since Nick works for Taskrabbit and he is really inspired by how Taskrabbit allows him to connect with and help others, and being a Taskrabbit at Christmas is almost like being a TaskElf, hahaha, hey, have I mentioned yet that Nick works for Taskrabbit and he feels kind of directionless in New Hampshire unless he’s working like a Taskrabbit?)—are incredibly mild. I’ll give it to this movie that, unlike Happiest Season, the goofiness is often less unhinged, but that also just means that the scenes are often a lot less memorable.  I’ve already forgotten a lot of the story beats within this movie’s second act.

There are things to praise here, to be clear, beyond my enthusiasm for a holiday movie that gives us a diverse cast (not just several key gay characters, but also at least a little welcome racial diversity for a movie set in New Hampshire).  Insane as both the characters they’re playing are, Kathy Najimy and Jennifer Coolidge (Peter’s mother and aunt) were kind of born to play sisters and to some extent they each make the other seem more realistic as a human being by being adjacent.  Coolidge as Aunt Sandy, the deranged megalomaniacal director of Jesus H. Christ, the town’s non-sectarian Christmas pageant, can at her best make even the wildest, most flailingly awkward moments seem plausible…she is not always at her best in this film, even so, but nobody could have done more to keep at least one of the movie’s toes on the ground where the pageant subplot is concerned.  Kathy Najimy as Peter’s mom….well, I have been to too many farmer’s markets to doubt the existence of people who buy kitschy, folksy, and at least allegedly funny wall decor, and Kathy is 100% landing the plane as a woman who would purchase a framed cross-stitch that says “Sleigh Queen”.  If you chuckled at that, friend, this is a movie you should check out.  The plan briefly entertained by Peter to pretend that he and Nick are dating (as a smokescreen to save himself from the blind date his mother’s going to send him on) dies a quick and fairly painless death more or less on arrival, which was a relief in the moment, at least.  And the best performance in the movie, bar none, is Luke Macfarlane as James, the spinning instructor for Peter’s mother, “Christmas Carol” (yes, that’s the name every character in this movie calls her, friends: how are you feeling about it, right now?), and also of course Peter’s blind date.  The character of James comes across as nuanced, thoughtful, patient: he undermines every likely stereotype, and he seems like a genuinely good dude with whom Peter might have built some really good chemistry, maybe even was initially building that chemistry.  I think this works against the film, to some extent, since it makes the ways Peter treats/mistreats James on his way to his destined-by-the-screenplay relationship with Nick even harder to enjoy when James is not only sympathetic but someone who feels more real, more human than our main character.

The overall arc of the film, really, was just too hard for me to enjoy: we’re asked to join all of Peter’s family in rooting for them to destroy his budding romance with James (based on a blind date his own mother started) and figure out how to basically force Peter and Nick to realize that they’re “perfect for each other”, by which I mean Peter’s dad who loves Nick’s handyman skills and a couple of teenage nieces who think it would be, like, sooooo cute if Peter and Nick dated and…well, you get the drift.  This isn’t a movie that’s figured out how to get these best friends to fall in love with each other by any means other than having a bunch of family members bashing them together like two Ken dolls they’re playing with.  I get that it’s supposed to be silly and sweet, but I don’t know: I was not in the mood for this movie’s brand of romance, and the whole thing ended up feeling almost offensive, as though the gay main characters were paper dolls being puppeted around by straight people who are, yes, “accepting” of their identity, but also not really treating them like people with their own desires and needs in relationships.  But honestly, using a word like “offensive” about Single All the Way would be inappropriate: this isn’t a movie that’s working hard enough in any direction to really mean the things it’s saying.  Like, this is a movie that wants us to nod along with a character claiming that if the town’s Christmas pageant is peppy enough, maybe it can “go on tour” after Christmas Day.  It wants us to accept that the highest powered marketing executives in the country would insist on an emergency photo shoot occurring on Christmas Eve at a moment’s notice….but they’re fine if the images produced are just iPhone snapshots in the woods, featuring whatever random local hunks are willing to pose in a hat and coat.  It’s never, ever mean-spirited, and as the queer main cast members are seemingly comfortable with what they’re appearing in, I wouldn’t tell you not to watch it.  I just think that, ultimately, this is not a script or a film that respects its characters in the ways I was looking for—the final scenes of revelation and admiration between Peter and Nick imply a greater psychological depth than has been developed for either of them.  The movie thinks it’s a story about self-discovery, but I experienced it much more as a story of social engineering, in which a family’s acceptance can also become a fenced yard in which your identity becomes a convenient way to pigeonhole you.  As always, though (and especially for films in this particular subgenre), your mileage may vary.

I Know That Face: Luke Macfarlane (as aforementioned, here he’s James, Peter’s incredibly attractive blind date) is an absolute veteran of TV Christmas movies, having appeared in at least NINE of them, including as Edward Ferris in 2019’s Sense, Sensibility and Snowmen, and as Chris, Santa Claus’s alleged son, in 2023’s Catch Me If You Claus.  I’ll give it to this subgenre: the movie titles are hilariously corny.  Barry Bostwick (here playing Peter’s genial father) is no stranger to the holiday circuit, himself, appearing in at least five such films, including 2017’s Christmas in Mississippi and 2019’s Christmas in Louisiana—the mind boggles at the potential for 48 sequels (more, even, if we throw in D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam).  Add in Kathy Najimy (again, Peter’s well-meaning and overbearing mother), a member of the cast of at least four different holiday movies, including her appearance as Kim in 2013’s A Madea Christmas, and this little cast covers a remarkable breadth of the sizable collection of 21st Century TV movies that depict this special time of year.

That Takes Me Back: As a 2021 release, this movie’s too recent for any real nostalgia, of course, but someday the relentless Taskrabbit and Instagram references will be dated as hell.

I Understood That Reference: Kris Kringle shows up in the end credits song, and of course, thanks to Aunt Sandy’s lunatic obsession with a Christmas pageant that I will remind you again is titled Jesus H. Christ, we get a weirdly elaborate nativity scene on screen, since the movie can think of no more natural way to tie Peter and Nick together than forcing them to help out with the pageant before Aunt Sandy’s ego crushes every single participating child.  

Holiday Vibes (9.5/10): I have to hand it to this movie, it captures the feeling of a particular holiday energy, embodied by the kind of person who sees a framed poster in a country store that says “Nice Until Proven Naughty” and thinks, “That would be perfect for my entryway.”  And basically everything about the film once we reach New Hampshire is pretty Christmassy—snow and merriment and pageants and a countdown hanging on the wall that reminds passers-by to be good for St. Nick.  It’s generating plenty of holiday vibes, that’s for sure.

Actual Quality (6/10): As for the quality, on the other hand, this movie suffers.  Now, is it truly awful?  I can’t say that.  There are some fun performances and the movie’s pretty relaxing as a watch, as long as you don’t think too hard (as I clearly did) about the ethics of how this family is treating their visiting adult son/brother/uncle.  But is it good?  I struggle to even call it “fine”, given what I’m looking for in a movie: there’s just not enough ‘there’ there.  It’s a film that leans on the worst tropes in romantic comedy, for me, and (with my apologies) I just don’t think most of the cast is talented enough to really hold my attention: better actors might have saved some of this writing, but the two main characters here in particular are pretty bland, for me.

Party Mood-Setter?  Oh, 100%, especially if you’re at a party where those gathered will enjoy a little bit of eye candy from the hot men posing for the camera at multiple points throughout.  Sure, I think it’s empty calories, but that means that a party or a cookie baking afternoon is a potentially great venue for a movie that, if nothing else, fully lands the plane of “cute gay guys having a lovely white Christmas in small town New England”.

Plucked Heart Strings?  You’d have to find both Peter and Nick much more effectively realized as characters than I do to feel that lump in your throat as they finally confess their love for each other.  I guess I can imagine that reaction, even though I didn’t have it, but I don’t want to make you any promises!

Recommended Frequency: For a movie I didn’t like, honestly, this is maybe where I’d be gentlest: I can even imagine watching this one again, since I’ll acknowledge that I may just have been in too grouchy or critical a mood the first time around.  Most romantic comedies have premises that are at least a little unsettling or weird in the ethics department if you break them down far enough.  That said, I don’t know that I would ever seek it out again: there’s a lot of films out there, and this one missed me on too many levels for me to think it has much of a chance of warming my heart.  But if it sounds interesting to you, I think it’s well worth a try: you’ll decide early on if it’s really your style.

If you’d like to do just that, Single All the Way is one of those Netflix-produced movies that is really only available on the Netflix platform.  I see a couple DVD copies available from sketchy looking websites, which I assume are pirated, but other than that I can’t really give you options for renting it, buying it on disc, or securing it from your local library.  Apologies!  I try to stick mostly with films that we have a wider array of options to access, and I’ll try to get back to that array of options later this week.

Carol for Another Christmas (1964)

Review Essay:

At the outset, I’ll remind you that Sundays at FTTH are Christmas Carol days.  Each Sunday, as I did last year, I’ll be bringing you a different adaptation of Dickens’s absolutely timeless classic.  Like last year also, I’m aiming for a mix of versions, some of them more traditional and some more experimental: today’s film, a 1964 television movie entitled Carol for Another Christmas, definitely belongs in the latter camp.  Anyone familiar with The Twilight Zone will immediately recognize the layered depth of a Rod Serling screenplay, as one of the masters of television suspense and speculative fiction creates something uniquely American out of the classic English story.  And you may notice as the film progresses that it feels a lot more cinematic than television movies normally would, especially those of this era: that’s because this is a film directed by four-time Academy Award winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director of The Philadelphia Story, of All About Eve, and, maybe most crucially for our purposes, of 1938’s A Christmas Carol, a faithful and widely-beloved adaptation of Dickens’s novella starring Reginald Owen.  Mankiewicz, who never directed another TV movie, knows the right ways to evoke the spirit of the tale even as this version of it does away with almost all of the trappings we normally expect from this story, and what remains here is truly powerful, even unsettling, on a level that I think everyone should watch, and maybe especially every American living in 2025 should.

The premise of this film unfolds in the following way: wealthy American industrialist Dan Grudge is essentially alone in his enormous mansion on Christmas Eve, attended only by a couple of servants who know to steer clear of him in his current bleak mood.  He is mourning, as he seemingly always does, the loss of his beloved son, Marley Grudge, who died serving in WWII on Christmas Eve, 1944, and whose spirit hovers underneath this film even if he does not make himself visible and audible as an apparition in the way we might expect.  A knock at the front door brings a visitor—Dan’s nephew Fred, who mourns his cousin also—and Dan and Fred find themselves immediately at odds as two people who agree on nothing but their fondness for the absent Marley.  Fred is a liberal idealist, someone working for international cooperation and peace, which Dan dismisses as dangerous foolishness.  Grudge thinks the world can go hang itself, and let America take care of Americans…are you getting restless, yet?  Rod Serling’s not going to let you off the hook here, politically—to the contrary, the politics of all this are its point.  Dan acts and speaks like someone who thinks America belongs to him and not to Fred; that, moreover, America needs someone like Dan to protect itself from Fred.  When Fred tries to soften his uncle by wishing him a “merry Christmas,” Dan’s reply is that he is “in no mood for the brotherhood of man.”  Each man is sure that the other one’s ideology will lead to conflict, to global war, to the calamity that threatens the lives of the whole world’s peoples.  And while Fred does not issue any ominous prophecies—much like Dickens’s nephew Fred, he merely leaves with words of compassion and hope—something about the exchange ignites the visitations that will haunt Grudge this night (and haunt him they do).  Fred leaves and Dan suddenly thinks he can see his son’s reflection in a window.  There is a figure who disappears the moment Dan tries to focus on him.  The record player in Marley’s room fires up the Andrews Sisters, whose harmonious glee is suddenly eerie, almost unearthly…only, when Grudge runs upstairs to turn it off, he finds that it is all in his head.  The player is silent.  And then we are in the fog, with him.

The DVD cover for Carol for Another Christmas is in black and white. At the top it reads "the Lost Rod Serling Science Fiction Classic". Below that, Serling appears on the right half of the image, facing inwards, while the tagline next to him reads, "Where the future meets the past...and our world collides." Below this, six small portrait photographs stretch across the screen depicting members of the cast.

The Past / Present / Future structure of the story is retained, but each sequence is radically altered from what we know in Dickens.  In the past, Grudge finds himself on a naval transport ship in an endless dark mist-covered ocean, a vessel carrying the bodies of the dead.  The vessel’s pilot is the only other seemingly living soul aboard, played by a young Steve Lawrence in maybe the only dramatic role he ever took, but he’s cast well here.  His youthful face and voice take Dan back to the end of WWI, a war that he’s still angry about as one that killed a bunch of “suckers” we sent to die for democracy.  When the Ghost asks him if Marley was a “sucker”, Dan is startled into understanding the meaning of what he’s been saying.  He backs down a little but struggles to explain what he really thinks, and he and the Ghost argue over what really led to a second global conflict, and what he thinks will keep us from a third.  The solemn, mournful reality of the dead soldiers around them contextualizes everything they say, and ultimately it’s too much for Dan, who leaves the ship, only to find that the Ghost has brought him to his own past more directly….to Dan Grudge, a commander in the U.S. Navy, with his WAVE driver, a young woman named Lt. Gibson, at Hiroshima in September 1945, one month after the bomb fell.  Haunting doesn’t begin to cover how intense and horrifying it is to watch Grudge confront his own memories of the Japanese school girls he encounters there, bandaged and faceless, so wrapped in gauze they resemble mummies, if not the shrouded dead on the transport he just left.  He and Gibson, both profoundly shaken by what they are seeing and hearing, argue over the morality of what has happened here, with Grudge defending the necessity, even the morality, of the A-Bomb, and Gibson demanding that he set aside his “simple arithmetic” and deal with the human cost of the conflagration, even quoting the Bible at him in her desperate attempt to waken him into sharing her outrage.

I don’t want to narrate the whole film to you because I want you to watch it – to encounter it with eyes and ears that are ready for (but not guarded against) what Serling and Mankiewicz are trying to say.  Dan Grudge, in an attempt to escape the horrors of the past, finds his way to the Present and a new Ghost….but only by walking through the doorway at Hiroshima that led into the room where the Japanese children were being housed.  The film rarely misses an opportunity for symbolism of this kind—we can only understand the present by literally walking through the doorway of the horrors committed in the past.  The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Dan to the realities of an America in the 1960s that, my friend, I wish I could tell you did not feel like America in 2025.  It is a sobering and troubling experience to understand how little our society learned from the 1960s, as Dan encounters the world’s needs and is forced to make sense of how little is being done about them.  He and the new Ghost find themselves just as at odds as he was in the Past, with the narrative of a wealthy American man repeatedly wrecking itself on the truth of the reality he has chosen to ignore.  It was powerfully convicting stuff, for me.  And the Future is maybe the most audacious reimagining possible, as a new Ghost leads him into a post-nuclear-conflict America, where the town meeting hall Grudge knows well is now a shattered ruin, inhabited only by the Cult of the Imperial Me, a sect devoted to the “truth” that there is only one person who matters, and it is Me.  The Me at the head of all these disheveled, chattering Mes is played by Peter Sellers at that level of manic, malicious energy that maybe only he could have delivered in 1964—the performance is astonishing, as is the world Serling imagines.  Dan Grudge has to reckon with the chaos and violence of a world in which “looking out for yourself” has become the one watchword of humankind—a hellscape so bleak that, when one character unexpectedly advances the argument that we can have law and ethics and honor and decency because “these things were not destroyed by the bomb”, the appeal is not only laughable to the other survivors, they find the suggestion that humanity can be good so insane that it amounts to treason against the “non-government” of the Me People.  The violent conclusion of this sequence is not visually graphic (this is a TV movie from 1964, after all), but in emotional terms it could hardly be more unsettling.  Grudge is so tormented by what he has seen and heard that he throws himself at the Ghost of Christmas Future’s feet, begging to know what happened to him in this desolate future and whether these events could be altered or whether Fate had already committed the world to this end.  And then he is looking up at the curtains, and the picture of his son Marley.  The bells are ringing.  It is Christmas morning.

