Tag: comedy

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Christmas (2019)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crowded Day (1954)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christmas Story (1983)

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scrooged (1988)

Review Essay:

On Sundays at FFTH, I take on adaptations of Charles Dickens’s classic novella, A Christmas Carol.  This year, as with last, I tried to bring in one adaptation of the novella that’s more daring (and diverts more from the original text) in an attempt to see what kinds of interesting art can be made from the underlying structure of the tale.  And much as with last year’s total failure (I found Ghosts of Girlfriends Past almost unendurably awful, as you can see from the review I’m linking to there), Scrooged just really, really doesn’t work for me.  It’s at least a little better in my eyes than the openly misogynistic romantic “comedy” I watched last year, but after multiple tries, I just can’t find much sympathy in me for this approach to the story.  Let’s see if I can unpack where I think it goes wrong.

The premise feels high-concept but workable: instead of withered London moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge, this is the story of a narcissistic creep named Frank Cross, a quintessentially American mid-level manager who aspires to TV executive stardom.  His big swing for the limelight is a star-studded live broadcast of A Christmas Carol, which he wants to make the television event of the century when it airs on Christmas Eve.  Instead, though, he is confronted by the dead form of his former employer, and as he tries to stumble his way through Christmas Eve at the TV studio, he keeps drifting in and out of a warped version of Scrooge’s experience, in which Spirits have been sent to visit and confront him.  The whole thing is bleak right up until it’s very, very sincere, a tonal shift that is just one factor in the film’s primary problem: it hasn’t figured out what kind of movie it intends to be, and that’s pretty important given the attempts it is making to simultaneously produce a fairly straightforward mimicry of the Dickens original while also kind of sending it up by escalating some elements to the level of parody.

The DVD cover for Scrooged features the manic face of Bill Murray, looking directly into your soul with eyes and mouth agape and an intensity that suggests he's just told what he believes to be the funniest joke in existence and he is willing you to laugh at it. Next to the yawning rictus of his unsettling mouth, Murray holds a cigar gingerly between two fingers, waiting for it to be lit by a match held in the skeletal hand of an unseen creature (who appears to be wearing a Santa Claus coat, judging by the cuff of the sleeve). In the background is an inexplicable full moon, looming above the New York City skyline.

At the beginning of the movie, though, I almost thought they had it worked out.  Cross and his lackeys are screening promos for various movies, and it’s clear: this is the Bah Humbug of 1980s America, in which Christmas is not dismissed, but rather it’s treated so cynically that all sincere sentiment in connection with the holiday has been eradicated.  What’s hard to take from the beginning, though, and never really gets calibrated successfully in my opinion, is the character of Frank Cross as played by Bill Murray: Murray, of course, is responsible for some truly remarkable and successful film performances, but he’s also an actor with a weirdly limited range, especially in the earlier stages of his career.  There’s no question that Cross as a character needs to be unpleasant—he’s Scrooge!—and in that sense, casting Murray to play this pompous, sardonic, condescending, panicky television executive can work, since he’s got the capacity to do that well.  Murray’s impulses as a comedian, though, undermine his performance here as an actor, since he trades in his opportunities to exhibit some kind of character growth for the chances to land quippy one-liners or the perfect smirk.  But it’s not just Bill’s fault: I think the screenplay is also so in love with the idea of all the jokes it can generate out of him in the lead role that it doesn’t give him much of a man to play even if he’d tried harder to do so.  I’ve enjoyed Murray in lots of films, even movies that count on a certain level of cringeworthiness to succeed (What About Bob?, anyone?), but I’ve watched Scrooged multiple times and I’ve never been able to invest myself at all in his performance.  There’s something desperate about it, like an actor who understands the film isn’t quite working while he’s making it, but he can’t figure out how to fix it from the inside.

I think that the film’s sense of humor overall is really where I consistently struggled to figure out what the filmmakers were trying to do.  A Christmas Carol definitely can be funny: Scrooge loves a good wisecrack, and many of the surrounding cast of characters are people in a light-hearted mood.  But the tone of Scrooged is so sour.  The character of Loudermilk is one example: he’s one of Cross’s underlings, who gets dressed down and then fired in the film’s opening minutes.  Thereafter, he keeps reappearing in the film, but almost always just so that there can be some gag in which he is mistreated again, often by Cross (directly or indirectly).  To me, there’s just no sympathy in the film for him: every single joke is punching down at a guy who exists only to be humiliated.  We’re supposed to laugh at how pathetic Loudermilk is, or at least the scenes are shot and edited like comedy sketches, rather than as haunting examples of the way Cross mistreats those under him.  Imagine if A Christmas Carol was designed so that, when Scrooge maliciously refuses coal to Bob Cratchit, we get a reaction shot of Bob turning blue that’s intended to make us laugh at how miserable he is.  Do they know what this story is about?  And Loudermilk’s not even the worst example of this: one of Cross’s many enemies is a woman from the network censorship office who is worried about the “family-friendly” nature of his crass, exploitative, live TV cavalcade, and she seems to exist in the story purely to be abused (often physically) for laughs like she’s one of the Three Stooges.  Except the Stooges are main characters and the audience is expected to root for them, whereas I can only describe the treatment of the network censor as accidentally misogynistic at best (and honestly, it doesn’t feel accidental to me).  The problem extends to the Spirits themselves, whose sense of humor is as mean-spirited as the rest of the movie’s: Christmas Past and Christmas Present are supposed to be here for Scrooge’s welfare, trying to wake in him a less callous and more humane understanding of himself.  I honestly don’t know what the heck the movie thinks it’s up to, but here, the Spirits are tormentors on a level that has nothing really to do with Dickens.  Christmas Past steals from Loudermilk for his own amusement—can we imagine a world in which one of the Spirits steals something from the Cratchits, as a joke at their expense?  Christmas Present seems to have been written as a woman who is simultaneously a sexually adventurous flirt with Cross, a hyperactive toddler he needs to manage, and a comically violent menace whose primary goal is to hurt Frank repeatedly…I have no clue why any of it is happening, other than that someone thought it would be funny.  If it makes you laugh, friend, I’m glad for you but also I don’t think I understand why.

Honestly, the humor is so bleak that I tried to construct an understanding of this movie as essentially a parody of A Christmas Carol.  I wouldn’t have much sympathy with the ethics of a film that thinks the Dickens classic is goody two-shoes nonsense, but I think I would at least find the motion picture interesting as a curiosity: can you persuade us that it’s dramatically satisfying to have an unrepentant Scrooge, surrounded by Spirits who are supposed to reform him but are having more fun being as gleefully mean as he is?  But that’s definitely not what this film is doing.  One reason is that they’ve cast the luminous Karen Allen, a woman who deserves SO much more than this screenplay is giving her, as Claire (the equivalent to Scrooge’s Belle), a dedicated social worker and professional bleeding heart.  It’s clear that the movie wants us to understand that she’s a good person and Frank needs to reform himself to get her back—a prospect as baffling and implausible as the primary relationship dynamic in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, sure, but it’s the obvious point of the movie nevertheless.  At this point, I think I’ve decided that any Christmas Carol adaptation that wants to give Scrooge romantic happiness at the end is likely doomed to failure: it just requires too forgiving a woman (or else too appealing a Scrooge), and it turns his reform into something he’s doing in order to win a prize rather than a genuine change of heart.  And as I alluded to earlier, this movie is going to end with a sincere (well, sincere except for a final few jokes they couldn’t stop themselves from adding in) expression of holiday sentiment and goodwill from Frank Cross to the world via television broadcast.  A rich and self-satisfied man with no previous holiday spirit to speak of will suddenly lecture millions of viewers at home about their own callousness in watching the TV program he himself created and shoved down their throats….okay, that part actually does seem true to life, let’s give it to the movie.  Anyway, my point is, Scrooged, in trying to be both a black comedy and a soaring ode to virtue, is a film at war with itself, and as a viewer, I wanted to surrender.

