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 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!

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.

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.

Review Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review Essay

Some of my favorite holiday movies make the list because of the depth of their ideas: they make me think the way I want to think at this time of year.  But others make the grade purely because of the power of their feelings: they just evoke an emotional response in me that feels like the holidays, regardless of what the underlying film intends to convey.  The latter category is, I think, the best way for me to broadly characterize White Christmas, a motion picture that surely most if not all of you are very familiar with: I love this movie, I watch it every Christmas, and if I think about it too much, I start to wonder why I have such a deep connection to it.  Let’s try to unpack both sides of that, shall we?

First, the basic premise, in case somehow this movie’s missed you in the past: the movie opens on Christmas Eve, 1944, with two soldiers (one an already-famous entertainer named Bob Wallace; the other an ambitious but green up-and-comer named Phil Davis) putting on a show in honor of their general and Christmas (seemingly in that order) before an artillery assault breaks out and Davis saves Wallace’s life.  Having done so, he extracts a series of promises from Wallace — to sing a duet together, to become partners, to start producing big musical revues — before they cross paths with the singing Haynes sisters, Betty and Judy, and find themselves (through a mishap or two) following the girls to Pine Tree, Vermont.  There, they discover their old general is a down-on-his-luck hotel owner in a snowless and therefore guestless December, and the boys spring into action to come to his aid (while Phil and Judy try to steer Betty and Bob into each other’s arms).  Along the way, there’s a lot of singing and dancing from some of the most talented folks in Hollywood at midcentury: there’s a reason this film endures.

One of the things I noticed on this latest viewing is how the film repeatedly has these men make a promise with mostly good intentions but lacking in a little sincerity…and then that promise turns out to be really meaningful to them in unexpected ways.  Wallace promises Davis to sing a song with him out of guilt more than enthusiasm, and his whole life changes.  The two of them decide to keep faith with a weird dude they knew in the Army out of obligation, and that’s how they meet the Haynes sisters.  Davis’s promise to find Wallace a girl is motivated by a selfish desire for a little leisure time, but, well, other good things come of it for him.  I don’t think the film’s message is “do the right thing for the wrong reasons and you’ll succeed” but there’s definitely something going on there, under the surface.

Another element that’s definitely going on under the surface is social and cultural conservatism — this movie is fully locked into the moral landscape of mainstream America in the 1950s, and the “boy, girl, boy, girl” lineup of romance and matrimony fits a little too neatly.  The implication that marriage is the most central meaning in life is pretty clear.  The valorizing of the army is understandable for the era, but it’s over the top nevertheless: the movie’s absolutely not interested in a depiction of war or its aftermath that feels genuine (unlike say, The Holly and the Ivy, which I wrote about here just two days ago).  And not one but two musical numbers take swings at modern entertainment — “Choreography” memorably parodies modern dance (I think specifically the Martha Graham Dance Company) in making an argument that the old tap dancers and soft-shoers were obviously superior.  And, of course, the medley that ends with “Mandy” repeatedly reminds us that the performers REALLY miss those old-fashioned minstrel shows — weren’t those the good days?  For my part, I think MGDC is fine as a target — yes, there’s something a little sneering about that number, but it’s also pretty funny, and I am unaware of any weird bigotry associated with Martha Graham’s particular style of modern dance.  Minstrel shows, on the other hand, were a real blight on American entertainment — Bing Crosby, of course (who plays Wallace here), had appeared in blackface in a minstrel number in an earlier film, Holiday Inn, so he’s only thinking back about a decade as he yearns in song.  And of course the thing that’s ridiculous about both numbers here in White Christmas is that they are self-refuting — sure, the modern dance in “Choreography” is intentionally goofy in ways that make me laugh, but doesn’t that suggest that in fact the new modern dance style was capable of pretty evocative communication and therefore artistry?  And more importantly, doesn’t the fact that Clooney and Kaye and Crosby can joke around in song on stage, before Vera-Ellen comes out and dazzles us all with her skill as a dancer, prove that you can have all the old vaudeville fun you want on stage or screen without burdening it with awful racist caricatures?  We do not need “Georgie Primrose”, as the song here suggests, to have a good time: far from it, in fact.

I know, I know — none of this sounds like me being in love with this movie enough to watch it every Christmas.  Well, I haven’t really dealt yet with the four stars of this movie, and I have to say, each one of them is basically ideal casting, simply ideal.  Bing Crosby is just coming down from his apex of fame and talent here in the early 1950s: the film needs a proud but affable crooner and that fits Bing to a T.  His ability to work as a straight man had been pretty carefully honed, and for my money he is JUST young enough to still be playing a romantic lead in this film.  His comic foil, Danny Kaye, is a personal favorite of mine — Danny’s effortless and energetic presence on screen really never fails to make me laugh or hold my attention.  Everyone’s tastes are different of course — I complained back in my review of The Holiday about Jack Black dialing it up to 11 a little too often, and I’m sure there are folks who would feel the same about some of Kaye’s goofiness here, but for my money he can dial it up as high as he likes, I’m here for it.  As young Judy Haynes, Vera-Ellen is startlingly talented in every kind of dance she’s asked to perform — so good, in fact, that Kaye couldn’t keep up with her (if you’ve ever wondered why that one semi-anonymous dude is suddenly dancing with Judy in a couple of big numbers, it’s because he was a top-tier studio dancer covering the parts that Kaye, despite all his talent, just couldn’t do himself).  And I love the way she very subtly breaks the fourth wall — the next time you watch this film, pay attention to how many times Vera-Ellen makes direct eye contact with the camera, and flashes us a little conspiratorial smile as if to say, “God, I’m good.  Watch this next bit.”  Finally, Rosemary Clooney as Betty Haynes is, in my purely subjective opinion, just about perfect: she takes a role that, on the page, might be a bit stiff or stick-in-the-mud, and presents a woman who’s warm and guarded and winning.  Plus she’s got the voice of an angel and she’s a vision in Technicolor in basically every perfectly chosen Edith Head costume — maybe you can take your eyes off her, but I can’t.  And the end result of all four of them basically firing on every cylinder in every scene means that the film is always bursting with charisma, no matter how I feel about the writing or the pacing or the underlying message of any given moment.