In the same way that the film thus far has been a dramatically altered version of the Dickensian events, the conclusion to the film is different also—Grudge is not a gleeful, celebratory presence in this epilogue as much as he is a chastened, bewildered, shaken version of himself, a man still reconstructing his own sense of himself and his world in the unexpectedly gentle morning light.  We do not entirely see beneath his surface, but it is clear from what little he says and does that something has happened to him, and that something is happening to him, still.  Perhaps the same thing that Serling and Mankiewicz hope is happening to us, the viewers, as we reflect on what we have just experienced.  The film offers no easy answers, but the door that Serling holds open to the future is clearly one that assumes Fred has won the argument with Dan about what it will take for the world to live in true and lasting peace.

What, then, is this American Christmas Carol in another guise—who is it for?  My feeling is that it’s for all of us.  In a way, I think Serling has given us what we no longer really encounter in the Dickens versions of this story—a genuinely convicting and unsettling understanding that WE are being haunted by these ghosts also, that the message of peace and brotherhood is not some easygoing “let’s all hug at Christmas” lark but a truly daunting and monumental undertaking that demands more from us than we might ever otherwise be willing to give.  This version of the story, unlike so many others, offers us very little in the way of transformation and hope because Serling does not know from the vantage point of 1964 whether we really will transform ourselves, and therefore cannot offer us too much in the way of encouragement that it will, in fact, all work out for the good.  Speaking from the vantage point of 2025, I think perhaps his reluctance was warranted.  We learned too little from the 20th Century, and much of what we “learned” as a society was, I think, clearly the wrong lesson, something that has led us into what I will euphemistically call our current predicament.  There is an honesty to this version of the story that is not always easy to sit with, but perhaps the time has come again (as it did in 1964) for us to sit with the honesty that art can give us and ask, what next?  What now?  Will we learn, as Scrooge does in the original novella, to let “the Spirits of Past, Present, and Future strive within me,” so that “the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled”?  I think we can, and that, muted as it is, this version of the story expresses the kind of hope that we can really believe in—the conviction that all of us, or at least enough of us, may be able to change the course of the future, and bring a better Christmas into being than we would otherwise receive.

I Know That Face:

As I mentioned, the young pop singer Steve Lawrence appears as this film’s version of the Ghost of Christmas Past: later in life, he plays Peter Medoff in The Christmas Pageant.  Eva Marie Saint, who in this movie portrays the ethically convicted WAVE, Lt. Gibson, makes appearances as Martha Bundy in 1988’s I’ll Be Home for Christmas (note: ‘90s kids, this is NOT the Jonathan Taylor Thomas flick you’re thinking of) and as Emma Larson in A Christmas to Remember, and IMDB claims that her first ever film role was in 1947’s TV A Christmas Carol, though it gives no indication of her role (I’m assuming one of the Cratchit kids, most likely?).  And Pat Hingle, the irritatingly (to Grudge) persistent Ghost of Christmas Present, will later play the Bus Driver in One Christmas, and Joe Hayden in Sunshine Christmas.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present:

This is maybe a weird claim to make (given that he never addresses the film’s “Scrooge” aloud, as the character obviously does in the original), but Marley’s initial ghostly haunting is really incredibly effective here, more so than in many more straight adaptations.  It’s obvious why Grudge would be shaken by the manifestations he hears and sees, and it establishes the basis of the ghost story effectively.  To the extent that the original novella is about giving us an emotionally resonant series of confrontations with Scrooge’s underlying moral sense, this movie is knocking it out of the park: at times, honestly, it’s even more affecting than anything Scrooge undergoes, or maybe I should say that I feel the conviction of it more keenly than I do when Scrooge is the one under the microscope.  In a way, then, this adaptation is faithful to the underlying reality of the original story, even if it gets there by making some pretty radical alterations to the text.  And of course we do get the consistency of our “Scrooge” character waking up on Christmas morning, clutching the curtain that had been Future’s robe.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent:

I don’t get into this as much in the review because I’m more excited to talk about what works in this adaptation, but I do have to be honest: there are elements missing from the story that I do think hurt it dramatically to some extent.  The moral weight of the dead Marley doesn’t really pay off in the long run here—there’s just not a lot of things for Dan to make amends for in terms of personal harms done, and therefore we don’t really have the sense on Christmas morning that he has a lot of people to settle up accounts with (other than nephew Fred).  If Grudge’s servant Charles (who does appear in some of the ghostly portion of the movie) is this version’s Bob Cratchit, that story’s been shaved a little too lean to make it work.  We don’t have the same thrill of recognition when Charles shows up, and we don’t see much of a reckoning on Christmas morning, since they just don’t have the same relationship dynamic.  And maybe most importantly, one of the most central planks to any Christmas Carol rendering is the idea that Scrooge has some kind of joy in his past (his love of his sister, and his romance with Belle, even just his genuine joy at the overly festive generosity of his old employer Fezziwig) that he can rediscover and re-awaken within himself, which he does on Christmas morning.  But if Dan Grudge was ever more idealistic, we don’t see it, and I think therefore we are less sure of his transformation than we might otherwise have been.  I think the Past section of this screenplay could have been structured to give us more of an idea that Dan had something to recapture about himself, but either Serling doesn’t really believe that about the American avatar he’s writing, or else he dropped the ball.

—

Christmas Carol Vibes (6/10): This is a fun adaptation in that it does sit between the really faithful examples and the ones that are borrowing nothing more than a couple of names or moments from the classic story.  We’ve got a rich old guy haunted by someone named Marley and challenged by an idealistic nephew Fred who encounters three ghosts on Christmas Eve and is affected by them – that’s really effective at making it feel like A Christmas Carol.  But the changes to the structure (the loss of the Cratchits in particular as a way of externalizing and dramatizing both the risk and the potential reward of a future that might go one of two ways) and simply the look and feel of the film take it to a very different place.  This is much more comprehensible, in a lot of ways, as a long-form Twilight Zone episode than it is as an adaptation of a work by Charles Dickens.

Actual Quality (9/10): In terms of how much this connected with me as an audience member, I’m probably selling it short.  This was a profoundly affecting viewing experience, and one that I think worked on me in exactly the ways Serling intended it to, so as an act of persuasion (some might call it propaganda, even), it’s a 10/10.  In terms of its quality as a dramatic work, I have to rein it in just a little, since if I stop and think about the loose ends, or the ways the Past/Present/Future sequences do or don’t sync up, I can see ways in which I would improve the film.  A fair amount of the dialogue is not especially realistic, as characters argue more as representatives of an ideology or way of thinking than they do as real people with more subtle understanding of the world (though of course the Ghosts are not “real people” per se, so I think that’s less of an issue in this film than it would be elsewhere).  But the difference between a 9 and a 10 here is not all that material—whether or not this is flawless film-making (I don’t think it is), it’s a movie that is not throwing away its shot, and that matters.  And it’s grown in its power the more I’ve thought about it since watching it, which I think is always the sign of a really good work of art.

Scrooge?  As rich American businessman (and former naval officer) Daniel Grudge, Sterling Hayden is playing a role he’s probably born to play, to some extent.  I’d say that in this work, he’s effective but often one-note as a stern, jaw-clenching expression of America First thinking circa 1964.  His performance is pretty restrained, sometimes so much so that he feels a little limited by the writing, but I think it’s also true that the world around him (both the Ghosts themselves and the theatricality of the visions they present to him) impacts the viewer in a stunning way that’s bound to overshadow almost anyone in the Grudge role.

Supporting Cast?  I have to say, I think that all three ghosts are solidly cast and often riveting when they talk.  It’s hard to say how much of that charisma is in the writing versus in the acting but it may not matter that much: it’s certainly true that that’s where the power is here, dramatically speaking.  Charles and Ruby, Grudge’s servants, are almost wasted in roles that feel like they’re either underwritten or else sequences involving them maybe ended up on the cutting room floor.  And nephew Fred is really effective up front as Grudge’s interlocutor and the advocate for a different future, but man, I wish we got more out of him in the finale—either Serling doesn’t know how to use him to draw Grudge out or he just didn’t think that Fred would have done such a thing on Christmas morning, with the bells calling him to his (presumably liberal mainline) church service and testy Uncle Dan seeming unsettled but not anxious for advice.  

Recommended Frequency?  I think that, if we can stand it, everyone ought to watch this film once, and encounter its artful confrontation of America in the world.  It was tough enough to face that one time that I am not sure when I will do it again, but I know that what upsets me as a viewer is not the film, but my own complacency, my fear that in little ways I am a Daniel Grudge who neither thinks enough nor does enough for people suffering in the world, perhaps because I cannot see them from my dinner table in the way that the Ghost of Christmas Present forces Grudge to see them in his vision.  I think that until the lessons of this particular carol have been learned, not just by me but by American society, it will always be a text to which we must return, to ask ourselves how much closer we are to peace and understanding than we were in 1964; to challenge ourselves to learn even better than Scrooge did what it means to honor Christmas in our hearts and try to keep it all the year.
If you’re persuaded (as I hope you are) to take the time this year to watch Carol for Another Christmas, I’m afraid that it’s exclusively licensed for streaming to HBO Max, which of course some folks subscribe to via Hulu or Amazon Prime.  These days I normally offer DVD/Blu-ray links to Barnes and Noble (given some Amazon business practices many of us, I think very fairly, object to), but only Amazon has a DVD version….and the reviews suggest that the audio and video quality are terrible, so you may not want to drop cash on that.  Even more disappointingly, that appears to be the only version available, held on disc (according to Worldcat) by a mere 11 libraries worldwide.  I would never normally suggest accessing the film in other ways, since usually we have lots of options for access, but under the circumstances, perhaps you’ll be glad to know that there are some small accounts (surely illegally) uploading copies of this film on YouTube…I assume the copyright holders will take action sooner or later and that link will break, but for now, it’s there.  I don’t know where they got their copy, but it doesn’t have the video/audio quality issues folks report about the DVD.

Nothing Like the Holidays (2008)

Review Essay

I feel like there’s a fine line to walk when you’re writing an “awkward family gathering for the holidays” movie. It can be easy to load up the gathering with a bunch of profound emotional revelation that feels almost unbearably intense, or conversely to turn the family scenes into such broad, slapstick comedy that the people involved no longer feel human. (Or, if you’re Happiest Season, you flip back and forth between the two like a yo-yo: it’s not a bad movie, as I said last year, but it sure can be a tough hang.)  In the case of Alfredo De Villa’s Nothing Like the Holidays, alas, we encounter yet another film that hasn’t quite worked out this balancing act.  But there’s some fun to be had along the way, here and there.

The premise of Nothing Like the Holidays is part of what drew me to it—this is a film about a Puerto Rican family living on Chicago’s west side (Humboldt Park, to be precise) in the late Aughts.  It’s sold as a movie about immigrant culture and American pride; about the violence of the city and of the world beyond it; about the ways we keep secrets from each other and what it takes to finally be honest.  It seemed more than a little bit like the kind of movie I, as a former resident of Chicago (in the early ‘Teens) and a proud one, would really love to trumpet to you all here in 2025, at the end of a series of months in which the city has been under attack by its own national government’s forces.  But this is, first and foremost, a blog where I talk to you about movies and how they work (or don’t), and I have to be honest.  This one mostly doesn’t.

The DVD cover of the movie Nothing Like the Holidays looks like a framed photograph that is tied up with a red ribbon and bow. Nine cast members are all posed and smiling at the camera as though a family photograph is being taken. The title appears above their faces, and below them on the ribbon is the tagline "They're just a typical American family. Minus the typical."

The movie’s power comes out of the gate hot, early on: we’re welcoming home an Iraq war vet, Jesse Rodriguez.  His brother and sister, Mauricio and Roxanna, are excited to see him…but in all honesty they’re probably more preoccupied with their own baggage than with helping Jesse through what’s clearly a painful transition back into civilian society.  They all have complicated relationships to their parents, the cheerful though muted Edy and his acidic, glowering wife Anna, but then they have complicated relationships with everybody: Mauricio with his very-not-Puerto Rican wife Sarah; Roxanna with long-time friend of the family Ozzy (who’s cute but maybe too much trouble); Jesse with his old flame (and Roxanna’s best friend) Marissa.  And things spiral outwards—Sarah’s tough relationship to her in-laws, Ozzy’s desire for revenge on the man who murdered his brother, etc.—to the point where it would have been hard for a really brilliantly written screenplay to fully pay all these things off, and this is, alas, not a really brilliantly written screenplay.  But again, before all of these tangled webs are woven, the film seems strong—it’s about Jesse and his relationship to this home he’s been away from in such a bleak place.  It’s about the color and the sound and the life here in Humboldt Park that’s really winning me over from the opening shots, as I see some things I recognize about a city I came to love in my time there.  If what you want most is that kind of cultural immersion, with music and architecture, food and domino games, all adding up to giving you the feeling of a place and a time, the movie is going to deliver the goods to some extent.

The challenge is that, authentic as the streets sometimes feel, these main characters often end up seeming less than authentic, like caricatures written by folks who don’t really know Humboldt Park.  Sarah plays the white outsider so fully that sometimes it feels like she’s never met Mauricio’s family, even though the text of the film makes it clear she knows them all pretty well.  The explosive relationship between Edy and Anna seems to have been written for the convenience of the screenplay but not anyone’s actual human life.  Somehow the violence of the streets is both too intense—it’s hard to make sense of why Ozzy, based on everything else we know about him, seems so committed to the violent murder of the guy he spotted in the park—and also too muted, since if that IS how people like Ozzy live, it seems like it should have affected far more of the people in this story than give any evidence of their having been impacted.  Most dialogue feels less like it’s revealing qualities of character, and more like it’s setting up the next set of dominos just in time to be knocked over so that the plot can move forward.  It’s hard to pin down what a character cares about or wants, other than maybe Jesse and his father Edy (the two best performances, for me), since the things characters say and do are for the script’s convenience and not emerging from their own desires.  And even those two have their struggles at conveying clear motivation: Edy, for instance, spends most of the movie claiming he’s going to chop down the tree in their yard to “improve the view”…but, this is Humboldt Park, Edy.  You don’t have a view of ANYTHING other than other people’s houses.  Chopping down a gorgeous old deciduous tree isn’t improving your view: it’s taking away your view of the tree.  So, does the movie know that, and this is a crazy distraction Edy’s using to deflect attention from himself?  Or did they actually think this was logical?  It’s so hard to know.