What goes well?  Like I said, I think the jokes in the opening scenes are mostly aimed right: the film’s mocking sensationalism and the exploitation of Christmas for media stardom and millions in profits, and I get why the initial pitch for this movie persuaded producers and talent that it could be a great update of A Christmas Carol.  Grace, Cross’s long-suffering servant and our closest Cratchit analogue, has a story with some heart, and my few glimpses of her with her family made me wish I was watching her story instead of Frank’s.  Although I think the Christmas Past spirit is very badly written as a character, at least some of that segment of the movie works, especially Cross’s memories of his relationship with Claire, which feel authentic enough that there’s some real emotion in the break-up, and you can see where a better kind of Frank once existed.  I do think that some of the scare tactics of the ghosts/spirits work effectively (even though—or maybe because—they are pretty disgusting, like the Marley equivalent’s disintegrating body).  And, though here I’m at odds with the motion picture itself, I kind of like the character of Bryce Cummings, an “L.A. slimeball” (to quote Frank) who’s here to threaten Cross’s hold on his job—the screenplay sees him as a villain because he’s Frank’s antagonist and needs to be humiliated in the final act in order to give Frank a happy ending.  But what I liked about Cummings is how mean he is to Frank—in a way, he’s revealing that Cross was never as good at being a big shot as he wanted to be, and given how horrifyingly Frank’s treated everyone else in his life, I loved seeing our Scrooge character squirm for once as someone being thwarted by his competition.  I’m not sure how the movie itself doesn’t get that Cummings isn’t the villain—Scrooge is his own villain.  Whatever process this screenplay went through, I feel sure that too many hands touched it, and the result is an incoherent mess.

In the end, I think part of what I respond to negatively in Scrooged is just that I live in a world run by Frank Crosses, where media moguls (and the ghouls they have made famous) dominate far too much of society, amusing themselves excessively at the expense of people they think of as extras.  If I’m going to see a story about a Frank Cross, I need it to contend with his monstrous capacity for harm in a way that I can make sense of.  The narrative presented by Scrooged, on the other hand, is a chaotic muddle—a film that thinks Frank is funny enough that we can’t help chuckling at his mistreatment of others, but also redeemable enough that he won’t even need to apologize for most of that in order to get us to forgive him.  It wants to satirize an industry that fills our screens with sex and violence and special effects…but one of the consequences of that is a film selling itself to us with a lot of those very elements.  And even the movie at its most noble remains confused: what is the lesson Frank Cross needed to learn?  (His “Marley”—a former network boss named Hayward—is confusing to me.  He arrives neither chained nor haunted by any specific misdeeds, telling Cross to avoid the fate he has suffered as a “worm feast”…but that’s nonsense, since nothing Cross does is going to let him avoid mortality, and the message of A Christmas Carol isn’t “avoid death at all costs” in any case.)  And when/how does Frank Cross learn whatever it is he learns in the noise and mayhem of the events he experiences?  I’m still not sure.  That’s probably one of the most damning reviews I can give of an adaptation of A Christmas Carol: I don’t understand how this Scrooge has been transformed. 

I Know That Face:  Bobcat Goldthwait, who appears here in the astonishingly ill-conceived role of Eliot Loudermilk, plays the role of the Narrator in 2005’s A Halfway House Christmas, which from what I’m seeing online looks like an equally ill-conceived television program.  Alfre Woodard, an iconic performer who’s mostly wasted here in the part of Grace Cooley (the Bob Cratchit analogue), appears later in her career as Wanda Dean, a drug-addicted mother rescued at Christmastime by a drag queen, in 2000’s Holiday Heart.  It will be not at all surprising that Bill Murray (who in Scrooged is of course Frank Cross, the Scrooge-equivalent) appears as himself in the TV special, A Very Murray Christmas, but it might surprise you that the bartender in that program is a role played by David Johansen, who had appeared alongside Murray here as the Ghost of Christmas Past.  And John Houseman, who appears here in his final credited role as a thinly fictionalized version of himself, narrating the live Scrooge television broadcast that Frank Cross is trying to produce, had appeared as Ephraim Adams, the imperious old choirmaster, in 1980’s A Christmas Without Snow.  Houseman also plays a small role—Mr. Wabash, a CIA officer—in 1973’s Three Days of the Condor, a relatively taut thriller that happens to be set around the Christmas holidays (a la Die Hard) and will probably at some point make it onto this blog.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present:  In fairness, we do get a very creepy undead Marley, and I think Yet to Come’s a good modern American version of the Spirit just in terms of character design.  The rest of the spirit work, as aforementioned, isn’t clicking for me, but I liked these elements and felt they captured something of the Dickens original.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent:  It’s surprising to me that nobody comes calling on Cross for donations, like the men who call on Scrooge in the original tale, and it is flat out weird that Marley isn’t burdened by chains or any other symbolism to communicate that he’s specifically suffering for his crimes against humanity.  Sure, Hayward mumbles something about how mankind should be his welfare, but it feels so tacked on to a scene that otherwise communicates nothing about the Hayward-Cross dynamic (as opposed to the depth of that Marley-Scrooge encounter) that I think the movie essentially whiffs on the dialogue itself.  Everything from the appearance in the film of Christmas Yet to Come through to the end credits is very different from the original story, and in a way that saps the story’s power, I think.

Christmas Carol Vibes (6/10): Starting with the title, there’s no way you’ll be confused about this being an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and given that Frank Cross is trying to produce a much more faithful (in some respects) live version of the story at his TV studio, we do get images of traditional costumes, etc.  Spirits are taking him to the past, present and future, and he becomes sympathetic to the unwell child of his employee.  You know, the pieces are here.  But also, this really doesn’t capture the right tone of the story at far too many points.  If you’re in the mood for A Christmas Carol, I’m not sure this one will resolve a big chunk of that need.

Actual Quality (5/10): There’s a lot of money and talent on the screen here, and at the right moments (a fair proportion of the interactions between Frank and Claire, anytime Grace is center stage, etc.) I could see there was a movie I kind of wanted to watch.  And then everything else happens, and makes me feel foolish for coming back to this film more than once, trying to understand a motion picture that clearly doesn’t understand itself.  It’s an interesting effort in some ways, but it’s also a failed effort, without question.

Scrooge?  Murray’s register as an actor is great in the right roles, but when the writing lets him down, at least in the 1980s I just think he didn’t have the tools it would have taken to escape the problem of being obviously and exhaustingly self-satisfied on screen.  It undermines both sides of the Scrooge experience, in my opinion, even though I’ll admit he persuades me that he is a person other people hate and might love to see dead.  And especially when it’s time to be the reformed Frank Cross, he’s still leaning so hard into this smug, condescending persona that it undermines most of his lines of dialogue in a way that maybe another actor could have sold me on.

Supporting Cast?  I wish there was more for Claire to do, since Karen Allen’s got a lot more range than what’s asked of her, to be a largely trodden-upon do-gooder who in the final scene seems almost like a woman relieved that her abusive boyfriend has forgiven her (rather than a woman who rightly ought to be receiving his apology and weighing whether to forgive HIM).  The Spirits are badly written and directed—I don’t blame David Johansen or Carol Kane, even though I think it’s also true that really they’d be poorly cast as better written versions of the Spirits in most adaptations since their comedic energy is hostile and aggressive in ways that would be hard to calibrate when it comes to this story.  

Recommended Frequency?  I have tried so many times to like this film, given how many talented actors are in it, and given my feeling that there’s got to be a way to tell a good modern American version of the story.  It’s better than last year’s entry (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past), but that bar was ludicrously low, and frankly, I think I’m done trying to understand or appreciate this movie.  Despite its own self-satisfaction at its big swoopy emotional ending, I think the choices of the film-makers end up creating a work that’s almost as sour and bitter as Ebenezer Scrooge.  If they understood how to make a movie that celebrated human connection, compassion, and care, they applied very little of that understanding to huge sections of Scrooged.  An unfortunate miss, and one I won’t be coming back to again.

You might feel very differently, of course, which I respect, so how might you watch Scrooged?  Well, if you subscribe to some of the slightly less well-known streamers—Paramount+, AMC+, MGM+, for instance—you can stream it for free, and you can rent it streaming from all the usual places.  It’s quite inexpensive at Barnes and Noble on disc, and some 1,500 libraries have it for checkout, according to Worldcat, if you’d like to try it without paying (a wise option, in my opinion).  For those of you still waiting for a good, straightforward adaptation of A Christmas Carol, hey—watch this space.  Next Sunday, I should have something for you.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Review Essay

Relationships to films are complicated—today’s entry, Christmas in Connecticut, being a helpful illustration in my own life—since so much depends not just on the contents of the movie itself but on who we are in the moment we’re watching, what we’re prepared to see in a work of art, and what expectations we bring to the experience.  I first watched this film years ago, and found it underwhelming at the time: I was just getting started on this fascination with holiday movies that led to the blog you’re reading, and I think the title (and some of the advance praise I’d read) made me think this would be an instant classic.  When it wasn’t, I set it on the heap of “fine, I guess” films, and I hadn’t re-examined that rating until my recent viewing.  To my pleasant surprise, I found myself really engaged by Christmas in Connecticut, and excited to share it with you all.  I can see both sides of this movie, that’s for sure, and I’ll try to make them both clear by the end.