I think part of what’s tough about ensemble holiday movies is that somehow you have to avoid being a caricature while successfully being a memorable character.  In this film, when characters aren’t going over the top, often I feel like they’re underplaying moments too much: even if the person they’re playing would in real life struggle to emote to those around them, an actor has to do more to connect us to the moment as an audience, or we will lose contact with the movie entirely.  The big reveals that eventually unfold in the movie run into these same problems: too often they’re either not supported by how the character has been behaving, or they’re so outlandish that it strains credibility to think of any normal person or family coming to grips with them.  The movie clearly wants an ending in which I (and the rest of the audience) feel comfort that things worked out for these people.  But I don’t know them well enough to know that…and I don’t like half of them enough to care if it does “work out” for them.  And I’m not even really sure that it DID work out, you know?  They end up in new places by the end of the movie, but it’s hard to know how much better it is for any of them.

What else did I like, looking back?  The depiction of the parranda as a vibrant cultural tradition in Humboldt Park is pretty cool even if it arrives out of nowhere.  Sarah, once she loosens up (and drinks a little), draws some good things out of the family around her and helps create some of the more meaningful conversations in the film.  The stretches where everyone’s not standing in a room being mean and aggressive to each other are all at least indicative of the kind of film this might have been in someone else’s hands.  And when is Alfred Molina not fun?  I mean, to be clear, Molina is not Puerto Rican, which is one very fair criticism to make about the casting.  But he’s so enjoyable to watch on screen.  Ultimately I think what I appreciate most about the story is the character of Jesse and the growth he achieves, particularly in relationship to his father.  For all that the movie’s an ensemble, the one arc that makes any sense as a narrative is his.  But I also never really felt like the film could take the time to do his life experiences justice, which therefore limits how much character development is really possible.  File this one among the other holiday movies I really wanted to like but couldn’t quite get there.

I Know That Face: Alfred Molina, the Rodriguez family patriarch, elsewhere performs as the voice of Francis Church in the movie Yes, Virginia, and, maybe appropriately (in the light of Yes, Virginia’s message), is later the voice of Santa Claus in an episode of Santiago of the Seas. John Leguizamo, the incredibly stiff and frankly off-putting elder brother Mauricio, voices Sid, of course, in Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas.  Jay Hernandez, here playing family friend/love interest Ozzy, plays Jessie in A Bad Moms Christmas, which has an incredibly stacked cast.  And Claudia Michelle Wallace, who in this film chews the scenery in a small role as an employee at Edy’s bodega, plays a Child Services Agent in Fred Claus, and follows that up with the role of Mrs. Colvin in Once Upon a Christmas Wish.

That Takes Me Back: This will be nostalgic for nobody else, but when a character gives the driving direction, “Turn on Sacramento,” I’m back in our Albany Park apartment, where on my walk to the nearest L stop (or, later, when taking my infant out for a stroller walk around Ravenswood Manor) I would turn south on Sacramento to cross Lawrence.  We didn’t live that near to Humboldt Park, but Chicago’s flat, extensive grid of streets mean these names cross through all sorts of communities, and it was fun to imagine how closely I was once connected to Edy Rodriguez’s bodega.  Nostalgia, too, was there for me, and maybe you too, to see the era of the flip-phone at its height: wild to me now, in an age where phones get larger and larger as they become the one true screen for all entertainment and productivity, that we once prized making these devices as compact and tiny as possible.  And I won’t call it nostalgic, but it was sobering to get this plain a reminder of the Iraq war, and the devastating effects that lingered after that conflict: it’s hard not to think of the conflicts around the world today (some of which we perpetuate needlessly, as a country) and the toll they’ll leave in their wake.

I Understood That Reference: Santa appears, as he does in many a holiday film: there’s a Santa suit worn by Spencer and a brief dialogue exchange about “Black Santa”. Later in the film, Christmas’s religious underpinnings surface when, having brought a priest to the family’s dinner table in an attempt to settle some of the internal conflicts, a character asks the priest, “How about a little sermon about Jesus being born so we can be forgiven for our sins?”  

Holiday Vibes (9/10): I cannot deny that this film really makes the holidays present – these are characters going through a very painful, hostile version of the more widely-experienced challenge of occupying space at the holidays with family members you rarely see or haven’t seen in years.  The decorations, the food, the energy of the city, the passive aggression from a mom who wants grandkids, the heightened strain on an interracial marriage…it all tracks as the holidays to me, even if it’s a lot more intense and uneasy than holiday memories of mine.  If you want a Christmas movie, it is showing up.

Actual Quality (6/10): I really wrestle with how high to rank this film: I wanted to love a Chicago Christmas movie so badly this year, especially one with such a diverse cast, set in a neighborhood that has been under siege by taxpayer-financed agents of violence for months now. (You may disagree with that characterization: respectfully, if you do, you may not always love the blog this year.  I live in a borderline authoritarian state and if I feel like acknowledging and challenging it, I’m gonna.)  Anyway, as I said earlier in this review, in the end, what this blog is mostly about is the experience of these movies for me, and I can’t pretend I had a good time with this one: it was really uneven.  There are some hilarious lines of dialogue and some pretty heavy but resonant scenes where characters are unpacking some tough baggage.  The movie surrounding all that, though, too often felt silly when it needed to be serious, and flat when it needed to be funny, and the total effect was to make me feel restless.  I can imagine someone getting more out of the movie than I did, but not enough that I can call it even “good”.

Party Mood-Setter? Part of what sucks here is I wish you could just put it on for the vibes of Humboldt Park at Christmas, with the parranda and all the rest, but the tone of the family arguments is so bitter and so often unresolved that I just don’t think it would be all that fun to have on in the background of holiday merriment.

Plucked Heart Strings? It’s definitely a film that wants to get you to that emotional space where you feel for Jesse (who has gone through some serious PTSD-triggering horror in Iraq) and maybe also for the parents in their separate distresses, but for me the characters are too badly served by the screenplay for me to really feel the emotion with them.  I was never close to misty-eyed, though some folks (especially people with their own Iraq memories, or people close to people who have that background) might.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t imagine watching it again.  There’s a great film to be made out of material like this, but I think it needs a screenwriting team that actually knows the place—this is what sets a film like Boxing Day, which is written by someone from the community being shown, apart from this more generically Hollywoodized version of a family in an ethnic/cultural enclave.

If you’re curious to see if you’ll enjoy it more than I did, it looks like this December you can stream Nothing Like the Holidays on Tubi, Fandango at Home, or the Roku Channel for free—all of them are ad-supported, of course.  It’s available for rent at all the usual places (pretty cheap at some of them, too: YouTube and Google Play are offering it for about $2 as of this writing), the DVD is inexpensive also, and almost 900 libraries worldwide hold a copy.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Review Essay

Folks, welcome back for another season of holiday movies and musings: it was such fun last year to share some media experiences (both the sublime and the ridiculous…and whatever the heck Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was) with so many of you, and if you’re new to Film for the Holidays, a special welcome to you!  As a reminder, these film reviews will be appearing once a day like clockwork from now through the morning of Christmas Eve.  You can just remember to pop back here to see them, or click that floating Subscribe button you hopefully see somewhere on your screen to receive the posts via email.  All of last year’s categories for notes and ratings are sticking around this season, which I hope will help you both figure out how (or if) to add some films to your holiday experiences and encourage you to explore some titles not even on this year’s list.  With all that said, let’s get on with the review of this truly classic motion picture.

My approach to Miracle on 34th Street is definitely influenced by the fact that I know it to be the #1 Christmas movie on the recommendation list constructed by Connie Willis.  Willis is one of my favorite authors of all time, on any subject but especially on the subject of Christmas, which she has used extensively as a setting for short stories for decades now, and her passion for this particular movie in the various Christmas anthologies she’s edited is unrivaled.  I had the chance to talk with Willis this summer (on many subjects, including the subject of holiday movies), and since then I’ve been asking myself how I would rank Miracle, myself, as someone who absolutely grew up with this film as an annual tradition, but who I think never had quite the same passion for it that its true fans express.  The conclusion I’ve come to is that the movie is essentially a perfect object in that it achieves exactly what it sets out to accomplish, and my only issue with it is that the thing I go to holiday media to hear isn’t quite what it sets out to say.

What’s the nature of this perfect object, first of all, if somehow I’m talking to a reader who’s never seen this film?  The premise is both simple and silly once you write it all down: Miracle on 34th Street posits that, by the mid-1940s, Kris Kringle (Santa Claus) is living in an old folks’ home in Long Island, taking regular jaunts into New York City to breathe some fresh air, harass shop assistants who are trying to dress their windows for the holiday season, and give pointers to performing Santas as he meets them in the street.  Our story begins when, having exposed an unfit Santa on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Kris is hired by Doris Walker, a hard-working single mother and Macy’s employee, to not only take part in the parade but to work the “photos with Santa” line inside their flagship store on West 34th Street in the middle of bustling midtown Manhattan.  Kris immediately busies himself with improving the lives of basically everyone he encounters, from Alfred, who sweeps up the locker rooms in the Macy’s employee changing area, to Peter, a kid who wants a fire truck that squirts water but which he will promise only to use in the backyard, to Peter’s mother who, let’s face it, seems like a lady near the end of her rope.  Most centrally, Kris’s goal is to convince both Doris, an incredibly hard-boiled divorcee who has seemingly learned to shut out all hope or faith from her live, and Doris’s daughter Susan, a child raised on such pure common sense that the concept of an “imagination” is unfamiliar to her, to believe in him.  In this, he has the enthusiastic help of Doris and Susan’s neighbor, a bright young lawyer named Fred Gailey who’s hot for Doris and sweet to Susan, and who is at least willing to play along with Kris’s eccentric notion that he is the real, the one and only, Santa Claus.  Wild stuff.

This is the poster for the theatrical release of the movie, Miracle on 34th Street. The background is bright yellow. From the left and right sides of the poster, the lead actors, Maureen O'Hara and John Payne, face each other, smiling. Between their faces but far more distant in the background is the image of Natalie Wood as Susan being embraced by Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle.

The story as presented feels like it might make a sweet children’s movie—believe in Santa, young folks, and all will be well—but Miracle manages a deeper level of resonance than that, and I think a big portion of the credit clearly goes to the incomparable Edmund Gwenn in the role of Kris Kringle.  Gwenn, who wins an Academy Award for the performance, seems to have been born to play Santa Claus, with a warmly smiling and almost cherubic face (if cherubs could grow beards), and perhaps the perfect voice for the part: both cheerful and chiding, he manages to hold a tone that sounds constantly ready to celebrate niceness but also unhesitant to let the naughty know they’ve really stepped in it.  It’s that balancing act, a Santa Claus who seems capable not only of genial indulgence but also of genuine moral candor and outright confrontation of the unworthy, that transforms the film into something robust.  There’s a wisdom to this Kris Kringle that seems to take at least a note or two from the character’s ancient roots in the stories of Saint Nicholas of Myra, a countercultural force, a figure whose principles are more important than his presents.  Though he does love giving the perfect present.

In some ways, Gwenn’s perfection in the role is a liability: it is so easy to believe this man to be Santa Claus that Doris and Susan Walker (Doris especially) can seem to be dragging their heels needlessly.  Natalie Wood’s Susan is a genuinely charismatic performance by a child actress.  She has the range to not only emote successfully on screen, but even to play the part of a child who cannot act, as she does when she fumbles slightly her attempts to pretend to be inviting Fred Gailey to Thanksgiving dinner, or struggles to convincingly play a make-believe monkey.  So I think to some extent she sells us on Susan as a real kid who would wrestle with the problem—a child who is so indoctrinated against Santa Claus that believing in him might spark an identity crisis.  She also gets the slightly easier task of being the first of the two Walkers to open up to the possibility of Kris’s telling the truth, in famous scenes where she tests the reality of his beard or listens in as he effortlessly switches to speaking Dutch to offer greetings to a recently adopted refugee.  Maureen O’Hara’s Doris has to be the rigid one, and it’s no criticism of O’Hara when I say that it does become just a little difficult to believe in a woman who refuses to let a primary schooler read fairy tales or pretend to be an animal for fun: I think that’s a challenge for the (admittedly Oscar-winning) screenplay, which has somehow to make this premise work, and if it’s stretched a little thin there, well, at some point we have to accept that this is a movie about Santa Claus and not a hard-hitting realistic drama.

The message of Miracle is, as I’ve noticed revisiting it as an adult, surprisingly complicated in its politics.  The film seems to wear its anticapitalist leanings on its sleeve: you notice even as a kid that Kris courageously stands up for sending parents to get toys from other stores, and as you get older, perhaps you pick up on the fact that Macy and Gimbel only embrace the idea because they realize it’ll turn even more of a profit, and not out of any real belief in the ideal.  Alfred, the sweetly naive custodian, observes mournfully early on in the film that these days the worst of the “isms” floating around the world is “commercialism”.  It’s all “make a buck, make a buck,” even in his native Brooklyn, he laments.  Fred Gailey throws away his job for the sake of a higher principle, and Judge Harper risks his chances at re-election for the sake of his own principles (somewhat different from Fred’s).  And yet.  This is also a movie that never really takes Macy or Gimbel to task—to the contrary, you’ll come away from the movie feeling a great deal of sentimentality and even sweetness in connection with “Mr. Macy”, a person who did not exist (at least, not in 1947, by which time no Macy had owned the company for over half a century).  It’s a movie that treats the material desires of its characters as laudable: nobody is ever told that the “real meaning of the holiday” is something other than getting the right present, and even the movie’s final climactic moment of awe-struck belief is something only occurring because a character thinks she’s just been “given” an extraordinarily expensive “gift” (that others will have to work rapidly behind the scenes to actually buy for her).  This is a movie about faith, yes, and love, but it’s one that has no problem assuming that these things can co-exist happily with thriving post-war American commercialism and not encounter the slightest trace of a conflict.  This is odd for an American holiday movie: we just don’t tend to think about it because for most of us we can’t remember a time when this movie wasn’t a Christmas classic.

To be clear, I am in sympathy with this film’s moral compass to a large extent.  The truly odious Sawyer, who at the film’s start is an industrial psychology staffer for Macy’s, is a monster measured along any possible axis: narcissistic, cruel, misogynist, selfish, and vindictive.  Violence may not be the answer but I can’t claim to be disappointed when Kris Kringle beats him over the head with an umbrella.  Kris is a huge proponent of learning to love not only yourself but those around you, whether it’s getting Susan to realize that she can connect with the kids playing in the courtyard or opening Doris up to the idea that romance hasn’t passed her by forever.  I like that: who wouldn’t (other than Mr. Sawyer)?  And the movie is a huge believer in accidental grace, which I love as an undercurrent: good things happen despite people’s intentions rather than because of them.  Doris Walker and Mr. Shellhammer hire a Santa Claus thinking he’ll be good for business, not for their hearts.  Macy and Gimbel help beleaguered parents as a marketing scheme.  Even the movie’s most famous sequence, the arrival at the courthouse of an endless stream of letters to Santa Claus that win Kris’s freedom, is of course the self-interested action of two overwhelmed postal employees who have realized it’s a pretty slick solution to an overcrowded warehouse.  This is a truth about the world, and the ways in which goodness manages to survive even among people who are not trying in any particular way to be good.  It makes me smile.

I know this review’s running long, and it’s a holiday weekend, so I’ll stop here, though I could say a lot more about this film: it’s a rich text and there’s a lot to find (and like) in it!  To me, again, the movie undeniably does what it sets out to do basically perfectly—you wouldn’t think that you could merge a fantasy about Santa Claus working in a department store with a surprisingly high-minded courtroom drama, but it works incredibly well.  I think what ultimately leaves me just short of calling the movie a masterpiece is my sense that its message isn’t quite profound enough for me.  When Kris tells Fred, early on, that “those two [Doris and Susan Walker] are a couple of lost souls, and it’s up to us to help them,” that feels really true in my heart.  And it’s weird to realize, at the end of the story, that they accomplish this by means of Fred dating Doris (I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but how is this “saving her soul”?) and Kris persuading Doris by means of his sincerity and Susan by means of an incredibly unlikely gift that he’s the real Santa Claus.  They have learned to be a little less hard-headed about the world, but not in a way that feels inspiring to me, let alone soul-restored.  It’s a sweet movie, a holiday treat, and I could watch Edmund Gwenn chew bubble gum or sing a song about Sinterklaas any day of the week and be happy about it.  But it’s not a fable that speaks to my heart at quite its resonant frequency.  If it does that for you though, dear reader, I am genuinely and unreservedly delighted for you, and I’m certainly happy to celebrate it as a worthwhile member of the Christmas motion picture canon here at the start of the FFTH season.

I Know That Face: Jerome Cowan, who in Miracle appears as the district attorney, Mr. Mara, plays the role of Fred Collins in 1950’s Peggy, a movie set around the Tournament of Roses Parade that rings in the new year in Southern California.  Percy Helton, who here performs uncredited as a Santa Claus so inebriated that he’s pulled off the Thanksgiving Day parade float, makes a similarly uncredited appearance as a train conductor in another midcentury holiday classic, White Christmas, which I covered last year on the blog.  And Alvin Greenman, memorable in his uncredited role as the sweet and simple young Alfred, is the only member of the 1947 film’s cast to appear in the 1994 remake: in that movie, he plays a doorman (also named “Alfred”).

That Takes Me Back: It’s a little wild when Doris tells Shellhammer that she won’t miss the parade since she can see it from her apartment building: this is near the very end of the era in which a person could not watch the parade on television (it was first televised locally in New York City the year after this film was released, and has been televised nationally since 1953).  I think of these parades so much as a television spectacle that it’s kind of amazing to consider the decades in which they were an in-person only event.  Susan saves her chewing gum overnight, which is kind of amazing to me: I remember doing that as a kid, but gum is such a cheap commodity that I’d never think of doing it now.  I wonder if it’s just my age that affects this (or my income), or if this is something nobody does anymore?  Would a modern kid relate at all to the song “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Overnight)”?

I Understood That Reference: In terms of references to other Christmas stories or media, obviously this movie is chock full of Santa lore.  There are references to the North Pole, of course, and Kris Kringle’s next of kin on his employment card consist of all eight reindeer (including the accurately spelled “Donder”).  Donder’s name will be permanently altered in the public memory in just two years after the release of the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which refers to him as “Donner”.  Rudolph’s omission from a Santa film is probably also a “That Takes Me Back” moment really—though the character of the scarlet-snouted reindeer who guides Santa’s sleigh had been created back in 1939, it’s not until a 1948 cartoon short and the 1949 song that he springs into the limelight so completely that he’ll be inextricably tied to Santa from then on.

Holiday Vibes (9/10): From the parade that (for many of us) kicks off the holiday season to a party with not one but two Santa Clauses dispensing gifts next to an enormous and lavishly decorated tree, this movie touches on so many aspects of the season (busy department stores, children making lists of desired gifts, etc.).  And, as with a few other true classics, I just think this film is so embedded in my memory that even its less Christmassy elements are associated with the season somehow, from Mrs. Shellhammer and her triple-strength martinis to Fred Gailey’s facts about the United States Postal Service.  It maybe doesn’t hit on every single element I’d look for in a holiday movie but it does really well on this front.

Actual Quality (9/10): And again, I don’t want to be mistaken: it’s doing a great job on the “quality” front, as well.  Despite my critiques, I think it’s a really well-crafted piece of entertainment, and one with a lot of heart—it more than deserved three Academy Awards and a Best Picture nomination, and it’s a worthy addition to the list of films that we treat as more or less mandatory to be shown and shared at Christmastime.  That scene where the mail shows up at the courthouse is thrilling every time.

Party Mood-Setter?  A film so familiar to so many of us more or less HAS to work in this setting—especially because it’s a movie with key moments you can check in for and then a lot of fairly low-key scenes that work fine in the background of cookie decorating or catching up with old friends.  It’s better if you pay full attention but it is very pleasant company if that’s all you’re after.

Plucked Heart Strings?  I’d say we get close, in a moment or two, where Doris’s faith in Kris is sincere and that’s moving, but it’s more a fantasy story than it is one that wants a lot of sincere heartfelt emotion.

Recommended Frequency: Oh, come on now, you know this is an every year kind of movie, or at least it sure is for me.  If you’ve somehow made it this far in life without seeing it, it’s time to dive in.  If you haven’t watched it since you were a kid, I think you’ll find it bigger than you remember: how much you find yourself connecting with the themes it advances will obviously vary, but I think it’s a movie that rewards re-watching, and I hope you’ll give it your time this holiday season.

Luckily for you, it should be fairly easy to watch Miracle on 34th Street.  Right now, it appears to be streaming for subscribers on Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.  If you want to rent a streaming copy, it looks like Google, Apple, and Fandango at Home would all be happy to help you out (for a small price).  Barnes & Noble will gladly sell you a copy on Blu-ray or DVD, and Worldcat’s data suggests that nearly every conceivable library system has access to a copy if you just want to borrow one.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Review Essay

It’s so hard to talk about It’s a Wonderful Life, since for some of us every single scene is imprinted on our memories from childhood, the strangeness and wonder of this fable about life and hope and worth so indelibly associated with Christmas that it would be very difficult to say anything new or original.  And for others, the film is unfamiliar — a “holiday classic” but one that’s long enough and black-and-white enough that you haven’t picked it up yet, perhaps especially because the movie’s fans tell you it’ll put you through the emotional wringer and that’s not necessarily something we all want to sign up for.  What can I say about a movie many of you have either memorized or else long avoided?  Well, it’s Christmas Eve and I guess there’s no reason to say anything other than what I think and hope it connects with you, wherever you’re coming from.  If you’ve come here to spend any of these important holiday minutes with me, I owe you nothing less.

The premise of this film is well known, I think: a man named George Bailey is shown the world as it would have been without him, as though he was never born, and it transforms him.  And it has something to do with Christmas, though I imagine when folks who’ve not seen it hear these summaries, it’s always a little puzzling what the connection really is.  So, I’ll offer a different way of seeing this film, if that’s all right.  The author of the short story on which this movie is based always acknowledged a debt to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, and I think it’s evident here: the movie’s three great sections are George Bailey’s Past, Present, and a grim vision of what will become of the world without him (though, of course, to be precise, it’s the world as though he had never been).  George is no Ebenezer Scrooge — the real “covetous old sinner” of this piece, Scrooge’s counterpart, is the malevolent spider in his web, Henry F. Potter, whom this film can neither explain nor redeem.  Instead, our attention is on an ordinary man in so many respects, both kind and hot-tempered, both ambitious and loyal, a good man and a flawed one.  We see him at his triumphs and at his most desperate.  And so we learn alongside him as people more able to put ourselves in his shoes than most of us can ever fit into Scrooge’s.  It’s a carol for an American life.

The poster for It's A Wonderful Life shows a painting of Donna Reed held high in the air by a smiling Jimmy Stewart -- they gaze into each other's eyes lovingly.

It carries with it that same background of Christmas religious observance that Dickens employs in his novella: we open on a snowy Christmas Eve in the town of Bedford Falls, and all we know is that behind every closed door and window, simple and heartfelt prayers are being offered for a man named George Bailey, whom we have not yet seen.  And then, in the movie’s weirdest device, we are in some astronomical photograph, as blinking galaxies and stars represent God, Joseph (whether an angel or the adoptive father of Jesus is unclear), and of course, Clarence Odbody, AS2 (Angel, Second Class).  Clarence is tasked with assisting George Bailey out of a terrible condition — far worse than being sick, God observes, George is discouraged.  He is contemplating suicide.  The next hour and a half, then, unfold for Clarence the life of George Bailey, with a particular emphasis on Christmas Eve, 1945, the day of George’s profound despair, as this novice angel tries to “win his wings,” a metaphysical situation that is never really explained further.

I think what must surely be challenging or even off-putting to a new viewer is the character of George Bailey himself — Capra plans to take full advantage of the fact that, as I observed in writing about The Shop Around the Corner, Stewart had developed this screen persona by the 1940s that allowed him to play characters who were irascible and difficult and rude without losing the audience’s trust.  Capra extends that quality down into the boy actor playing the younger version, as from the beginning we understand that George is brash and ambitious and self-confident to a fault…but he’s also wise beyond his years at times, and loyal to his sense of ethics, and always willing to make a sacrifice for someone in need.  It’s why he taunts his kid brother Harry into a daredevil sled ride that forces George to leap into an icy lake to save him.  He’s condescending about coconut and bragging about his membership “in the National Geographic Society” but one glance at a telegram and he realizes his boss is grieving — and he risks anger and even violence to save Gower, the druggist, from his own despair.  Those scenes are hard to watch, but what’s hard to watch in them is what’s most human — some of us have known griefs as profound as Gower’s, a pit so deep we cannot see out of it, in which every human voice wakes further to agony.  Some of us have had to be as brave as George, standing up to someone’s pain knowing it may cause us pain, ourselves — for the sake of helping them, of helping others.  The emotions that come home in the movie’s justifiably famous closing scene are all laid in us here, bit by bit, as George’s life unfolds.  We come to care about the people he cares about, and through them, we care for him.

If you’re a newcomer to this movie, please don’t feel it’s all death and sadness: there’s a liveliness to so much of the film.  We get it from the banter of Bert and Ernie, the policeman and the cab driver (no, despite Internet rumors to the contrary, as far as we know Henson did not name two roommates on Sesame Street for these men).  It shows up in the Bailey home, with criss-crossing dialogue and Harry balancing a pie on his head and Annie, the family’s maid, very rightly referring to the Bailey boys as “lunkheads”.  Even if you’ve never really watched the film, I’m guessing you might know about the Charleston contest, as George and Mary accidentally dance their way into a swimming pool.  What’s great about their flirtations that night is that George is just as complicated as ever, but Mary sees through him to the man he’s going to become.  She’s not planning on “fixing” George Bailey, but she knows better than he does who George Bailey really is.  What I love about the movie, though, is how it weaves its deeper ideas into the fun moments.  Ernie the cabbie is George’s wisecracking friend, but it’s also a loan to him that becomes a rhetorical football between George’s idealism about the common man and Potter’s domineering sneers about the working class’s need to learn “thrift”.  The chaos of that dining room scene at the Baileys surrounds a really serious conversation in which Peter Bailey (who, without knowing it, is having the last conversation he’ll ever have with his son) tries to convey to George what matters in life…and George both knows in his heart his dad is right and doesn’t want to give up his dreams for it anyway.  And of course, George’s relationship to Mary is the hinge on which the whole movie turns, at every step.

I’ve heard complaints about the movie, over the years, about the ways it handles some gender dynamics, and I won’t defend any 1940s movie as wholly innocent of those charges: we just know better now, or at least some of us do.  This is, I should note, still a lot better at giving women agency than much more modern films like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, but that’s a low bar to clear.  I do think, though, that sometimes those critiques have been misplaced.  For instance (and apologies for spoilers, but so much of this movie’s success is about its final half hour that I cannot avoid them all), Mary Hatch doesn’t end up an “old maid” librarian because the movie’s punishing her for not having George in her life — this is what she’s said from the beginning, telling George at one point very plainly that if it hadn’t been for him, there wasn’t anyone else in town she wanted to marry.  And the movie’s also not arguing that being an “old maid” or a librarian is a fate worse than death — it’s a fate that feels like death to George, because it IS his death.  Or rather, it’s damning proof that Clarence is right, and that this is a world in which he was never born, never did anything, never kissed Mary Hatch Bailey on their wedding night or built a life with her.  It’s not Mary he’s grieving: it’s himself.

I’ve heard complaints also about George’s outbursts at his kids, and certainly I can understand that depending on your own experiences, it may be very painful to watch the movie’s “hero” act so dismissively and harshly to his children, shouting at them and smashing things.  I don’t want to minimize the harm there, but again, I think the movie doesn’t either.  That Christmas Eve, George is facing the ruination of his entire life — he sacrificed everything for the sake of Bedford Falls and the building and loan, and now the business will fail and the town will slip into Potter’s cruel hands and his own family life will be destroyed by scandal and prison, he expects.  He’s barely holding it together until those moments when he’s not holding it together at all.  But I think it’s clear from the ways the children react that this is not the father they know — that they expect support and love from him, and it is a startling betrayal to find those things missing.  That doesn’t make an evening of borderline abusive conduct “okay”, but I think it reframes the situation for us — we have to believe that we’re seeing a man prepare to commit suicide because he believes the world is better off without him.  So he has to wreck himself and that family’s peace enough to have that moment where he’s stammering apologies and trying to command them to restore the home he’s terrified of losing, and his wife and children look at him with such fear that he feels they’ll be happier without him.  It is not the well but the sick who need a doctor, as the Gospels remind us: for George Bailey to be saved, he’s got to realize the harm he’s done.  If you don’t want to roll with that, I get it.  But for those of us willing to take that journey with George, it’s the movie’s power.

I refuse to spoil any more of the movie’s final half hour, much of which plays out like a Twilight Zone episode, but of course it’s a Twilight Zone episode that follows 100 minutes of establishing scenes, so that we know every single minor character on screen and we can feel the depths of George’s confusion and ultimate agony as he explores a world without him in it.  The movie’s values are on its sleeve throughout, and say what we will about Capra, he understood what endangered American freedom and joy.  It’s what endangers it still.  This sequence is an indictment of Potter, and of a society resigned to letting the Potters of the world have their way.  And the whole time, I know, a new viewer will keep saying to themselves, “okay, this is all happening on Christmas Eve.  But where’s this movie that’s supposed to be so holiday-inspirational that it moves me to tears?”