The premise of the film is absolutely of its era—Jeff Jones, a sailor who survived the sinking of his destroyer, has gotten himself engaged to his nurse, which his buddy convinced him would secure Jeff better hospital food in recovery, and she thinks the only way to get him to want to settle down and get married for real is by having a real down home Christmas.  Her problem is that she and every other member of her social circle is living out of hotels and boarding houses as they contribute to the war effort, so she needs to borrow someone’s Christmas.  She calls in a favor, and Jeff’s signed up to be sent to the perfect celebration taking place on the idyllic Connecticut farm of nationally-famous homemaker Mrs. Elizabeth Lane, whose column about the lavish meals she cooks for her husband is a sensation from coast to coast.  The only problem?  There is no Elizabeth Lane—or rather, there is, but she’s a single gal in a Manhattan apartment who churns out bucolic fiction about a life she’s never lived, with the stories loosely based on a description of a Connecticut farm belonging to John Sloan, a suave architect whose marriage proposals she’s deflected countless times.  To save her job (and her editor’s), since their publisher has no idea her columns are a pack of lies, Lane agrees hastily to marry Sloan, and then fake her way through the perfect Christmas at a home she’s never seen, dealing out meals from a kitchen she has no ability to cook in.  As they arrive at the farmhouse, though, Lane’s not technically married to Sloan yet, which of course is going to create some complications of the heart when she gets a look at the grinning war hero she’s hosting for the holidays.

The poster for Christmas in Connecticut features, below the names of the three stars, a tiny image of Sydney Greenstreet looking down happily on a large central image of Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan cuddled up together on a rocking chair (she in his lap). All around them, small red stars bedazzle an otherwise mostly white background.

How well all this works for you is going to depend a lot on your interest in / patience with the particular tropes and style of a 1940s rom-com, an era and genre to which, as experienced readers of the blog will know, I’m pretty susceptible.  Since the first time I watched this movie, I’ve seen a lot more of them, and I think that’s a big factor in my warming up to this movie on a second viewing: I mean, Barbara Stanwyck’s a highlight of anything she’s in, and here she manages the quirky charm of a woman who plans to bluff her way to success with a pair of deuces in her hand just about perfectly.  Even in black and white, her Edith Head costumes are as striking as ever.  More surprising to me is how skillfully Dennis Morgan as war hero Jefferson Jones plays off of her—Morgan’s career was mostly made up of roles where he’s the likeable square who loses the girl to a slightly grittier star (like Humphrey Bogart), but the structure of the screenplay here allows him to play that same naive persona as the star.  In this film, Lane’s already got the attentions of the brandy-drinking sophisticate in John Sloan, but what warms her heart is the corn-fed friendliness of a Midwestern boy who cheerfully offers to bathe and diaper the baby (an infant on loan in a hasty arrangement that is definitely not going to backfire spectacularly on Elizabeth, who holds the child like it’s a radioactive parcel) and spends his after-dinner energy sitting at the piano, warbling out Christmas carols and old love songs in an angelic tenor.  Sloan owns the farm, but Jones is the guy who seems at home there, in the fantasy world Lane never figured she could have (and is only slowly realizing she might want).  Stanwyck and Morgan’s flirtatious and furtive conversations crackle with romance long before it’s clear how they could possibly pair up, since the whole premise of their meeting is that she’s “happily married” and likely to remain so.  They’re fantastic.

The supporting cast are no slouches, either—Lane’s performance of the perfect Christmas is under the microscope thanks to the presence of her domineering publisher, Alexander Yardley, played with gleeful pomposity by Sydney Greenstreet, and she’s only pulling off the illusion of ideal domesticity thanks to the help of Felix Bessenak (“Uncle Felix” as she calls him, to maintain the cover story), the bespectacled Hungarian immigrant who runs a delicious New York City restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment Lane lives in, and who reluctantly agrees to come out to the farm to whip up a Christmas to remember.  Felix is maybe my favorite character (and in a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck, that’s saying something)—like a benevolent trickster spirit, Felix manages to be in the right place at the right time every step of the way to prevent Elizabeth from tying herself down in a marriage he knows she doesn’t really want, and to keep all options open for her to have a happy future.  He’s generous and joyful, while also having a sassy edge to him that plays really well on camera, and after learning the English word “catastrophe”, he takes great delight in declaring any kind of even mild difficulty as a “cat-as-TROAFF” (as he pronounces it).  S. Z. Sakall, who plays the part of Felix, was himself a Hungarian immigrant, and one who had narrowly avoided disaster fleeing his homeland in 1940—several close family members remained there, and died in Hitler’s concentration camps—and knowing that adds a layer of wonder for me as an audience member, watching an immigrant actor who’d known such grief become such an integral and happy part of this quintessentially American story.  Maybe it’s just that it’s 2025, and I feel a special debt these days to refugees and asylum seekers from around the globe who’ve given so much to make my country the vibrant place that it is.

What doesn’t work here?  Well, the thing I struggled with on my first viewing hasn’t really gotten better, and that’s the fact that there’s not all that much of a plot.  It’s obvious from early on that we’re being given an incredibly complicated Rube Goldberg device to orchestrate something pretty simple—Elizabeth and Jeff are going to fall for each other, but in a context where they just can’t really admit that openly, and we get the slightly illicit good time of rooting for Jeff to kiss a “married woman” and/or rooting for Elizabeth to throw herself at a guy she will eventually figure out has a fiancee waiting for him back at the hospital.  As a result, to the extent that we have a plot, it’s a farce, but really great farce requires pretty impeccably tight writing to make the tension wind itself up more and more as scenes progress, and this is a much more languid screenplay than that.  We have to accept a lot of strange coincidences and impulsive choices by characters to generate the necessary narrative energy and reach the resolutions we know we’re rooting for.  I’d also say that it’s a story with very little character development: the changes in any of the people on screen are subtle, from my perspective, and this is more about well-defined characters overcoming the plot obstacles in their path than it is about characters coming to learn something about themselves and grow.  I don’t think that makes a film bad, but if you’re looking for deeper emotional resonance, there won’t be as much here as I think there easily could have been.  And of course, in any film of the era, some of the dialogue is going to be corny: for me the worst example is Jeff trying to dole out advice about “how to rock in a rocking chair” but your mileage may vary.

There’s a lot here to enjoy, though.  For one thing, I applaud any movie of this era that handles race well in even a limited way, and this film gets high marks for its context: in the first act, there are two Black performers with speaking parts, and they’re both depicted positively and without stereotypes (a confident and efficient deliverywoman with a package for Elizabeth, and then an erudite young waiter who informs his boss, Felix, of the definition and Greek etymology of the word “catastrophe”).  Felix, too, really is playing the part of a minority, in this era, and while the movie’s having a little fun with his exclamations of “catastroph!” he’s not the butt of jokes as an outsider—as I noted, to the contrary, he’s almost the film’s ultimate insider, embraced and appreciated for who he is by basically everyone he encounters (other than perhaps Sloan’s Irish housekeeper, Nora).  Sure, I’m praising fairly limited progress on diversity in film, but given that it’s 1945 (and remembering other films of this vintage that I’ve seen) I’m grateful for what’s here.  Also, in terms of gender politics, it’s ahead of its time, or at least I was really pleasantly surprised that nobody in the film shames Elizabeth when it’s revealed she doesn’t really know how to care for an infant or cook.  Jeff’s jumping in to help with the baby is treated as natural and positive—he doesn’t consider it “women’s work,” and the only reason Elizabeth feels uneasy about it is her need to play her persona as Happy Homemaker and not the mere fact of her gender.  It’s hard not to feel affection for basically everyone on screen, and the folks who have done the most to deserve a little comeuppance do get it, though even this movie’s harshest consequences are pretty gentle.  Show up to just spend time with these characters, and you’ll get a good evening at the movies.