And then you get the ten minutes that either work for you or don’t.  If it’s too sentimental for you, too neatly resolved, too implausible, then I get it.  There are other movies that maybe will kindle hope for you, if hope’s something you’re willing to take from a world that rarely seems to reward it.  For the rest of us, this is where the movie breaks us open.  I watched this film for what I am sure is at least the 40th time this December, preparing for this blog post.  And I wept like a child for most of its final sequence, even though I could also probably recite it to you by heart.  Gratitude is overwhelming like that, I think — when we confront the fact that we can be grateful for life even at its darkest extremes, even when we feel most lost.  And what the film is urgent in reminding us is that we are more loved than we know; there is more joy than we’ve yet found.  No man is a failure who has friends, as Clarence says, which is both glib and profound.  I get that that’s not a comfort to everyone out there, but I hope that the movie’s argument speaks even to those who feel friendless, reminding them that any life has touched so many other lives, and we have given so much more love than pain, those of us who aren’t Potters, at least.  Half the people we see in the film’s finale are not George Bailey’s friends.  They are people who have known the worth of his life, and who are ready to return blessing for blessing.  That’s the Christmas magic of this movie, and the reason that, despite being a film that spends only about half its running time on Christmas Eve and very little of its Christmas Eve time doing anything that feels connected to the holiday, it remains not just a holiday classic, but to many folks THE holiday classic, the film we cannot do without.  It’s so powerful for me that there have been Decembers I couldn’t take watching it, because it would have hit me too hard.  Whether or not it’s that kind of movie for you, I wish you this movie’s sense of gladness and of hope, of joy at being alive, of the discovery of friendship and fellowship in those places in your life you least expected them.  For those preparing for Christmas or Hanukkah tomorrow, or Kwanzaa the next day, or simply preparing for a break in life’s chaos here at the turning of the year, peace to you, and thank you for reading this little blog.

I Know That Face: Henry Travers, who here plays the angel Clarence Odbody, plays the businessman Horace Bogardus in The Bells of St. Mary’s, one of those movies that has a Christmas sequence and is therefore a holiday movie, as well as playing Matey, the brother to Anne Shirley’s landlord, in Anne of Windy Poplars…another movie that has a Christmas sequence and is therefore a holiday movie.  Ward Bond, who here plays Bert the policeman, plays a different kind of cop in 3 Godfathers, a loose Western retelling of the three wise men (and at least partial inspiration for Tokyo Godfathers), in which Bond plays Sheriff Buck Sweet.  And of course we’ve already seen Beulah Bondi, here Mrs. Bailey, in Remember the Night, as well as Jimmy Stewart, here our George Bailey, in both The Shop Around the Corner and Bell, Book and Candle.

That Takes Me Back: As someone who remembers being mesmerized by the spinning of a record on our record player, I love the sight of the phonograph that, while playing, can also turn the spit to roast two chickens on George’s wedding night.  My guess is that my daughter would barely understand the phrase “a long distance telephone call” other than from context clues, and therefore would have absolutely no chance at understanding what it means that Harry’s “reversing the charges”.  Some things have changed a lot since I was young.  This is where I’d normally make a quip about how the movie takes me back to when we held greedy, amoral men with too much money and absolutely no conscience accountable under the law, but in this case there’s nothing at all nostalgic about It’s a Wonderful Life — Potter seemingly will get away with having stolen eight thousand dollars from the Baileys, and go on being the man in Bedford Falls with the most power and capital, even if Harry Bailey is right (as I hope he is) in calling his brother George “the richest man in town,” speaking on a human level.

I Understood That Reference: Speaking of Henry Travers’s filmography (as I was just a moment ago), we see in a couple of shots that The Bells of St. Mary’s is playing at the theater in Bedford Falls that Christmas Eve.  Tommy is, I think, wearing a Santa mask when he tries to scare his father and George in his panic doesn’t know what to do other than hug him frantically…but honestly, I could be misreading it, it’s a weird mask.

Holiday Vibes (7/10): This is another one where there’s no easy rating: give it a 10 and a new viewer will, 45 minutes in, wonder what the heck is so Christmassy about it, but give it some low number and that’ll underplay how powerfully this movie’s scenes and its message have taken up residence in millions of people’s experiences of December and the holidays.  I think a 7 is fair, given that half the film’s on Christmas Eve, and we encounter enough of it (from decorations to music to the movie’s themes) that it’s playing an important role.  Plus the big finish.  Knocks me flat, every time.

Actual Quality (10/10): This film has, for some reason, long had a reputation as being underappreciated by critics, but I don’t think that’s true — sure, a few pieces have knocked it for its sentimentality, but it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, and in recent years it has placed high on almost every kind of movie list from the organizations that put these things out on both sides of the Atlantic.  For me, it’s absolutely top tier: those of you I’ve made aware of Flickchart are probably asking where this one ranks, and while it’s moved around a little over the years, I think it’s solidly a top 25 movie for me (and it’s currently sitting at #20).  But the movies I love aren’t always the ones I think have the greatest quality, so let me double down here on this movie’s artistry: the cast is tremendous, and the film successfully sweeps us through half a century of American life, touching on the influenza epidemic, the roaring 20s, the crash that started the Great Depression, the second World War, etc., without feeling cheap or cheesy in the ways it uses those contexts.  It is hard to pull off this movie’s intended outcomes, mixing some comic moments with a classic romance featuring two stars but wrapping all of it in one of the most fantastic premises you’ll find in a major Hollywood release of that era.  The fact that it succeeds on all fronts leaves me feeling there’s no way I can dock it even half a point.

Party Mood-Setter? So, it really shouldn’t work in this setting, since the film is complicated and has a pretty wild premise, and then the emotion at the end hits like a truck.  But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t households that know this film so well that it can be a Christmas vibe you’re only half paying attention to — how many of us, indeed, remember Christmas Eves where this movie was just on in the background while our families did other things?  If it works that way for you, though, you’ll already know it: for folks newer to the movie, I wouldn’t recommend using it in that fashion.

Plucked Heart Strings? I know sometimes we say things like “I cried” and mean them only metaphorically, so I want to be clear: I cried human tears while rewatching this.  A lot of them.  Tissues were involved.  I think it may have hit harder because it’s 2024 and I have a lot of feelings about the Potters of the world and the bravery of communities banding together to protect each other from them.  It may also have hit harder just because I was thinking in such detail about the film that its themes really reached me.  But I think it’s also just a movie that does this to people — I ran into a “reaction video” on YouTube about It’s a Wonderful Life, where a woman (I think a Millennial) filmed herself watching it for the first time.  Yeah, I know, I don’t really get this genre of video either, folks, but I was curious.  She got within about 5 minutes of the end and was remarking at how confused she was that her viewers had told her she’d cry at this movie, because it just doesn’t hit like that.  And then she spent the last five minutes in full, heaving sobs as the movie came crashing down around her — it hit her so hard that afterwards, in conversation with her off-screen partner, she tells him she feels so embarrassed by her reaction that she’s not sure if she should post it.  I share all that just to say, I think that’s how this film works.  It surprises us with joy in a way that gets past our defenses.  Maybe it doesn’t hit you like that, but I’d come to it, if you are approaching it for the first time or the first time in a long time, ready to let yourself feel this way.

Recommended Frequency: As I mention above, to me, this is only kept off of the “every single year” list by the fact that it’s powerful enough to be hard to take some years.  It’s still easily a 9 out of 10 years movie for me, and if you’ve not seen it even in just the last few, I’d tell you you’re overdue.  I hope you get a lot of joy out of it.

Before I tell you about where you can watch this movie, I do want to note: this is the last Film for the Holidays movie review of 2024.  It might be the last one ever!  But the day after Christmas, if you want, I’ll be posting a survey here.  It’s intended to get a better understanding of what the blog’s viewers might care about if I was thinking of doing this again — what to keep the same and what to change.  It’ll be very short and obviously totally up to you which questions to answer if any.  But I hope, if you’ve come here at all regularly, you’ll pop back here and tell me what you think: even if what you think is “yeah, James, failed experiment, use your free time for something else”.

If you want to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, you can go very old school and watch it over the air tonight, Christmas Eve, on NBC at 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific.  You can stream it on Amazon Prime if you’re a subscriber, or stream it for free (with ads) on the Roku Channel or Plex.  It looks like you can rent it from Google Play or Apple TV or Fandango at Home (as well as Amazon, I expect, if you’re not a Prime subscriber).  This is a classic, folks, and if you want to own it, I think you should — Blu-ray and DVD copies are really inexpensive (in my opinion) at Barnes & Noble right now.  And of course Worldcat assures me it’s in thousands of libraries, so I think you should go check out your local library’s film collection.

If you don’t swing back through here for the survey, folks, it was a delight sharing this journey from Thanksgiving to Christmas with you.  Whatever holidays you are or aren’t celebrating, I appreciate you giving me a little time during a stretch of the year where free time is often hard to come by.  Perhaps I’ll be back in 2025 and so will you, but if either (or both) of us are not, happy film watching to you, and a happy new year regardless!

Joyeux Noel (2005)

Review Essay

I think of all the possible genres for a Christmas movie, a war movie in some respects seems least viable.  Christmas is a holiday that generally provokes Western society to a rare moment of pacifism, whether it’s John and Yoko singing “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” or Stevie Wonder singing the (to me) far superior “Someday at Christmas” or a choir singing the words of Longfellow’s lament in “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”.  And so, of course, the best holiday war movie I know presents a story about an unlikely truce, and what it tells us about both Christmas and ourselves.

The premise of Joyeux Noel (or, Merry Christmas, if we want to translate the title) takes us to a particular historical moment: Christmas, 1914, the first of these holidays to be observed in a war that was allegedly planned to be over by then, and which would of course extend over several more bloody years.  We follow the pathways to war of soldiers from three countries — a German tenor opera singer named Sprink, a Frenchman who is son of a major general named Audebert, a pair of Scottish brothers (Jonathan and William) and their parish priest, Father Palmer, and a handful more — as war is declared.  We watch an intense and violent sequence of trench warfare, as one of the Scotsmen (William) falls dead in no man’s land next to his weeping brother.  And then it’s Christmas Eve, and something wondrous happens.

The poster for Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) depicts the three commanding officers of the French, German, and Scottish units walking together through the snow, while in the background we see a huge tableau of soliers on both sides in front of a French farmstead in the distance. Above them appears the movie's tagline: "Christmas Eve. 1914. On a World War I battlefield, a Momentous Event changed the lives of soldiers from France, Germany, and England. Based on a true story."

The film’s opening, just to clarify, isn’t just about establishing characters — it’s about the cruelty of war, in which everyone is participating. The film’s very first scene is an intense, almost nightmarish sequence in which we hear one child after another reciting angry, violent propaganda, first in French, then in English, then in German.  Fear and hatred is inculcated from the youngest possible age.  We have seen angry old men on every side, too: a bitter old Frenchman whose home is occupied and who clearly thinks of the Germans as barely human.  A furious Scottish officer who wants to bark the compassion out of every last soldier in his unit since he’s convinced it’ll get them killed.  A series of German officers (and a crown prince) for whom the violence of this war is remote and tactical, a string of words on a page but not a reality to face.  The prospect of understanding here is so hard to believe in.  But the vehicle for overcoming that disbelief is here also, in the form of music.

Music is used to great effect throughout the film, but I want to focus on a couple of uses early in the movie that are among the most moving, I think.  Sprink, the tenor, has been sought out by his lover, the Danish opera singer Anna Sorensen — she has played every card at her disposal to be reunited with him for one night, Christmas Eve, so that they can sing for the crown prince.  As they do so, we see the agony here — her music is undimmed, but he is broken by his experiences at the front, and chokes at first on the words.  It’s only when she turns towards him, and he towards her, that all is resolved: he does not know how to find himself in this music any longer, but he can find himself in her.  And the song they sing, “Bist du bei mir”, is a song whose German lyrics say that death is welcome if we can face it hand in hand with the one we love.  It’s poignant and heartbreaking…and we see it move not just their German audience, but the French couple downstairs.  Music can cross such a boundary.  And then, in the film’s most indelibly beautiful sequence, music crosses the boundary of the war itself: Sprink takes Sorensen to the front with him to sing with his men.  The Germans hear the Scottish bagpipers playing some song they don’t know, and it connects with them somehow.  So, when the bagpipes silence for a moment, Sprink starts to sing the German carol he knows the men on both sides will know — Stille Nacht.  As he sings, suddenly there’s a sound drifting over to him — Father Palmer playing along with Sprink on the bagpipes, and Sprink rises like some kind of angel.  He climbs above the top of the trenches, risking sniper fire from the other side, because his heart is touched by the humanity of the music they are making.  And then the old parson plays Adeste Fideles, and Sprink with a candlelit Christmas tree in one hand and his other hand extended in brotherhood, comes singing across no man’s land.  Even though you know going in that the whole point of the movie is the depiction of the Christmas truces, honestly, the moment is still breathtaking.  We have seen the violence of this war, and we know the risks men on both sides are taking here.  Their shared celebration of Christmas, in whatever language, rises above the level of that conflict, and brings them together.  It’s astonishingly moving.

After a momentary halt, perhaps driven by unease, a deal is struck by the commanding officers on all sides.  The soldiers cross to greet one another with wine and chocolate, to look at each other’s photographs of wives and girlfriends, to use what little they know of German or French or English to connect with each other.  An amusingly brisk argument emerges over the name of the cat who has been slipping back and forth between the German and French lines — to the Germans’ insistence that he’s Felix, Ponchel, the French batman who literally grew up down the road, huffily declares that he’s known this cat for years and his name is NESTOR.  The German lieutenant Horstmayer returns to the French lieutenant Audebert a photograph of his wife, and shares a memory of his honeymoon spent in the town the Frenchman is from.  The symbolism is everywhere here, as they shake hands and smile at one another in a field crowded with the frozen dead, men from both sides who have fallen in recent assaults.  The bells ring in the distance and they realize that churches on either side of the lines are marking midnight: it is Christmas Day.  And Father Palmer, in the Latin that would have been familiar, at least, to Catholics from all three countries, leads the soldiers in a mass held right there in no man’s land, punctuated by Sorensen singing the Ave Maria she had been singing on a German stage the night the war broke out.  Not every man is interested in such things, to be sure, but we see men from every side (including one who, shortly thereafter, identifies himself as Jewish but still touched by the experience) in thoughtful, often tearful prayer.  They look back at one another, as they part afterwards, with glances that suggest real understanding.  They have found kinship where they did not expect to find it, mediated by a holiday all of them were feeling deeply in their hearts that night.

That might seem like I’m giving this whole movie away, but I promise, I’m not.  There’s a lot more to unfold here, both in terms of what kinds of understandings the soldiers on both sides try to arrive at, and in terms of the consequences for soldiers on both sides after the truce is done.  Some powerful moments, including at least one shocking act of violence, remain ahead of you after this midnight mass and the sense of brotherhood it awakens.  In all honesty, I’d fault the pacing here a little — the film struggles a bit with timing and with how much it needs to communicate what’s about to happen.  But the sentimentality of the film, which some reviewers find excessive, I think suits the occasion: these truces really happened.  Soldiers on both sides of the war, that first Christmas, found it easier to understand each other than to go on hating each other.  It didn’t last, sadly.  By 1916 and 1917, no one was interested in such “understandings” any longer.  But I think that doesn’t invalidate the meaning of those connections made in 1914.  We’re capable of better things than we often display.