I Know That Face: We’ve got to acknowledge out of the gate that this is yet another film starring Barbara Stanwyck, arguably the queen of ‘40s Christmas movies, given her role as the guarded, wounded Lee Leander in Remember the Night, which I covered last year on the blog, and as the savvy, ambitious Ann Mitchell, the reporter to invites America to Meet John Doe, a movie I’ll be covering here before the month is out.  The man playing her alleged husband, John Sloan, in this film is one Reginald Gardner, who’d appeared as the writer Beverly Carlton in 1941’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, a screwball Christmas comedy that’s absolutely on my longlist and which I’m hoping I’ll get to in 2026.  S. Z. Sakall, who in this movie is my beloved “Uncle Felix”, will show up in 1949’s In the Good Old Summertime, a remake of The Shop Around the Corner which I glowingly reviewed last year: he plays Otto Oberkugen, the owner of Oberkugen’s Music Store, in that film, and his name appears in the end credits as “S. Z. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall.”  Maybe everybody loved this guy?  And lastly, I would be falling down on the job if I didn’t help you figure out why Judge Crowthers, who keeps showing up to try to perform a quick at-home wedding ceremony for Sloan and Lane, feels so familiar…I was sure I’d seen him somewhere.  Well, it turns out, that actor, Dick Elliott, makes a brief uncredited appearance the following year in a little movie called It’s a Wonderful Life, in which he is the man sitting on his porch who tells George Bailey to “kiss the girl instead of talking her to death,” before complaining loudly that “youth is wasted on the wrong people”.  What a legend.

That Takes Me Back: Obviously it’s always at least slightly jarring in films set before the 1990s how socially accepted smoking is at all times and in all places, but even so, it was especially wild to me to see Jeff smoking a cigarette in the hospital while being pushed around the recovery ward in a wheelchair.  Times have changed.  Shortly thereafter, Mary Lee, Jeff’s nurse fiancee, manages to secure the favor of a Christmas in Connecticut for her beau by reminding Mr. Yardley that she helped save his granddaughter when she was suffering from measles…a reminder of the past, yes, and also of the disease-riddled future the nation’s Health and Human Services Secretary dreams of at night, but I guess in polite company we’re supposed to pretend that the death and disability of children is just another of those political matters we shouldn’t mention at the Christmas table.  Apologies if it bothers you that I’m bringing it up anyway.  Speaking of things inhumane, it is always a little fascinating to me how luxurious and universally appealing furs were, in this era: I’m not going to throw paint at anybody, and obviously a vintage fur isn’t doing any additional harm on its own (those animals are long gone), but what little I know of the conditions under which mink fur coats were made suggests to me that maybe it’s nice they’re no longer considered the gold standard of wealth.

I Understood That Reference: I didn’t catch any references to any Christmas stories or poems, myself, which is at least slightly surprising.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): It is honestly kind of surprising how little holiday content is worked into a film that’s allegedly about giving a man a classic Christmas experience.  But we skip past a lot: we don’t sit for Christmas dinner, we don’t open gifts around the tree, we don’t go caroling, etc.  There’s definitely some pieces that are seasonal, with sleigh rides everywhere (as though the automobile has yet to reach rural Connecticut by 1945) and at least one scene of tree trimming, and a community dance on Christmas evening.  Really the movie’s energy is far less given to the holiday than it is to the mechanics of the plot devices—how to get Elizabeth and Jeff into a room together to flirt unobserved, how to heighten the comedic tension of things that will expose the lies, etc.  I am pretty sure this was a flaw in the movie for me the first time I watched it, since the title seems to promise a totally Yuletide extravaganza, so I’d advise you to keep expectations moderate on this front.

Actual Quality (9/10): So, this isn’t high art, but it is a confection—sweet and lighthearted and designed to gallop us through six crises quickly enough that they don’t inflict much stress.  We know where we’re going, and we get there comfortably.  There are just so many great performers here who can do a lot with even fairly pedestrian dialogue, and the setting couldn’t be more charming, with lavishly furnished 1940s glamour constantly intruded on by wandering cows and the needs of a countryside that’s mostly oriented around doing war work.  I had a great time with it this time around, and even though I know why I didn’t love my first viewing (and why I know some of you likely won’t love it either), I think this is the best assessment of how well the movie’s doing what it’s setting out to do.

Party Mood-Setter?  It’s hard to casually view a farce given the need to understand context in order to follow a lot of each scene’s potential humor, and there’s not quite enough holiday scenery for this to be a great background for a Christmas party or something similar.  If you know it well enough that it’s a film you know well, though, the energy of it is so cheerful that perhaps you could find the right time to throw it on while you’re working on something.

Plucked Heart Strings?  The film’s emotional only to the extent that there’s some pretty great chemistry between Elizabeth and Jeff, but it’s not a film that puts a lump in your throat out of either sadness or joy.  If you want the release of a little tearful delight, I think you’d need a different movie.

Recommended Frequency: Like I said above, it grows on you!  It’s working its way into my rotation, though, now that I think I’ve figured out the ways it works (and the things not to worry about).  I definitely intend to make it a regular (if not annual) part of my holiday viewing.

Christmas in Connecticut is a little frustratingly inaccessible compared to some other films on the slate this year: you can rent it from almost any of the streaming services, but only at the rate of $4.99, which to me is a trifle higher than I like to pay for a streaming rental.  You may want to consider picking up a Blu-ray or DVD copy at Barnes and Noble, given the relative difference in price, honestly—that or just do what I did, and get it on disc from your local library, of which some 1,200+ have it on the shelves, according to Worldcat.  I will say, though, if your only access to it is the streaming rental, I don’t think $5 would be too high a price to pay, if it sounds like your kind of movie: if I hadn’t had it at my local library, I wouldn’t have felt cheated at that amount to have streamed it, myself.

Bernard and the Genie (1991)

Review Essay

The selection process here at Film for the Holidays is pretty loose: it’s not like we’re being lobbied with gift baskets by streaming services (though Tubi, anything you want to send, I’m here for it), and other than a few very simple rules (1. Cover at least one movie per decade in the talkies era, 2. Every movie needs to have at least one unambiguous scene set at a winter holiday) I don’t really have much to guide me.  I try to come up with a mix of things I’ve seen before and things I haven’t; things I like and things I don’t; different genres and film-making styles, etc.  And along with all of the above, I’m always on the lookout for something that could be a diamond in the rough—some neglected, little-known gem that I can share with you all and add to our collective holiday fun.  That’s why I reached for this BBC production—an early ‘90s British TV vehicle for a young Alan Cumming and a just-hitting-his-prime Rowan Atkinson, along with a big role for Lenny Henry, who’s less famous than the other two fellows but who I’ve thought was hilarious from his early days on Chef! to his recent work on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.  Throw in that this is a screenplay by Richard Curtis—he of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, with 4-5 other Christmas-related screenplays under his belt over the course of his career?  It just seemed like the perfect pick to be a surprisingly delightful lark. . . . Well, it ain’t.

The setup of this movie probably should have made me wary from the outset.  Cumming, as Bernard Bottle, is a bumbling young art dealer, fired by his outlandishly narcissistic boss, Charles Pinkworth (Atkinson), for having even raised the possibility of being generous to the senior citizens from whom he’d purchased some paintings that had proved to be hugely profitable at auction.  Bottle stumbles back weepily to his apartment where he learns that his best friend Kevin has been knocking boots with his long-time girlfriend Judy, so he really is at the end of his rope.  He polishes some old lamp he’s found, though, and KABOOM, just one singed testicle later (I’m sorry, but it’s literally what the doctors say when he wakes up), he finds himself in possession of a 2,000 year old genie named Josephus (Lenny Henry), with whom he is only able to communicate because in a moment of terror he shrieks, “I wish we could understand each other” and magically they can now talk freely, despite the language barrier.  The screenplay’s version of the ancient Middle East is so comically stupid that I can’t always tell if it’s offensive or just incoherent—though my guess is most people will find at least some moments and jokes offensive—and the problems of Bernard Bottle are so cartoonish (but also so easily resolved) that it’s not exactly clear how invested we’re supposed to be in his triumphs.

The DVD cover for Bernard and the Genie superimposes the title and a shiny golden oil lamp in front of a generic-looking, snow-covered suburban house that has nothing to do with the movie. Above the title and house, images of Alan Cumming and Lenny Henry in his genie costume are making surprised faces, next to the tagline, "You'll believe nylon carpets can fly!"