In all honesty, one of my complaints about the film is that it is too grim about humanity: a fair chunk of the final act consists of every unit’s superior officers imposing some fierce punishments on the men for their having betrayed their cause by having this truce.  Father Palmer, in particular, is excoriated by a furious bishop who puts the exclamation point on his castigation of Palmer by forcing him to listen to a bloodthirsty sermon to a new Scottish regiment that the bishop wants to make sure is ready to go out there and kill Germans without compunction.  But as a matter of fact, this isn’t at all the context of the Christmas truces: no unit or soldier, that I know of, was reprimanded for their participation in the truces, and tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides had participated.  The Pope himself had called for a truce (though neither side listened, not at a national level).  Yes, following that Christmas, clearer lines were drawn about the potential consequences for “fraternizing with the enemy”, but they postdated the truces.  In real life, these men were better understood by their commanding officers than the film shows us — perhaps because the film’s argument, about the gap between combatants who know the violence of war and the leaders for whom it is a game or an abstraction, needs things to be different.  And I have to share one detail that shows how the film’s director was thwarted from making it even more grisly: the aforementioned trench cat was based on a real cat who was caught carrying some papers that had been tied to it (sending messages across the lines).  That real cat was executed by firing squad for treason, in what I can only assume was one of the stupidest and most senselessly violent acts in a war notable for stupidity and senselessness — this occurring, by the way, not at all in connection with the Christmas truces.  Anyway, the director had planned to recreate this scene, but when the time came to film it, literally every extra on the “firing squad” flatly refused to take even pretend shots at the cat.  He was forced to rewrite the script, declaring that the cat had been imprisoned for treason.  So, animal lovers, you can watch this movie with that much comfort on board, at least.

I do have to emphasize, though — this is still an intense movie.  The violence and sexuality (in one scene between Sprink and Sorensen) are on the end of PG-13 that’s much closer to R.  It’s well made — it was, in fact, an Oscar nominee for Foreign Language Film — but I should make a particular note of the language, since the film is shot in the languages these folks would have spoken, and more than half of it is in French or German (with subtitles).  It’s a more challenging watch, then, than a lot of the films I’ve screened for this project.  But I think it’s one that deserves a wider audience than perhaps it gets, and I’m glad I’ve been able to share it with you here as the penultimate film in the 2024 Film for the Holidays season.

I Know That Face: Gary Lewis, who plays the Scottish priest, Father Palmer, here, also appears as the father in Billy Elliot, a film that would just qualify for this blog given a pivotal scene taking place at Christmas time.  And Sir Ian Richardson, who here plays the cruel bishop that sends Palmer out of the church with his lust for war and death, plays the actual character of Death (much nicer than this bishop) as well as voicing the narrator in the TV movie Hogfather, which is set in the Christmas-equivalent-feast of Hogswatch in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a film I really should watch next year to see how “holiday” it feels.

That Takes Me Back: There’s not much, thankfully, that here reminds me of anything from my own past, but I was taken back, surprisingly, by Ponchel’s windup alarm clock.  I had a clock that was probably very similar in technology on my nightstand as a kid, and the ringing of the bell that reminds him of coffee with his mother served to remind me of my own family home, growing up.  

I Understood That Reference: I had a slight sense of anticipation that there would be something here about Santa Claus, etc., but as I reflected on it, really the things that tied Christmas celebrations together across these countries were not shared media (if the Scots were thinking of Dickens, the Germans wouldn’t have been…and Pere Noel wasn’t the same person as Father Christmas or Sankt Nikolaus), but shared belief and a shared sense that Christmas ought to find them at home with loved ones.

Holiday Vibes (7/10): So, the trench warfare couldn’t possibly feel less like the holidays.  But I’m hard-pressed to identify a more powerfully evocative celebration of Christmas on film than the ways that music and prayer call these folks together across lines of nationality and hostility: if you want a reminder that, at least in some places and at some times, Christmas has genuinely called humans to remember that we ought to live at peace with one another, in defiance of a world that seeks to divide us, this movie hits it out of the park, and maintains a sense of optimism and brotherhood far longer than other approaches to the Christmas truces might have managed.  No offense to Bing and Danny celebrating Christmas Eve in a war zone at the start of White Christmas, but this one is both more believable and more moving.

Actual Quality (8.5/10): Yes, it’s a sentimental film, and in trying to get its messages across, it plays fast and loose (to take but one example, I’m not clear as to how the majority of German and Scottish Protestants in their ranks would have participated as comfortably in a Latin mass as that scene suggests), but the moments of transcendence are genuinely captivating.  The cast is talented, and the production’s setting is richly realized: we know they’re fighting through French farmland because we can see the remnants of a peacetime life around us everywhere, slowly being ground to dust by the machinery of war.  As I mention in the review, as it goes on, I think it struggles a little to maintain momentum, since the peaks it hits mid-film are so high, but the overall effect is still successful: this is a good movie.

Party Mood-Setter? If you’re doing last minute Christmas wrapping, this is not your jam: even when it’s uplifting or light-hearted, it’s by no means a casual watch.

Plucked Heart Strings? I mean, I am absolutely tearful at the scene where Sprink is singing as he crosses to the Scottish soldiers, Christmas tree in hand.  It’s gorgeous and hopeful and sad.  If you’re watching this and you’re remotely engaging with it, I can’t help but feel you’ll be moved, emotionally.

Recommended Frequency: Even the best holiday war movie is still, of course, a war movie.  I couldn’t watch this every year, and I wouldn’t plan to do so.  I think I’ve seen it three times in the last decade and that feels about right to me: often enough that I remember its message, and not so often that it’s grown too stale or comfortable.  It’s powerful any time of year, of course, so you wouldn’t have to rush to it, but if it didn’t make your list this December, I would certainly suggest you give it a try next year — in the right context and right frame of mind.

If you’re a Paramount+ subscriber — and this is, I think, the first time all December I’ve mentioned that platform — you’re in luck: this is your moment.  For the rest of us, it looks like this film comes with some premium add-on subscriptions on some platforms, and is widely rentable as a streaming title.  In fact, if you have access to a university library, check their streaming offerings: my own university has a streaming license for this movie via an academic film package we subscribe to.  There may be a Blu-ray version, but I’m not sure it’s available for North America: we do definitely have a DVD version, though, which in these times of picket lines at Amazon facilities I am suggesting you acquire via Barnes & Noble (or your preferred disc retailer).  And Worldcat knows of copies in at least 1,500 library systems: it’s well worth a look in your library catalog, then, if you’re interested in it but not enough to pay for it (which I understand).

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Review Essay

There was a time, I think, when it was countercultural to argue that the best adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was a version presented by the Muppets, but I see it often enough now that I think it’s become a kind of shared wisdom, at least among the Xennial generation I’m a part of.  Some of you arrive at this post already persuaded, but for the rest of you, I hope I can bring you at least closer to that perspective, since I fully agree with it.  In fact, I’d go a step further and say that anytime I meet someone who unabashedly loves this film, they’re always someone I feel an immediate kinship with, and I’ve not yet been disappointed — indeed, I’ve got a couple of friendships that were essentially cemented by the existence of this movie and our love for it.

There are some widely held and expressed sentiments about this film that I’m going to note as givens at the outset.  It is largely agreed that the genius of this film is located in Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, and specifically his consistently treating every Muppet on screen seriously — there is never a wink at us, or a sense that he’s hamming it up for the sake of an imagined children’s audience.  The songs in this musical version of the story are all written by the great Paul Williams, already beloved by Muppet fans for his composition of “Rainbow Connection” that provided the soaring emotional finale to The Muppet Movie and well established as a gifted songwriter for many films and bands in the 1970s and 1980s.  What’s more, Williams himself had undergone a redemptive awakening perhaps not that different from Scrooge’s — overcoming profound struggles with substance abuse in the years immediately before writing the songs for this film.  I think there’s no question that the maturity of adult experience people like Caine and Williams are bringing to a movie underpinned by the ageless antics of the Muppets creates the blend that those of us who love the film are looking for.  We want the fun of Rizzo shrieking “Light the lamp, not the rat! Light the LAMP, NOT THE RAT!!!” but we also want to hear the haunted fear in Scrooge’s voice as Christmas Past is about to show him a painful memory he doesn’t want to face.  We want a movie that trusts the child in us with adult regrets and adult redemption.

The poster for The Muppet Christmas Carol depicts Ebenezer Scrooge in a top hat with a cane, walking towards us down the middle of an empty snowy street, while above him in the snowy sky we can see multiple members of the Muppet cast, including Gonzo, Kermit, Fozzie, and Miss Piggy, smiling and looking in our direction.

I think an underrated element in this movie’s success is the decision to present the story via the medium of Gonzo as Charles Dickens.  Everyone has a favorite Muppet (other than Kermit, whom we all adore), and mine’s Gonzo, that delightful eccentric, so I’ll admit to some bias.  But the advantage of Gonzo’s Dickens, first of all, is the preservation of the narration in the original — he can address the audience directly, saying that Scrooge is as solitary as an oyster, or that as he enters the vision of his childhood he is conscious of a thousand odors.  These aren’t lines you hear in any other adaptation that I know of, but the script trusts that Gonzo’s evocative delivery (and the visuals on screen) will help convey the story’s original strangeness and lyricism even to an audience younger than it was ever intended to speak to.  I mean, look at that opening — after a little comic patter with Rizzo, when his friend tells him to tell the story, Gonzo looks right at us and says, “The Marleys were dead, to begin with.  As dead as a door-nail.”  Sure, we’ve doubled the Marleys for the sake of our Muppet casting.  But otherwise, this is where the original story begins — before we even hear that there’s such a person as Ebenezer Scrooge, we understand that this is a story about the dead….well, people who are dead, to begin with.  The resurrections in this story are at first ghostly, of course, when we meet Jacob and Robert Marley, but ultimately it is the person inside Ebenezer Scrooge who will be restored to life.

Another thing that allows the movie to hew closer to the original than you would expect is that the Muppets can leaven the harshness of some moments with comedy — I bet this drives some people crazy, but to me, it’s a wonderful balancing act.  When the rat bookkeepers respond to Scrooge’s threats about the coal by singing “Heat wave! This is my island, in the sun!”, sure, it’s an element of goofiness Dickens didn’t depict (and a line my family quotes to each other all through the year).  But it also lightens the mood enough that when Scrooge tells his “dear nephew” Fred that he thinks people who celebrate Christmas should be buried with a stake of holly through their hearts, Caine can play the vicious language of the novella straight.  Rizzo will comment on this occasionally, even, when it’s getting intense — I love the moment where he asks Gonzo, “Hey, that’s scary stuff, should we be worried about the kids in the audience?” only to be answered with, “Nah, this is culture.”  There’s where the winks belong — not in Scrooge’s performance, as Caine was wise enough to understand, but with the wisecracking Muppets, always a bit childlike to adults and always a bit adult to children, who are reassuring us that we can handle this.  And we can.

I know this is going to be too long, but I feel like I have to gush about how they present every element here.  The reveals of the Spirits are, at each turn, handled basically perfectly: the burst of divine light that terrifies Scrooge as Past appears, then the warmer, gentler light from the next room that lures and invites him to join the feast with Present, and lastly the overwhelming of the fog as it envelopes him and pulls him into the future he doesn’t want to face with Yet to Come.  The film does a lot with Dutch angles — presenting certain shots as askew or out of balance to convey the mood — that I think are really effective.  Scrooge is at a precarious angle as the Marleys arrive, but their distance shots are presented as flat and even: they are grounded, even as ethereal spirits, in a way he is not.  There’s a little bit askew in the initial visit to the Cratchits with Present, but the return to that street with Yet to Come is astonishingly out of balance, as befits a scene where Scrooge is about to confront the painful truths he’ll find there.

Ultimately this is an adaptation interested in love’s power.  Thankfully Disney finally fixed a long-standing problem, giving us back the film’s original cut with Belle’s sad song, “The Love is Gone”…sure, you can only watch it if you’re one of the people who know you need to go to Disney+ and then into “Extras” to pick the actual full version, but I know it and now so do you.  For so many years, Disney had shied away from the power of that song — it was seen as too sad, too heavy for a kids movie starring puppets.  Again, though, that’s its power: the song convicts Scrooge to a depth we might not have expected, and can be moved by.  He had love and he turned away from it — not just love, but generosity, given that Belle’s lyrics suggest that she’s releasing him to pursue the “adventure” that calls Scrooge with an “unknown voice”.  But Scrooge knows the truth — no adventure pulled him away from Belle, only the black hole of selfishness and greed that has pulled him away from all human contact.  When the young Scrooge turns and abandons her there on the bridge, Caine’s older Scrooge steps in his place, and it’s heartbreaking to hear him doubling her vocals in that final verse — is he saying the things he knew even then?  Or is he finally discovering who she was, and who he was, in listening to her at last?  Regardless, it seems to unlock something in him that the movie explores more deeply thereafter: if, as Present tells him, wherever you find love it feels like Christmas, perhaps this explains why Scrooge has not been able to understand Christmas (or love) all these years.  He’s cut himself off from that kind of experience, and he’s awakened to it most by Tiny Tim, a child laboring under heavier burdens than Scrooge has known, but someone who has a peace Scrooge has never found before.  Tim sings about the love he sees around him, and his openness to that loving world, and it makes Scrooge aware of the path he’s finally able to choose.  And Scrooge’s ultimate acceptance of love, and willingness to show love, is why we need “The Love is Gone” in the movie, because when in the final scene it is reimagined and offered to us in a new light, we hear “The Love We’ve Found” sung by the whole cast — the melody that had been an expression of loss and grief is now also the melody of light and peace.

I Know That Face: Steven Mackintosh, who plays Scrooge’s “dear nephew” Fred here, plays the supporting role of Henry in Lost Christmas, a film in which Eddie Izzard portrays a mysterious man who has some kind of quasi-magical power to find missing things.  Michael Caine, who of course is this movie’s Ebenezer Scrooge, plays quite a different role as Elliot, an unfaithful husband, in Hannah and Her Sisters, a film that is deeply tied to two Thanksgiving celebrations.  And you may be familiar with a number of members of our main cast from other holiday media: Kermit the Frog who here plays Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy who plays his wife Emily Cratchit, Fozzie Bear who here plays Fozziwig, and many of the other Muppet supporting cast members, have appeared in such works of holiday media as John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together, It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, and Lady Gaga & the Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: Again, what I find enriching about this adaptation of the original novella is how much of the language it preserves, including turns of phrase that you’d think would be too archaic to work for a modern audience.  But from Gonzo’s opening lines about the Marleys to his final comment about Scrooge having become “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew,” the production commits to it.  And I’ll call out one very particular element present here that you might not expect from the novella — it is in fact true to the original that, when Christmas Past leaps from one point early in Scrooge’s schooling to a later Christmas, Scrooge literally watches the room crumble and decay around him at high speed, so the comical entropy bursting around Gonzo and Rizzo (including the loss of Shakespeare’s nose) is in fact totally on point.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: I appreciate the emotion this production applies to Scrooge’s encounter with his younger self, but I do wish it had kept in his conversation with Fan, his sister, since I do think that adds a lot to the importance of his relationship to Fred.  And while I love the Christmas Present sequences we do get, I do think there’s something lost in the production skipping the more aggressive travelogue as Scrooge is taken to all sorts of heartwarming Christmas scenes.  

Christmas Carol Vibes (9.5/10): I know, I know, Charles Dickens didn’t envision Bob Cratchit as a talking frog, but let’s face it, this film does an impressive job of presenting us a more-vivid-than-life Victorian London, with some pretty incredible costuming for all cast members (I love Rizzo’s outfit, and frankly, young adult Scrooge is a cad to Belle but that coat he’s wearing is phenomenal).  The commitment to the use of Dickens’s language is high, and Caine’s performance as Scrooge in particular is so committed that I think there’s no question that the themes Dickens wanted to explore are largely present here.  It’s very hard to get a 10 here just because the original novella is so distinctive — I don’t think I can imagine the Muppets successfully portraying Ignorance and Want at the end of the Christmas Present sequence, and I don’t blame them therefore for not attempting it — but this makes me think about the Dickens story at great length.

Actual Quality (10/10): Look, this is subjective, but I promise, I’ve at least been systematic about it.  There’s a website called Flickchart that just shows you two movies and asks you to pick which one you prefer, and it keeps track over time.  Over the years, I have rated my preferences for 1,085 movies at Flickchart.  The Muppet Christmas Carol ranks 4th on my all time list.  So, I can’t possibly imagine what it’s like not to love this movie.  Every inch of it fills me with positive emotions, I love every single casting decision, I can sing along with every word on the soundtrack album (which has a couple of songs that didn’t make the film), and I and my wife quote this film at each other basically all year long.  I think it’s the best Muppet movie ever made and it might also be the best holiday movie ever made, and it’s certainly such a good combination of the two that I love it unrelentingly.  If you don’t feel the same way, well, I’m glad you came along for the ride anyway!

Scrooge? There are a lot of successful versions of Ebenezer Scrooge, but I do feel like Michael Caine is probably my favorite.  When we first meet him, he’s largely filmed from a Muppet eye level, which makes Scrooge loom — he’s ominous here, and imposing.  Caine is just old enough to feel like a man full of regrets but still young enough to have a great deal of vitality.  He’s talked in interviews about trying to base his portrayal in Wall Street tycoon types, and that’s the right energy: he reminds us of the kind of rich man we see at work in society around us, and that’s what Scrooge is meant to do.  And I have to emphasize how sensitively I think the production draws out the emotions in Scrooge’s story.  For instance, it might be easy to miss it, but in the sequence at his countinghouse, Scrooge really loses it at one point.  Fred’s talk of falling in love seems to have awoken Scrooge’s most desperate anger — an acting/directing decision that makes perfect sense given Scrooge’s painful memories of all he lost with Belle — and Scrooge tries to rip Fred’s wreath apart before throwing it violently at the little caroler.  Watch Caine’s expression and body language in the moment just afterwards: his Scrooge seems to feel awkward about having lost control, even regretful, as though he is becoming aware that there’s this rage in him he doesn’t really understand.  Shortly afterwards, when he extends the tiny generosity to his staff of giving them Christmas Day off, they burst forth in gratitude to him, and it makes him so angry he shouts furiously at them to stop it.  He’s someone who is pained by love, not comforted by it, and his only way to handle it is to lash out to keep the world at bay.  It’s a lovely level of nuance to add to the arc Scrooge takes in this story, giving us this insight into his character from early on.

Supporting Cast? Gosh, I love this film.  Okay, so, to be more precise, I think Kermit as Cratchit is such perfect casting: it was inevitable, sure, but that doesn’t diminish how well it works.  The “One More Sleep Til Christmas” number (paired with the penguins’ skating party) is so perfect, pairing the childllike enthusiasm and the childlike innocent hope of Cratchit in a way that really warms the film after Scrooge’s relentless bitterness.  Kermit singing that last verse and then the beautiful shot of him at full height, looking up at the night sky, makes me misty-eyed every time.  I’ve already talked about Gonzo, but let’s give it up for Rizzo — it’s hard to be comic relief for Gonzo the Great, who is already comedy gold, but Rizzo takes the chaos up to the next level, eating apples to drive up scarcity, screaming in terror as they arc through the sky (and through the timespace continuum), cracking wise to Mr. Dickens about literature.  If I had a nickel for every time my wife or I said the phrase, “well, hoity-toity Mr. Godlike Smartypants,” I wouldn’t be rich but I’d be surprisingly well off.  And the humans are no slouches here: I love the good cheer and the cheeky grin of Steven Mackintosh as Fred, and his young wife Clara as portrayed by Robin Weaver does a lot in a little time.  I am always astonished to be reminded that the actress playing Belle, Meredith Braun, had essentially no screen acting career (one TV movie and four individual episodes in television series over the course of 26 years).  She was an accomplished stage actress, with several notable credits on the West End, so it’s not shocking that she’s great, but again, much like Robin Weaver’s performance, I think what’s remarkable here is just how much she does with almost no time at all.  She and Caine, between them, make us believe he’s still haunted by her, and that’s a real achievement.  And because if I don’t mention her she would karate chop me through a brick wall, let me just say that while Miss Piggy’s Emily Cratchit is, assuredly, more aggro and sassy than anything envisioned by Charles Dickens, that energy brings a lot of helpful spice to a household that might (between Bob’s essential sweetness and Tiny Tim’s near saintly demeanor) be otherwise too cloying.

Recommended Frequency? If my family watches only two films between Thanksgiving and Christmas, The Muppet Christmas Carol is going to be one of them…and honestly, we might watch it twice before watching most other holiday films once.  I think if you’ve never seen it you have to try it, and if it’s been a while you should give it another go.  It’s a wonderful adaptation and well worth your time.

Okay, so, again, the way you’re going to watch this is to go to Disney+, but you’re not playing the standard version there: you’ve got to select “Extras” and pick the full-length version from that menu, since otherwise you miss out on Belle’s big song.  There are people getting ready to write comments right now about how the movie in fact works better without the song, and I know who you are, folks, and you are wrong about this.  Lovely people, but wrong.  You can rent the movie from lots of places online if you’re not a Disney+ subscriber, but I’ve got to warn you: as far as I know, you will be renting the version of the movie without Belle’s song.  The only way to get the full version of the movie on disc is to buy the DVD from 2005 (“Kermit’s 50th Anniversary Edition”) and NOT the Blu-ray from 2012, which is a real failure on Disney’s part — come on, folks, re-release the Blu-ray with the complete version and take my money.  Anyway, Barnes & Noble will sell you the 50th Anniversary Edition on DVD, which is good, but it’s not remastered like the Disney+ version is.  And of course it’ll be a real crapshoot with library copies to see what you get, but any version of this movie is better than not seeing it at all: Worldcat says over 2,000 libraries carry a copy.  Good luck!

It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947)

Review Essay

There’s a way in which It Happened on 5th Avenue is just about the perfect distillation of so many elements in the holiday genre I’ve been thinking about all month long (as have you, if you’ve been along for the ride here, and thank you for your readership if so).  This is a midcentury movie set in bustling New York City (like Remember the Night or Beyond Tomorrow) featuring a romance with a semi-painful age gap (like Bell, Book and Candle or, let’s face it folks, White Christmas if we think too long about Bing and Rosemary).  The acting is generally hammy (see half the films I’ve covered) and the actual amount of Christmas content is surprisingly small for a movie that shows up this often on lists of forgotten holiday “classics” (again, see half the films I’ve covered).  What’s distinctive, here, then — distinctive enough that I would want to write about it?  Well, to me, this may be one of the movies that has the most capacity for moral conscience…but it loses its nerve a little bit, and I think that’s interesting.  In that way, I think It Happened sidles up next to works like Tokyo Godfathers or any good adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and I am interested in the ways it can’t quite pull off those moves.

I’ll start by laying out the movie’s essential premise: everything revolves around the fact that Michael O’Connor, “the second richest man in the world”, every year leaves his opulent New York mansion behind for an estate in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia for a solid four months and everyone in the world knows it.  This means that an enterprising yet sweet-tempered old street bum named McKeever can slip in with his adorable dog via the coal chute and live like a king for four months, as long as he’s not caught by the nightly patrolmen.  It means that when McKeever meets a down-on-his-luck veteran, Jim Bullock, he can afford the compassion of taking him in and lending him one of the house’s umpteen bedrooms.  It means that when O’Connor’s scallywag daughter Trudy runs away from her finishing school, she can expect to slip into an empty mansion to get her things…and that, when caught by McKeever and Jim, she can pretend to be an innocent farm girl all alone in a big city and in need of lodging (in part to see if she can win Jim’s affections).  It means that when Jim meets some old friends from his Army days…well, maybe you get the picture.  We can pack a LOT of humans into this mansion, and since Michael isn’t coming home, we’re gonna.  Except that Michael does come home.

The poster for the movie "It Happened on 5th Avenue" offers two vignettes with taglines: on the left, Jim hugs Trudy while she kisses his cheek beneath the tag "A guy with 50 bucks meets a gal with 50 million!" And on the right, McKeever stands proudly in a top hat and long underwear next to a scowling "Mike" holding a dog, under the tag "The world's second richest man changes places with a hobo!"

When I say that this movie has the capacity for moral conscience, I mean it — I think the underlying ideas here are honestly a lot deeper than the Jim and Trudy rom-com the film leans into becoming.  This movie was nominated for an Oscar for its story, an award they only handed out for a few years in the 1940s — actually, it loses out to another holiday film in Miracle on 34th Street — which I honestly think it halfway deserves.  The politics of the story it’s telling are pretty stark — Jim’s a veteran but he’s being made homeless by the wealthy O’Connor.  It’s nothing personal — O’Connor is just tearing down old, cheap housing to build some incredible skyscraper that won’t have any room in it for the likes of Jim.  The movie’s pretty clear about the dire straits here, too — Jim’s terrible apartment, which he attempts to defend from the Bekins movers and the cops, is a testament to how little he has.  He winds up sleeping on a park bench.  Later on, but still early in the story, Jim runs into two old Army buddies — their wives and children are traveling with them as they sleep in their station wagon on the streets of New York City.  The only apartment they can find refuses to rent to anyone with children, which is an astonishing policy to have here, two years into the baby boom, but I bet it wasn’t unheard of in the 1940s, which is not exactly a decade known for its progressive civil rights.  All of these people are scrambling to find a home for themselves while billionaire Michael O’Connor leaves a huge piece of New York real estate, full of enough bedrooms to house a hundred people, totally empty through the bitter cold of a New York winter.  In the hands of a Satoshi Kon or a Todd Haynes, I think this could have become a really searing look at the values of a society that creates such profound inequalities and treats them as normal.

The way the film loses its nerve, unfortunately, is by bringing Michael O’Connor into the romantic comedy as a potential foil — his return home (in disguise) allows us to watch him sputter as a young woman hangs her baby’s laundry in the parlor to dry or as McKeever doles out food from O’Connor’s pantry with lavish generosity.  Michael, as “Mike”, is treated pretty discourteously by most of the main cast, generally because they can’t understand why this old drifter is so sour-faced and grim about the prospect of free lodging and therefore treat him as someone who needs a bit of riling up.  I can’t deny that there’s a laugh or two to be had in all this, but it totally defangs the situation — O’Connor won’t ever be confronted about the injustice of leaving these people on the street because he’s too busy getting embroiled in more than one kind of romantic subplot.  The movie ultimately, I think, believes it can tell a Scrooge story here with O’Connor, and to the extent it does, I do like it — there’s a sense in which his heart grows three sizes in close proximity to Christmas, and ultimately he decides to look with kindness on the folks we’ve met.  I just rankle a little at the fact that O’Connor’s open heart seems limited to things like letting his daughter run her own life or being gracious to McKeever — New York City is full of McKeevers, not to mention full of young women down on their luck in the real ways that rich, spoiled Trudy O’Connor was only pretending to be.  A more fully rehabilitated Michael O’Connor could have taken responsibility on a larger scale for them — Scrooge was a wealthy moneylender, but he wasn’t richer than God, as O’Connor is presented as being here.  If you’ve decided to write a script featuring Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg as a character who’s about to reform, I think you’re obligated to talk about what someone that incredibly, astoundingly moneyed could really do for the sake of humanity.

I should move away from criticizing the film for what it doesn’t do, though, and address what it does.  There are some fun and sweet moments in the movie, but I have to say, I spend a little too much time rolling my eyes: a lot of the actors are a little overmatched by what’s being asked of them, and the result is that they recite the script more than they act it.  When a character actor as experienced as Victor Moore (McKeever) is reduced to saying things like, “Well, I feel I must admit the truth to you although I had hoped to avoid it,” I become conscious, at least, of how a movie with more confidence in its cast would have simply had him admit the truth in a way that conveyed reluctance.  You know, by acting?  With apologies to Moore and the rest of the cast, I find their fumbling takes me out of the experience a little.  And while I’ve critiqued plenty of midcentury films for their gender politics, it does feel particularly rough here, with a lot of weird off-hand remarks from Jim especially that grate more than a little — I’m not sure if it felt clever in 1947 to make jokes about domestic abuse to the teenage girl you’ve just met, but it does not feel clever to me now.  His relationship to Trudy, too, feels odd — in real life, Don DeFore is only about 33-34 here, and Gale Storm is about 24-25.  But Don looks and acts like he’s easily 40, an impression reinforced by some of the writing for his lines, and Gale’s being made up and costumed to look a lot closer to 17 — the net effect is weird, and when the script keeps having Jim put his arm around Trudy while Trudy complains to other characters that “he barely knows I exist” and asking “how can I get him to notice me” the whole enterprise feels a lot creepier than I’d like it to.

I watch this movie, though — for lots of reasons.  For McKeever and his little dog.  For the admittedly funny reactions of “Mike” as he watches his swank New York society house descend into tenement-style chaos.  For the optimism and energy of immediately post-war New York, and the sense from basically everybody on screen that big things are possible and that America may figure out every problem the world has without too much trouble.  Even the corny writing and slightly hammy acting feels safe and inviting (when it’s not weird about gender issues), like I’m sitting with my grandparents watching some old TV program they like.  The Christmas Eve celebration we get on screen really does feel like a found family, even if most of the characters in attendance are paper thin.  It Happened on 5th Avenue disappeared from the public eye for a long stretch of my childhood and early adulthood, so I didn’t know it at all until a few years ago, but I’m glad it’s resurfaced.  I just think the collection of ideas this script contained from the beginning is deserving of a stronger film and a better guiding principle to help this particular plane land.

I Know That Face:  Edward Brophy, who plays Patrolman Felton, had previously appeared as Morelli in The Thin Man, another one of those movies that’s got enough Christmas in it to make a list of holiday films but is also not really a holiday film by a lot of people’s standards.  Florence Auer, who’s briefly on screen as Miss Parker, the headmistress at the school Trudy runs away from, later appears as the unimaginatively named Third Lady in The Bishop’s Wife, a better late 1940s holiday movie than this one, in my opinion, though it’s probably no less weird.  And Charles Ruggles (who here plays the industrial titan, Michael O’Connor and whom we’re likeliest to know as the crusty yet twinkly-eyed grandfather in The Parent Trap) appears in a couple of holiday TV movies in the 1950s; he’s the Mayor in Once Upon a Christmas Time, and he’s Horace Bogardus in The Bells of St. Mary’s (the TV movie version, though, as I said), neither of which I can find anywhere to view, on stream or on disc.

That Takes Me Back: The idea that a music store would hire an enthusiastic and attractive young person to play the piano and sing in order to help sell sheet music is so fantastically old-fashioned, I can hardly believe it was a job even in 1947.  This movie also takes place in an era when outrageously rich people still had consciences, if you can imagine such a world.

I Understood That Reference: If there’s a reference here to another work of holiday media, it slipped by me.