By far the biggest problem with the script, a problem so big that if we just fixed this one element I think the movie’s at least 25% better, is Curtis’s decision to place no real limits on the genie’s power.  Josephus can literally snap his fingers and turn back time by minutes, hours, even days as needed to correct any mistakes he or Bottle might have made.  More seriously, though, the lack of limit extends to the number of wishes.  Bernard Bottle can make an infinite number of wishes.  There’s a reason that basically every wish story you’ve ever heard of extends a small number of wishes (usually three) to the wish-maker, from Aladdin to Darby O’Gill.  It’s just not that interesting to know what I would wish for if I have endless wishes: all pressure is off.  I can fix my house, my car, my job…I can fix the houses, cars, and jobs of anybody I meet, in fact, and I can take revenge on people who’ve wronged me, and I can do something about the world and its problems writ large, without any moment where I have to make a difficult choice.  It turns out that this one element—having only three wishes—is a load-bearing element in these stories, since it places a lot of weight on each individual decision to wish.  It forces the protagonist to learn to solve most of their problems themselves (in order to “save a wish”) and over time, by means of all that learning, our hero becomes, well, heroic.  A world in which Bernard has only three wishes is one in which he is forced to actually grow up, and become something other than a kind of life-sized Charlie Brown, but one with an infinite magic wand.

This is the point in a negative review where I stop and try to catalog the movie’s high points, but there’s not a lot to supply you with.  Lenny Henry, an actor I think has real comedic talent, has clearly been set loose in this role without any restraint from the writing or direction, and as a result his mugging for the camera is exhausting, like a kid running on too many Christmas cookies who you can’t wait to send to bed.  Because anything can happen, none of the chaos feels all that meaningful—like a series of Family Guy sight gags, whole stretches of the film’s second act just become jokes based on the fact that Josephus can do literally anything, from summoning a Big Mac to summoning the Mona Lisa.  Bernard can arrange the arrest of his former best friend on drug charges or transform himself into Bob Geldof or murder a police officer by accident (okay, I guess Mr. Bottle’s lawyer would like me to say “commit manslaughter” instead of “murder”), and all of these things will last for about fifteen seconds, and then anything bad about them can be undone, and anything good about them won’t last since there’s another wish coming.  Curtis’s screenplay is so overstuffed that there are definitely ideas that I think could have been funny in a movie that gave them room to breathe, like Bottle’s apartment having an elevator operator who is a charmingly pathological liar or Josephus having an obsession with the music of Barry White, but it’s the room to breathe that we’re missing.

And when I say overstuffed, I mean it.  I’ve made it to the fifth paragraph of my Bernard and the Genie review and I haven’t yet mentioned that a big chunk of the movie involves Josephus eventually claiming to have been a close personal friend of Jesus Christ, present at everything from the wedding at Cana to the feeding of the five thousand.  That’s the sort of thing that would in any other movie qualify as the singularly bananas story element you can’t wait to unpack, but here, by the time Josephus brings it up, all I could do was smile and shrug.  Sure, Josephus.  Why not?  His friendship with Jesus, who was a really chill guy (he says), supposedly makes him angry about Christmas commercialism, which is not what Jesus was all about (well, okay, that part checks out).  But Josephus makes this claim within a few minutes of him dispensing lottery cash to a guy he thinks deserves it, and doling out a ton of great presents for Christmas, etc., so what exactly is the movie’s anti-commercial message?  I’m not sure.

Okay, let me try a little harder: what can I actually praise here?  There’s something sort of right about Cumming as a naive young fellow counteracted by Atkinson as a brooding, domineering force of malevolence: this could have worked, and it almost does, though the film never comes up with great explanations for why the two characters do what they do.  Cumming as Bernard Bottle is in fact an appealing sad sack—as aforementioned, in a Charlie Brown kind of way—so that I remained a little more hopeful on his behalf than I’ve managed to be in some films where I just can’t care that much about Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation or Steve Martin in Mixed Nuts.  And there’s a comfortable camaraderie between him and Josephus at times, where it does seem like these two bros would have had a lovely time just hanging out in a London flat wishing for cheeseburgers and one more chance to chat up that Santa’s elf in hot pants that they met earlier in the day.  There’s this funny bit the film does a couple of times where the soundtrack shifts into a song sung by a choir that functions kind of like a Greek chorus, commenting on what’s happening to Bernard in an amusing way, though it’s not deployed consistently enough.  That’s about it.  Oh, wait!  It’s really short.  The premise could definitely have taken up a lot more time, and I was grateful that everyone involved knew to keep this one brief with a plot that doesn’t slow down.

But when you’re praising a movie for only being 70 minutes long, dear reader, not much went well.  And the appalling thing here is just the waste of talent: I know for a fact this collection of people could make better art than this.  A simpler approach—down-on-his-luck art dealer meets a less stereotypical spirit from inside an old lamp who grants him a very limited number of powerful wishes to fix his life problems at Christmastime—with the exact same BBC resources and running time could have been something, if not special, at least amusing as a diversion and remembered with some fondness.  Sometimes less is more, you know?  Someone needed to say that to a young Lenny Henry, for a start, poor fellow.

I Know That Face: Rowan Atkinson, here portraying the villainous Charles Pinkworth, had previously played the various Blackadders in 1988’s Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, and of course will later appear memorably if briefly as Rufus the jewelry salesman in the always controversial Love, Actually.  Kevin Allen, who plays the unfaithful (in I guess more than one sense of the word) “friend” Kevin in this movie, had earlier played a taxi driver in the 1984 short film The Man Who Shot Christmas.  Our hero, Bernard Bottle, is of course the widely-beloved Alan Cumming, who’s in the cast of the 1995 television movie Coping with Christmas, who holds the role of a desk clerk in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut (which, if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, it surely is also), who voices the titular Cinnamon Bear in the podcast series, The Cinnamon Bear: A Holiday Adventure, and who….wait, what?  Plays Mr. Flaxman, the villainous boss in the REMAKE of Bernard and the Genie, a 2023 Peacock movie titled Genie, starring Melissa McCarthy?  That exists??  Uff da.

That Takes Me Back: It’s a silly little thing, but something about seeing Josephus conjuring up Big Macs for himself in those tan styrofoam containers really took me back to childhood.  It’s not like I ate a ton of Big Macs, but they were in every ad of course, and I definitely remember finally feeling old enough/big enough that instead of ordering a cheeseburger on a rare visit to McDonald’s, I could get a Big Mac.  Very weird, in some ways, to see Big Macs used so prominently in a British production, but maybe McDonald’s was paying for product placement.

I Understood That Reference: Josephus’s talk about Jesus is all focused on him as an adult, so we don’t really get references to the nativity story.  There is plenty of chat about Santa, though—Josephus is surprised to learn that “the chap in the beard” goes around on flying reindeer, and later comments that “Mr. Beardy’s starting to sound like a non-event.”  Josephus ultimately sees himself on some level as having taken over Santa’s job, doling out wishes.

Holiday Vibes (6/10): There’s a surprising amount of Christmas stuff in a movie that didn’t necessarily need it, but that’s just part of the overstuffing, I guess.  From wishing for decorations through arranging for the right presents to the previously mentioned Santa’s helper in hot pants, there sure is a lot of activity around the holiday, even if the biggest story beats really don’t have anything to do with Christmas, per se.

Actual Quality (3.5/10): The movie’s only saved from the worst ratings I’ve handed out by finding ways to be pleasant company: certainly on the level of plot, pacing, performances, there’s a lot to criticize here and not a ton to enjoy.  This is not good work.

Party Mood-Setter?  I don’t know.  I guess in the sense that almost everything in the movie is just a quick gag followed by another quick gag, and another, you could watch it with very intermittent attention and get whatever it’s giving you.  But what it’s giving isn’t exactly cozy or gentle, and depending on which gags you’re checking in for, you might be getting some really uncomfortable jokes about life in the ancient Middle East.  I don’t think I’d use it for this.

Plucked Heart Strings?  There’s something real going on in the friendship of the two title characters, but it’s not going to move you emotionally unless you are way more sensitive to screenplay machinations than I am.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t in good conscience tell you to watch it once.  Part of me wants to watch it again to make sure it’s as bad as I think, and part of me remembers how these rewatches have basically never rescued a movie for me, so why waste even a brief 70 minutes?  I just don’t think this works.

If you’d like to see if I’m wrong about it (totally plausible), this little British TV movie can be streamed from Amazon Prime this December.  I’m not 100% sure if it’s rentable from Amazon if you’re not Prime members (we are, at my house, in part so we can get access to these holiday movies), but no other service seems to have it.  Barnes and Noble is out of copies on DVD, but Amazon has a few to sell, and if you happen to live near one of the 40 libraries in North America that own a copy (just one in the Pacific Northwest, for my local readers), you might be able to borrow the disc for free.  Or, and I’m just throwing this out there, you could just forget about tracking it down and move on to other fare!

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Review Essay

Part of the fun of the Film for the Holidays experience, for me, is finally sitting down to watch a movie I have been meaning on some level to watch for years, only to find that it’s not quite what I was expecting.  Sure, sometimes this is a negative experience, but more often it’s a neutral or positive one as I find myself recalibrating my expectations on the fly: it’s more interesting, at least, to be surprised.  In the case of 1944’s movie musical, Meet Me in St. Louis, I was expecting to be mostly dialed in for the star power of the incomparable Judy Garland, and don’t get me wrong, Miss Show Business is here and as fabulous as any of us would expect.  But sometimes in these holiday films, you get kind of fascinated by a truly charismatic supporting player—they’re not always even in sync with the rest of the cast or screenplay, but they’re so undeniably magnetic that you find yourself leaning in every time they’re on screen.  Think Dan Levy as Abby’s flamboyant friend John in Happiest Season.  Anyway, there’s a performance like that in Meet Me in St. Louis, and it tickled me.

Let’s handle the central story of the motion picture first, though—this is the story of the Smith family, and in some ways it’s an almost Austenesque premise wherein the oldest girls, Rose and Esther, are both pretty keen to land a guy (and grappling with some societal hurdles and conventions to do so) while maneuvering around a difficult parent (here, Mr. Alonzo Smith, their father).  It’s also a story about turn-of-the-century American optimism—St. Louis as a city “on the grow” about to welcome the whole world to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a place western enough that the big cities back east are a different country you can only reach by means of echoing long-distance phone lines but also connected enough that kids from the local high school head to the elite universities of the Atlantic Seaboard pretty routinely.  And it’s at least attempting to also be a story about the pressures on a lower middle class family: Mr. Smith’s worried enough about money that he’s willing to uproot the family to make a big move for his work, but not so worried about money that he can’t change his mind about that, at least in theory.  The film doesn’t really land this last punch, I’m afraid, since the family hardly ever seems low income (given their pretty lavish digs in a lovely neighborhood, with the girls expecting to head off to college, and Mr. Smith’s professional standing as a lawyer), and this is a problem since a lot of the conflict in the story hinges on the idea that the Smiths are so in need of the promotion/raise that they’re willing to throw away a whole lot of happiness in order to get it.  Sensible plots aren’t exactly the hallmark of the Golden Age Hollywood musical, and it’s probably fair to say that most people are being drawn here for that mix of MGM talent and Tin Pan Alley songwriting that make for a bit of a sensory extravaganza.  But I still think we can do a little better than this.

The poster for "MGM's Meet Me in St. Louis" features overlapping portraits of several young people (two teenage girls, a younger girl, and a teenage boy), along with the credits for the main cast. The only tagline reads "Glorious Love Story with Music".

In some ways the movie’s a bit more grown up than you might expect: both Rose and Esther Smith are pretty savvy about boys.  Esther (the character Judy Garland plays) at one point informs her big sister that “I’m going to let John Truett kiss me tonight.”  When Rose chides her, saying, “Men don’t want the bloom rubbed off,” Esther quips back, “I think I have too much bloom.  Maybe that’s the trouble with men.”  These ladies know a thing or two about the need to attract a fellow’s attentions without, shall we say, overindulging either themselves or the fellow in the process.  And of course it’s the 1940s, so the film’s going to ask us to play along with romanticizing things like a young man getting passionate enough that he grabs a young woman and kisses her, no permission sought: the fact that we know very well it’s what she wants doesn’t really make the moment 100% fun, from my perspective, but maybe I’m being too much of a wet blanket about it.  Nobody in this film manages to seem like a bad person for more than about five minutes (and only for the sake of creating just enough conflict to keep the story humming along).  When the meanest character in your motion picture is *checks notes* a devoted father who thinks he needs to relocate his family for their economic well-being, well, the stakes are pretty low.

I teased you a little up-front, though, with my claim that the show here is stolen by a high charisma supporting cast member, and I need to deliver the goods, so here it is: Margaret O’Brien, the child actress, is incredibly compelling as “Tootie” Smith, the youngest of the family’s five kids.  We’re introduced to Tootie having wandered away from the family home to help deliver ice on a horse-drawn wagon, entertaining the delivery man between stops by discussing her plans for the burial and mourning of one of her dolls who she plans to have “die” later that day—as she tells him, the doll has four fatal diseases, “and it only takes one.”  Later, on Halloween, we follow her through the neighborhood in an era predating the “or treat” option: Tootie’s all tricks, all the time, and her idea of a trick is on the level of stealing lawn furniture to add it to a bonfire, throwing flour at neighbors in an act of mock assassination, and, most memorably, the attempt to derail a double-decker streetcar by placing a hastily prepared mannequin on the tracks.  She is a menace to society, and I love her.  Admittedly, Tootie’s also young enough to be scared of the mayhem she’s capable of, but I think that only adds to the impressiveness of the mischief she accomplishes in one brief night out.  She’s endlessly quotable and really my big complaint of the film’s second half is that it spends way too much time worrying about getting Esther and John’s romance sorted out (over, it has to be said, the most comically miniscule of hurdles) and far too little time letting me watch Tootie, I don’t know, pursue a career as a juvenile arsonist or weigh the pros and cons of poisoning her grade school teacher or whatever other kinds of sheer chaos she is probably up to, off screen.

Now, here’s where I probably ought to admit a certain amount of favoritism at work here, or at least my predisposition to cheer for spunky kids like Tootie Smith in St. Louis in 1903.  Two of my great-grandparents were small town Missouri children in 1903-1904: my great-grandfather Warren was a scamp (injuring his hand as a 12 year old in an “accidental revolver discharge”…lord knows what Warren’s parents were doing at the time) and my great-grandmother Opal, who I will always and only ever think of as “Nana”, was a bright and brave woman all her life.  In 1904, the year of the Exposition, Opal was a 9 year old living in Lewistown, Missouri: at 150 miles from St. Louis, she was too far away to get to go to the Fair with her father and grandmother, but her dad gave Opal and her younger sister Nellie the consolation prize of a trip to Quincy, Illinois (about 30 miles away) to see Barnum and Bailey’s Circus that summer.  It was pretty easy for me to enjoy this 1900s peek into a Missouri family’s life, sanitized and historically inaccurate as I know much of it is, since it let me muse just a little about what it might have been like for Opal and Warren to hear tales of the World’s Fair or play a prank on Halloween.  If you feel any kind of connection or kinship to this part of the country or that era of history, I bet this will work a little better for you, too.

And of course, what this movie does best of all is its music, which I haven’t really touched on.  It’s a mix of songs: I’d never heard “The Boy Next Door” before but Judy Garland can make anything sound like a classic the moment she gets started.  I was familiar with the chorus of “The Trolley Song”—and I bet many of you, too, know “Clang! Clang! Clang! went the trolley”—probably from the Looney Tunes or some similar source.  And I could certainly sing all of this movie’s biggest hit and the one that pulls it squarely to Christmas (yes, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the conceit of this blog): Esther, in an attempt to soothe the fragile and frantic emotions of an agitated Tootie, pulls her little sister into her arms and sings, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  We get about 25 minutes of Christmas out of the film, but it’s a climactic 25 minutes, coming as it does at a point where the family’s preparing to move to New York, and treating the holiday as a huge final farewell—one last dance, one last tree in the front room, one last chance to maybe see if that John kid can get his act together and propose.  At its best, it’s a perfect Golden Age holiday sequence—red and green gowns that dazzle the eye, a real humdinger of an emotional song performed beautifully, and a finish that affirms love and family and togetherness in the way we want all our holiday flicks to end.  It’s just not always able to hold onto that perfection, since some of the machinations of the plot at the end are creaky, and while the song is beautiful and in Judy’s confident hands it packs an emotional heft out of the gate, its lyrics are sometimes a strange fit for the moment and the characters involved.  The movie works, but it doesn’t work as well as it wants to believe it does.  What it does do, aided so much by the energy of Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien, is give us the Smiths as a convincing and loving family, whose holiday celebration is genuinely joyful to look in on, and at this time of year, what else do we really want?

I Know That Face:  We just saw Tom Drake of course, who here is Esther’s beau, John Truett, when he appeared as Pat Dingle, a similarly fresh-faced boy next door, in The Great Rupert.  Margaret O’Brien, one of the last surviving child stars of the 1940s and the adorably gremlin “Tootie” Smith in this film, has voice acting roles in Elf Sparkle Meets Christmas the Horse and Elf Sparkle and the Special Red Dress (playing Mrs. Claus in the latter), as well as portraying Mrs. Foxworth in This Is Our Christmas.  And Margaret also plays Beth March in 1949’s Little Women—a film that, much like this one, incorporates a significant Christmas sequence even though it’s not exactly a “holiday movie”—and she’s not alone, since the March parents in that version of Little Women are played by Leon Ames and Mary Astor, the same actors portraying her parents in this movie, while Harry Davenport, who’s Tootie’s grandfather in this film, appears in the Alcott adaptation as Dr. Barnes.