Holiday Vibes (5/10): There’s a lot of busy energy in this movie as the various layers overlap, and it’s hard for me to gauge afterwards how much of the holidays we really got.  I think the movie’s reputation in this category is bolstered by having a couple of big moments take place at the mansion’s Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve celebrations — there’s no question that the gaggle of people living there by that point in the story adds to the sense of festivity, too.  And I never know how much to lean on the “vibes” part of this section, but as I noted initially, this movie feels a lot like a lot of other movies in the loosely understood holiday genre: it will make you think of them often, and that boosts this score a point or two, I think.

Actual Quality (6/10): It Happened on 5th Avenue is an expensive bid for respectability from a low-budget film studio that wanted to rebrand itself, and I think it kind of shows.  Despite their dropping about ten times as much cash on this motion picture as they’d been accustomed to spending, I think there are limits to what everyone involved here could really pull off, artistically — the two romantic leads, DeFore and Storm, would go on to find their particular talents a lot better suited to the small screen than the silver screen, and everything else about the film is, to me, suggestive of a production team that was hoping to mimic the holiday classics of this decade rather than say something authentic of their own.  There are whole scenes I couldn’t tell you the point of, and the longer the movie runs, the less invested I become in many of its characters and their lives, which is the opposite of what ought to happen.  Maybe that’s too harsh: I do enjoy some key performances and themes in this film.  It’s no Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (or Jack Frost, for that matter).  Ultimately, though, I want to spend my 1940s holiday rom-com time with other films more than with this one…your mileage may, of course, vary!

Party Mood-Setter? The complicated plot here doesn’t really lend itself to inattentiveness, but I do think that if you’re in some cookie baking or wrapping marathon and you’ve already gone to a couple of ‘40s classics and just want to maintain that feeling in the background, it would accomplish that.  I’d steer you elsewhere, though.

Plucked Heart Strings? The only person who really gets my emotional investment here is McKeever, the best reason to watch this film.  Victor Moore, who plays the role of the aging hobo taking occupancy of the O’Connor estate, had been a comic star on the Broadway stage in the 1920s and 1930s (as well as getting at least a little screen time with some big stars in both the silent and talkie eras), and he imbues McKeever with a sweetness and an optimism that saves the movie for me from some of its less successful dialogue and plot contrivances.  I’m still not getting choked up about anything related to him in particular, but he’ll put a smile on your face, I can almost guarantee it.

Recommended Frequency: As you can by now tell from the roster here at Film for the Holidays, I’m a sucker for 1940s holiday movies, both classic and less-so.  If you’re in that same boat with me, yes, you should watch this at least once: good and bad, it evokes that historical moment and the beats of that particular kind of romantic comedy enough that it’s interesting to connect it to whichever others are your favorites.  Beyond that, I really can’t project how often you would return — I think I’ve watched it three times in six years, and at this point I’ve gotten about all the fun out of it I want to have.  I will come back to it someday for McKeever, but maybe not for many years, I suspect.

If you’re someone who wants to see the unimaginatively titled It Happened on 5th Avenue for yourself, Tubi and Plex are happy to give you ad-supported free access to the film, as is Sling TV, allegedly. Hulu and YouTube both identify it as available via some premium add-on subscription tier, and it’s rentable from all the places you might think to rent a streaming movie.  Barnes & Noble will gladly sell you the film on Blu-ray or DVD (as will Amazon, but this union household wouldn’t recommend crossing a picket line, and it’s looking like there are quite a few of those around Amazon facilities this December).  And Worldcat, of course, will remind you to check your public library for this movie on disc, since it’s available from several hundred library systems, according to their records.

Carol (2015)

Review Essay

One thing I’ve enjoyed about this blog project this year — along with getting to share things with you, and hear some of your comments back — is that I’ve tried to push myself to watch a wider range of movies than I normally would have watched.  Sure, there’s lots of romantic comedies in the list, since that’s such a dominant element in the holiday genre (such as it is), but it’s been interesting to see the other uses Christmas can be put to.  That’s certainly true of Carol, which I think is arguably the best film I watched for this project on an artistic level while also not being the kind of movie I normally think of this time of year at all.

Carol begins in medias res: we know that a slightly older woman named Carol is at a table with a young woman named Therese, and that there’s something between them that feels tightly wound, and somehow also fragile.  A young man disrupts whatever their conversation had been, and they part, but the camera work and the editing helps emphasize for us that Therese is in a reverie, pulling her attention away from those around her and into the memories of meeting and knowing Carol.  There’s no easy way to summarize this, so I’m going to miss a lot in this initial stage setting in saying simply that Therese is a shopgirl who met Carol, a wealthy mother looking for a Christmas gift for her child.  It’s the 1950s — Christmas 1952, if I’m not mistaken — and for that reason it’s hard at first to know….are these women flirting with each other, or is this just awkward small talk?  But then the film pursues their relationship and slowly opens up to us that these are in fact two lesbians — one of them out to a handful of people in her life, the other maybe not even fully out to herself yet.  And, in that historical moment, this is incredibly precarious — Therese risks the relationships she has already built in her life (including a boyfriend).  Carol risks her ability to even see her child, let alone act as her child’s parent.  They run the risks anyway.

The poster for the movie "Carol" primarily features the two major actors -- in the top half, we see a partial view of Cate Blanchett's head and face in profile as Carol, and in the bottom half, we see a partial view of Rooney Mara's head and face in profile as Therese.

So much of the movie is about the question of whether a woman gets to have an identity that is her own: from the beginning, we watch Therese disappearing, whether under an obligatory Santa hat at work or into the vacant stare of dissociation I see as she tries to reckon with a boyfriend, Richard, who has big plans for her that don’t inspire her at all.  Carol lives a little larger, but she’s constantly forced to push back — when her estranged husband, Harge, makes a reference to “Cy Harrison’s wife” she almost instinctively mutters “Jeannette” as if to say, “she doesn’t belong to Cy, or anybody else, you know”.  Speaking of names, Therese is almost always referred to by her boyfriend as “Terry” — it’s only with Carol that she can count on hearing her real name, almost as though she’s not herself unless she’s with Carol.

And the film is also about the journey to find a space where you can be yourself.  The journey is internal, sure, but there’s a pretty substantial journey undertaken in the film’s second act, as Carol and Therese drive west, escaping into the American interior like so many people in fact and in fiction, over the years.  As they travel — initially as innocently as any two friends, but gradually opening up to the possibility of intimacy — the world slips by them and it’s maybe a little reminiscent of Remember the Night, except here both women are running away from their homes and not towards them.  What will redefine them is not the loving context of family and community, but individuality and agency.  The scene in which they finally have sex — and to be totally clear with you, dear reader, this is very explicit sex as you would expect from an R-rated drama, in case that’s not your holiday movie style — comes as a relief because you get the sense that you’re finally watching these people be authentic and unguarded.  It’s a haunted sex scene, to be clear, because even as they’re in each other’s arms, we know that neither the 1950s nor the legal system adjudicating whether or not Carol gets to have contact with her daughter are going to let this be as easy as it feels in that moment.  The relief they’re feeling is impermanent, and they know it; so do we.

The journey takes place at Christmas, and that’s where this film intersects with this blog.  Sure, it qualifies the moment Therese puts on a Santa hat at Frankenberg’s, but there’s more than that in the use of this holiday.  Carol and Therese’s first conversation deals with Christmas, at least a little — Carol loves it but also feels incapable, referencing how she always overcooks the turkey.  I think the movie, as it unfolds, makes it clear that the turkey line is just cover for Carol’s fears of being inadequate as a mother (and perhaps as a wife): that the reason Christmas doesn’t achieve that looked-for perfection is because of something she’s getting wrong as a homemaker.  Later, Carol fends off multiple invitations to friends at Christmas, as it becomes clearer that she needs her own space…a space into which she’s going to bring Therese, though.  Christmas works here as a catalyst for action — Harge and Carol, for instance, fight about Christmas but it’s not about Christmas, of course, any more than most fights at Christmas are about the holiday.  Christmas, meanwhile, threatens Therese a little, since she realizes she’s about to be treated as “family” by Richard’s family, and she doesn’t want to feel the inevitability of that — not yet and maybe not ever.  She’d probably have run off with Carol any day of any week, but it being Christmas is even more of an inducement for her.

So much depends, in a film this contained and zoomed in, on the performances of the primary actors, since there are no huge set pieces here, no sweeping plot devices, to distract us.  And the film has been wisely entrusted to Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese.  Carol is the most impossible of the roles — a woman established enough in a comfortable life to be proud and also wounded enough by the confines of that life to be vulnerable.  We have to believe her when, on more than one occasion, she chooses someone else’s happiness over her own, whether or not she’s right about them — whether or not they deserve it.  That Blanchett manages it is no surprise to anyone who’s ever seen her in anything, of course: I remember being blown away by her performance in Elizabeth, watching that movie on VHS from a Canadian video store back in grad school (talk about nostalgia), and the many times I’ve seen her since, she’s been uniformly wonderful (even in otherwise mediocre material).  But I think there’s still something especially wonderful about her work in Carol, since there’s absolutely no special effects here to enhance her performance, and she has to face some tough emotions pretty directly on screen: it works.  Mara’s task as Therese is to be believable as a young woman discovering that her ambiguity about her life isn’t some fundamental personality trait, but rather a reaction to trying to live as someone other than who she is.  Her awakening to herself and to Carol is a liberation, but it’s navigated in the slow and sometimes difficult way that such journeys of self-discovery often take.  And Mara’s really successful, I think, at not letting her portrayal become too cloying — really, both she and Blanchett give us characters who have sides that are not easy to warm up to.  They’re not afraid to be human, and to invite our empathy without having to be saintly enough to earn it.

A lot happens in this film, and particularly in its final act, that I just have to leave to you as a viewer.  It’s too nuanced and powerful a movie to spoil, even though it’s also not really a movie with a plot that’s relying on twists or tricks to keep you hooked.  A lot of careful choices are made here by the director, by the actors, and by the screenwriter, that wring every drop of potential intensity out of the smallest interactions.  When characters are betrayed, it hits hard.  When they suffer or submit, it burdens me as an audience member.  And the ending I get is not at all what I expected or had thought I was hoping for, but the way it resolves ultimately feels perfect to me, almost inevitable.  There’s a sense of hope and of possibility, for me, that rounds out the subtle Christmastide feelings of the film into something that strikes the right emotional note.

I Know That Face: Jake Lacy, who here plays Therese’s unfortunate boyfriend Richard, appears as Joe in Love the Coopers, a film about a massive Christmas family reunion that was released the same fall as Carol.  Kevin Crowley, here playing Fred Haymes, Carol’s lawyer, appears as Liam in the TV movie Country Christmas Album which is exactly what it sounds like, and has a bit part as Dr. Franklin in another TV movie, The Christmas Spirit, about a woman in a coma who appears in spirit form to persuade her community to something something look there’s a lot of holiday movies and I have definitely not seen them all.  Sarah Paulson, here playing Carol’s devoted ex, Abby, has several holiday flicks under her belt: she stars as Emily in the Lifetime movie A Christmas Wedding, she plays Beth, the mother of a terminally ill 8 year old, in Hallmark’s November Christmas, and she is Grace Schwab in one of the segments of the anthology film New Year’s Eve.  And Cate Blanchett, starring here in the title role, was once the uncredited voice of a “Mysterious Woman” in Eyes Wide Shut, which is also a critically acclaimed adaptation of a mid-20th century written work that takes us to a series of New York City gatherings at Christmas time, and is far, far more sexually explicit than even Carol is.  I’m not saying it’ll never make the blog, but it’s not on the list for this year (or next, I think).

That Takes Me Back: I know this kind of shopping does still exist, but it’s been years since I engaged in the bustle of department store shopping at Christmas.  I enjoyed the throwback feeling of a big decorated showcase space and the busy energy of the retail floor.  Less appealing but certainly just as indicative of a bygone era was all the smoking indoors, all over the place, often in furs — the look and feel of the movie works with those 1950s symbols pretty successfully.  I am too young to really feel a connection to the idea of a shared phone in the apartment hallway, but it sure reminds me of shows and books I encountered, growing up, and just the idea of a phone being in a place, and needing to go to that place to use the phone, is nostalgic.  Oh, and in further technological notes, I’ll say that I do love a cash register that goes “ding” when the cashier pulls a lever, and I love anything called an “icebox,” especially one operated by a handle in the door.  

I Understood That Reference: There’s very little sense of holiday media here, but Carol promises her daughter at one point that she won’t let Santa’s elf give her daughter’s presents away to another girl.

Holiday Vibes (5/10): In the movie’s first half, there’s a fair amount of this — as mentioned, Santa hats on the department store employees and discussions about turkeys, and then there’s handwritten note tags on gifts and home decorations.  The use of seasonal colors, especially red, in the costuming is not at all subtle, and conveys a little about how the characters change (or don’t). By comparison with some films that are much more widely considered to be Christmas classics, honestly, this one holds up pretty well as committing to Christmas as a relevant setting for at least the movie’s initial work, even if the holiday recedes from view over time.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): This is a very, very good movie — Haynes is a gifted director and I love a Carter Burwell score, and the underlying story comes from an underappreciated and notable midcentury talent in the author Patricia Highsmith.  As I’ve mentioned, too, the acting performances are really extraordinarily good: the movie earned every Oscar nomination it got, and was probably robbed of more than one statuette.  Now, is it for you?  Dear reader, I can’t know that: some of us are up for intense, often sad R-rated romantic dramas at this time of year and others of us wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.  But if you think you might be in the former category, I really can’t say enough about how good a movie this is artistically.  It’s worth your time.

Party Mood-Setter?  If you’ve brought a shop clerk home and are hoping to take things “to the next level” then I guess so, but otherwise, haha, no of course not, this is an incredibly moody, melancholy, and sexual movie that isn’t going to pair very well with decorating the Christmas tree.

Plucked Heart Strings? You can’t help but feel emotionally connected to both Carol and Therese, even though the film’s management of itself is such that every emotion is somewhat muted, and I’d expect that most viewers won’t be reduced to tears.  I found myself still feeling the movie’s emotional landscape after it was over, but it never caught me so by surprise that I was choked up, except perhaps for a single moment near the very end.

Recommended Frequency: It’s a great movie and it has some really vivid holiday moments, but it’s also such an intense viewing experience that I don’t think I’ll be rushing back to it every year.  This is great film-making, though, with thoughtful acting and direction and writing and outstanding costuming by Sandy Powell (who has multiple Oscars) and a wonderful score by Carter Burwell (who SHOULD have multiple Oscars), and if anything I’ve said about it here makes it seem like something you’d enjoy, I think you should go for it.  Just go in knowing this isn’t about hot chocolate and mistletoe and Santa laughing like a bowl full of jelly — both the movie’s highs and lows are just working in an entirely different register than the typical holiday movie.

If you’d like to watch Carol, Netflix will show it to subscribers for free.  You can rent the title via streaming service from basically all the big ones, as usual, and Amazon will gladly sell it to you on disc (though if you’re anywhere that there are striking workers in its path, I encourage you not to cross those lines digitally, and to find the disc elsewhere, such as Barnes & Noble).  And I don’t know what it is about Carol, but this film is available in even more libraries than White Christmas — over two thousand of them, according to Worldcat, so check this one out on disc from your local library for free, and enjoy it with my compliments.