That Takes Me Back:  This film’s set so long ago that it’s not so much making me nostalgic for things I remember as it makes me curious about things that maybe my grandparents or great-grandparents would have been nostalgic for.  Would the making of your own household ketchup have been such an engrossing enterprise back then, as it seems to be in the opening scenes?  Did people really tie ribbons in bows around the necks of housecats back then?  I associate this more with animated Disney films, in part because most of the cats I have known would have declared a vendetta against anyone subjected them to such indignities, and yet there the bow is on Tootie’s cat.  As I mentioned earlier, the film gives me a glimpse of a Halloween full of tricks only, and honestly, the chaos and vandalism is overwhelming enough that I can understand the citizenry of St. Louis getting together after Halloween 1903 and agreeing to the new “tradition” of trick-or-treating as a kind of public safety measure.  Anyone who knew Tootie Smith would have gotten to work the next day in an attempt to invent the fun size candy bar.  Oh, and there’s some shenanigans involving a dance card, which made me wonder when the end of the dance card era was (and why it ended).

I Understood That Reference:  Tootie’s waiting up for Santa Claus, but of course he won’t show up until she’s asleep.  How will he find the family next year in New York, though?  Gosh darn it, Tootie, you’re too dang cute sometimes.  When you’re not feeling murderous, that is.

Holiday Vibes (4.5/10): As noted above, the final half hour or so of the film really does a pretty good job of realizing an emotionally resonant and colorfully delightful Christmas holiday.  The addition to the canon of a now-ubiquitous holiday song has to count for something here, too.  But the score can only get so high before I say, hang on a second, the vast majority of the running time unfolds without even any reference to a winter holiday.  The score of 4.5 is probably generous, all things told, but like all my numerical scores, it’s to be taken with a grain of salt.

Actual Quality (8/10): At its best, this is a lot of fun—a couple of great songs, a lovely Christmas tableau, a charming performance from a child actress.  At its worst, it’s super forgettable: some of the music isn’t all that catchy, there’s so little conflict of any real consequence, and the film’s biggest questions as we get to the third act are a mixture of problems that will clearly be resolved with ease and problems that barely seem like problems.  The plot’s not strong enough to be a selling point, but it doesn’t give itself over into spectacle quite enough to get away with a weak story the way that other films frankly do (the plot of White Christmas, for instance, isn’t better than the plot of Meet Me in St. Louis, but that movie finds way more ways to captivate an audience and let the plot take a back seat).  Shaking all that up, this ends up a B/B- of a movie for me as an artistic product (even if I felt a little more charitable towards it, as a viewer).

Party Mood-Setter?  There’s not quite enough Christmas in the film to work for this purpose.  But it’s so gentle and full of nostalgia that I don’t think it would particularly distract you if you did turn it on.

Plucked Heart Strings?  I mean, I was not expecting this, but I really did find myself getting emotional at the Christmas gathering: the love of the people involved, and their gratitude for each other, got to me on some level.

Recommended Frequency:  I’d say that Meet Me in St. Louis is a film that, if you watched it for a few Christmases in a row, would become “a Christmas movie” just as much as a lot of other films that are not set primarily at Christmas but have some key Christmas scenes—in the vein of It’s A Wonderful Life or White Christmas in that way.  I’m not sure it’s quite great enough for me to make that effort, but it’s more than good enough for a viewing and it’s one I will absolutely watch again, as much for the old-time nostalgia of it as for the holiday elements.

As with so many other films this year, you can watch this (with ads) on Tubi. It’s rentable on streaming from almost all the places you might think to pay to rent it, too.  The Blu-ray is cheaper than the DVD at Barnes and Noble, if you know you want to own it, and Worldcat will help you find it in over 1,800 libraries worldwide.

The Great Rupert (1950)

Review Essay

As holiday movies go, The Great Rupert is maybe one of the goofiest possible examples: it’s hard for me, at least, to imagine a more gobsmacking summary than “stop-motion animated squirrel shoves a miser’s money through a hole in the wall, leading to a miraculous influx of wealth into the hands of an impoverished family whose circus act no longer draws a crowd.”  Like, who even pitched this to a producer?  What screenwriter generated this material?  And, maybe most importantly…is it any good?  Well…look, even at its weakest, we’ve got to give the movie this.  It is the second greatest Christmas movie ever made to feature a rodent in a starring role (in this house, we give Rizzo the Rat his laurels for an impeccable supporting performance in The Muppet Christmas Carol), and a diversion that’s really unlike anything else you could possibly dial up on your television at this time of year.  But let’s dig in a little, to see if I can say anything more definitive on the subject.

The centrally important feature of the film, storywise, is less a performing member of the family Sciuridae and more a cheaply converted carriage house that shares a wall with the Dingle family home.  The Dingles rent the carriage house out to people needing the least expensive lodging imaginable (since, no matter how cheap the rent, the place is only barely worth it).  The carriage house is, at the film’s beginning, occupied by Joe Mahoney, an old vaudeville star who’s sure the dancing squirrel, Rupert, is his ticket back to relevance in the world of entertainment.  His attempts to sell the act to talent agent Phil Davis are unsuccessful, though, and ultimately Joe cannot pay his rent to the scowling Mr. Dingle and is forced to vacate the premises, leaving Rupert in a park to fend for himself while Mahoney hits the road in an attempt to make a little cash.  As he leaves town, Joe crosses paths with some old friends: the Amendolas.  Louie Amendola, with his wife and a teenage daughter, is at about the end of his own rope as an entertainer, and is down to a little pocket change.  Mahoney tips him off to the vacancy at Dingle’s carriage house, where he reckons the Amendolas might get away without paying rent for a few months, anyway, like he did.  They might not have been successful in leasing the place, though, if not for their meeting Dingle’s son Pete, who takes one look at the lovely young Rosalinda Amendola and decides to bend his dad’s rule about insisting on rent in advance from the next tenant.  Returning to the carriage house, too, is a disgruntled Rupert, who found life in the park intolerable and who plans to take up residence in a little cranny in the wall adjoining both the Dingle residence and the Amendola’s new digs, where he’s been storing acorns for a rainy day.  The dramatis personae, at this point, are basically in place, and the story that unfolds is, in a weird sense, almost inevitable.

The DVD cover for The Great Rupert depicts an eerie-looking stuffed squirrel, dressed in a red hat and sweater and a green-and-white skirt, standing near a Christmas tree and looking at the viewer. Above his head reads the tagline: "A heartwarming family classic about love, faith and a furry little critter that saves Christmas!"

The crucially important story element here is also one solidly grounded in these events having taken place on Christmas Eve, cementing this film’s claim as a work associated with the holiday.  The Amendolas lack the kind of funds to give themselves even a meager Christmas feast (Louie is reduced to haggling in the street for a “Christmas tree” that’s barely a scraggly branch stood on end), and poor Rosalinda’s shoes don’t fit but her parents can’t afford to replace them.  The Dingles, meanwhile, have come into sudden and shocking wealth: the father, Frank Dingle, has invested in a mine that finally came through, and the checks are going to roll in once a week from now on, it seems.  Frank’s wife, Katie, wants to get to church to offer prayers of gratitude, but Frank wants to get to the bank instead—he doesn’t trust anybody with his money, not even his wife, and he decides to create a secret stash of cash inside his bedroom wall, where he will shove the money he gets from cashing his weekly check.  These two situations combine for a moment that is somehow both funny and emotionally resonant, as the devout Mrs. Amendola prays to God for just a little money to get her daughter some new shoes, with a choir singing a carol outdoors somewhere in the background, and then Rupert the squirrel, agitated by the sudden appearance of a bunch of money being shoved into his acorn cubby by an unwitting Frank Dingle, kicks the bills out the other side of his nest so that money appears to fall from heaven like snowflakes into the amazed, outstretched hands of Mrs. Amendola.  It’s a Christmas miracle.  Well, “miracle.”  After that, the movie leaves Christmas behind, really not to return at all, but that’s not unusual for a film I’m covering here at FTTH, after all.

The story from that point forward is really bananas, and the final act is completely implausible in every respect—law enforcement investigations halt because the officers just seem to have gotten bored, every unexpected loss is made good by an equally surprising act of generosity, and every longshot chance a person could bet on all come in at once, paying off in the most spectacular fashion.  Any one of these happy accidents or coincidences might have worked as a “see, there is some good in the world” finale, but all of them at once leave the movie feeling either naive or surreal.  Nobody here is quite real enough to have an emotional center we can really sympathize with (other than maybe Mrs. Amendola, whose devout prayers and later moral qualms about asking God for so much money felt authentic, to me), and the quality of the acting and editing overall certainly feels a lot more like a very long episode of a 1950s television sitcom than it does a feature film.  If you love happy endings, though, and really never fuss about how plausible or logical they might be, this finish could work for you.

The titular performing squirrel is another element here that is likely to be divisive.  On the one hand, the special effect of Rupert is really remarkably successful for a film that’s clearly in every other way a low-to-moderate budget production design, a B movie.  George Pal, the movie’s producer, was an Oscar-nominated animator making the transition to live-action with The Great Rupert, and I can confirm that there’s a fluidity and a personality to the animated stop motion of the squirrel that’s impressive.  On the other hand, Rupert and his antics often live fully in the uncanny valley, where his capering to concertina music while dressed in a kilt, for instance, is more unsettling than endearing.  The rigid face of the squirrel (a model I hope is an artistic creation rather than a taxidermied real squirrel with articulated limbs) is such a strange juxtaposition to his energetically flailing limbs.  Rupert’s role in the story is key but small, and therefore the sudden emphasis on him in the movie’s final few minutes is unexpected and a little destabilizing.  You couldn’t do this film without him, but doing the film with him creates a really odd energy sometimes.

I think the thing I wrestle with in The Great Rupert is that I feel I should be tickled pink by it, when I think about its parts.  I ought to be up for a hammy, confident comedic portrayal of Louie Amendola by Jimmy Durante, an icon of his era.  I’m the kind of person who enjoys a solid message in favor of community and fraternity—Frank Dingle’s a villain (to the extent the movie has one) because he rejects his wife’s feeling that the money ought to be spent, and Louie Amendola’s a hero (to the extent the movie has one) because he uses his money to make as many people happy as possible, from his family in need of a Christmas dinner to local entrepreneurs in need of a cash infusion to refugees in Europe displaced by WWII in need of shoes.  I tend to appreciate plot conceits in these “holiday movies” that rely to at least some extent on the religious content of Christmas as a feast—even though we know Mrs. Amendola’s miracle is directly caused by Rupert and not Jesus, there’s an undeniable feeling of grace in the scene that makes it seem like maybe a divine hand is working through the frankly lunatic chaos of Frank Dingle and a cashed check and a hole in the wall and a circus rodent falling like dominos to drop money into her hands at the moment she needs it most.  I’d like to be a booster of this movie…but it’s just too flimsy an enterprise, somehow both slight and overwritten.  It’s never really clear what the movie’s central story even is—Louie Amendola vs. Frank Dingle? Pete’s dream of romancing Rosalinda? Joe Mahoney’s hopes for squirrel stardom?—and none of them are really given the space they need.  It’s a propulsive little movie, that packs a lot of both situation and comedy into its running time, and I would never look down my nose at anybody who says they just plain like it.  It’s cheerful as cotton candy, after all, even when the scenes on film really ought to be pretty serious or even sad—without exception, this screenplay knows how to manufacture happy endings, and it refuses to be stopped.

I Know That Face: Tom Drake, the handsome but penniless musician Pete Dingle, had appeared earlier as John Truett in 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis, a movie you’ll see covered here on the blog in just a couple of days.  Terry Moore, here playing literal girl next door Rosalinda Amendola, is incredibly still acting today, in her late 90s; the only other holiday-related appearance I know of is a recent short film, 2021’s Evie Rose, in which she plays the 100 year old title character, celebrating Christmas with her teenage best friend.  Of course Jimmy Durante, the generous Louie Amendola, has the unmistakable voice that younger generations might only know from him singing “Frosty the Snowman” on the soundtrack of the Rankin-Bass television program by the same name.  And we have to doff our cap to Christmas perennial Sara Haden – underutilized here as the put-upon Katie Dingle, she’s appeared in other such holiday classics as The Shop Around the Corner (as Flora the shopgirl), which I blogged about last year, and The Bishop’s Wife (as Mildred Cassaway, secretary to the Bishop), a holiday film with a premise almost as strange as this one, though much less whimsical, and one I hope to cover, perhaps next year.

That Takes Me Back: You know, the whole idea of a circus feels stranger and stranger, the older I get—I grew up with them as a cultural experience that I and almost every kid I knew had had at some point, but my daughter’s never seen a circus and I wonder if she ever will (other than Cirque du Soleil).  A movie that’s relying on us having multiple households of circus performers interacting (despite us basically never seeing a circus on screen) is pretty throwback.  Oh, and cashing checks at the bank where everybody can see how much money you’re getting is a reality that on the one hand does seem perfectly normal to me, but it’s also something that I doubt a Gen Z kid would think of as even plausible.  “You mean literally everyone in line at the bank would just hear talk out loud about exactly how much money you just put in your pocket?”  “Yep.”

I Understood That Reference: Louie Amendola refers on multiple occasions to “Old Saint Nick,” a benevolent figure who wouldn’t forget the family.  All they needed was an address (as he exclaims) for the generous fella from the North Pole to show up with gifts all round.

Holiday Vibes (6/10): So, probably the most centrally important scene in this movie involves a snowy Christmas Eve, a choir singing “Adeste Fideles” in the distance, a woman’s devout prayer to God on behalf of her family for some generosity on such an important holiday, and then, once her prayer’s granted, a truly effusive Christmas Day full of trees and tinsel, merriment and music at the landlord’s piano, etc.  A movie that leaned a little harder into all that would score nearly perfectly.  As it is, these scenes fade into the background and the movie’s not even all that interested in making itself feel “like Christmas” to some extent, so the rating falls somewhere in the middle of the seasonal bell curve.

Actual Quality (6/10): I’d love to give higher praise, but this is a movie I’ve tried to enjoy three times in the last five years, and each time I get to the end feeling like I was either rolling my eyes or checking my watch about as much as I was having a genuinely good time.  It’s a gentle movie and it’s not going to bother basically anybody in the room, even if it fails to engage them.  The jokes mostly don’t land, but the music is lively at least, and Rupert’s….well, Rupert is Rupert, and you’ll either love him or find him unsettling.  It’s sure not my worst movie of the year, but I also really can’t tell you it’s any good, artistically.

Party Mood-Setter? It’s just not quite holiday enough to convince me it’s a great idea. But it’s certainly going to evoke that late 1940s vibe that feels like “the holidays” to a lot of folks, and it’s not going to confuse or bother you if your attention drifts in and out as it’s on in the background.  Maybe if you’re out of other options?

Plucked Heart Strings?  You know, weirdly, yes, there’s something moving about Mrs. Amendola’s prayer, and about her moral quandaries afterwards about whether it’s even right to keep asking for money they don’t desperately need.  Queenie Smith, who got her acting training at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, manages to convey a lot of pathos in a pretty small role. Even Louie’s generosity is sometimes pretty heart-warming.  The main romance is, to me, pretty flat stuff, but I think the Amendolas as people shuttling from rags to riches would give you a little of that holiday glow.

Recommended Frequency: All in all, I think it’s just worth watching once.  You’ll figure out right away if it’s not your thing or if it’s going to become a secret favorite.  My returns to it have been, I think, unnecessary: I could have trusted my first impression of the movie, and I doubt I’ll see it again.  If I do give it another go, years hence, it’ll be me looking to spend time with the emotional journey of the Amendolas again: the movie’s heart is better than its humor.

The rights holders for The Great Rupert clearly have zero concern about oversaturating the market.  It is available from Tubi, Plex, Pluto, The Roku Channel, Sling TV, and something called Xumo, all of them ad-supported streams for free.  Amazon Prime’s got it ad-free, if you’re a member, as does MGM+.  You can pay to rent it, if you really want to, from Fandango at Home, or Apple TV.  You’ll notice that a few of these services list it as A Christmas Wish which was the title given to it when a colorized version was released for sale in the 2000s (presumably they knew that would sell more discs than something called The Great Rupert).  Barnes and Noble will sell you a DVD version for about ten bucks, and Worldcat reports that maybe a couple hundred libraries have it on disc. (Ask your librarian, though—it looks like the movie was added to some anthologies held by many libraries, so it may be there in a multi-disc case that has a generic name like “Holiday Collector’s Set”.)

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.