And White Christmas is such a lush viewing experience too: I don’t know if any film’s color is more saturated than the reds and greens of this movie’s opening titles, and it’s paired with a really effusive orchestral overture.  The heightened theatricality of everything about the film somehow works to its advantage, for me: there’s no question that every outdoor setting looks like a sound stage, from the “war zone” in 1944 to the “boat dock” where Davis and Judy first dance to the “parking lot” outside the Pine Tree Inn.  But something about the artificial quality of those spaces just makes the whole thing feel slightly dreamlike to me in a way that’s really calming and satisfying.  Add in a few incredibly catchy Irving Berlin songs and some scintillating Robert Alton choreography and I just fall in love with the film every time.

Am I falling in love with a holiday movie, though?  For a film that opens and closes with two stirring renditions of “White Christmas”, the best selling single song of all time, I think there’s no question that this film is not all that connected to the holidays as far as its running time goes.  We get about 10 minutes at Christmas Eve in 1944 (more than half of it about General Waverly and not the holiday at all).  Then, while there’s some talk about the Christmas Eve looming at the film’s end, it’s not until the very last segment of the film that we get the holiday tableau you might remember, full of children in costume and Santa hats and the world’s largest Christmas tree.  But what a tableau it is.  Thematically…well, I’ve talked about this movie’s theme already, a little.  The more I think about what I think this film wants to say, the less comfortable I am with it — I don’t think it’s a harmful film, to be clear, but I think it just has a different sense of what’s important and in need of defense than what I believe in.  I have a hard time connecting most of the themes I do see to anything I would associate with Christmas in particular.  In the end, though, I can’t deny that the power of the movie’s full force being directed at the Christmas holiday really connects for those brief stretches where it’s doing that.  I come away fully washed in the VistaVision spectacle of the idealized midcentury holiday.  There’s a reason a ton of us watch this film every year and feel Christmassy about it.

I Know That Face: Mary Wickes, who plays Emma here (the hotel’s housekeeper and professional busybody), has a couple of other holiday turns under her belt: she plays Henrietta Sawyer in The Christmas Gift, a TV movie starring John Denver and Jane Kaczmarek (what an eclectic cast, eh?), and near the end of her career, she plays Aunt March in the 1994 edition of Little Women, another one of those movies that feels like Christmas far more than it is actually set at Christmas.  And Bing Crosby, here playing the seasoned entertainer and mogul Bob Wallace, is Father Chuck O’Malley in The Bells of St. Mary’s, a film that has a long enough sequence set at Christmas that it tends to make lists of holiday movies (and would certainly be eligible for this blog).  Bing, too, sang in that famous televised “Little Drummer Boy” duet with David Bowie that I alluded to when I reviewed Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

That Takes Me Back: Man, as a long-time happy Amtrak traveler (in the days when I could sleep sitting up overnight in coach: ah, youth), the vision of trains full of sleeper cars rolling through the night is nearly irresistible.  I loved, too, that in their conversation about whether to take the train or the plane, it’s clear that the train is luxury travel (since you can sleep), whereas on the airplane you’ll wind up sitting up all night.  No kidding, Bing.  It is fun to see the Haynes sisters have to fuss about their phonograph records (and phonograph) they travel with: technology has changed our relationship to music in so many ways.  And I know that I will never in my life get to say, as Bob Wallace does, “Young lady, get me the New York operator.”  And that’s okay, you know?  But I do kind of wish I’d gotten to do it.  

I Understood That Reference: The only Christmas story I heard them alluding to was a quick throwaway line when Ed Harrison tells Wallace he wants to show them off “playing Santa Claus to the old man,” right before Bob says to knock it off…though not in time to keep Emma from getting entirely the wrong idea about the situation.

Holiday Vibes (5.5/10): There is absolutely no way to score this film.  For those of us who watch this with religious attention every single year, it would seem ridiculous to set this any lower than a 9.5: when I hear the conductor calling out “Pine Tree” and the gang starts riffing on how they must be in California and not Vermont, it feels like Christmas to me and a few million other people, but that’s pretty silly, isn’t it?  And for those of you new to the film, I can easily imagine you, ⅔ of the way through, wondering if Christmas will matter to it at all other than that one opening scene you’ve already forgotten.  5.5 feels like the most honest middle ground I can offer to a movie that’s not about Christmas at all for all but about a half an hour, but those 30 minutes (distributed around the film a little) are incredibly evocative.

Actual Quality (9/10): Again, this is not a measure of how much I love it, but of how good the film is in my opinion.  And I would say that I think the screenplay’s pretty wobbly here, in terms of actually pacing things out, delivering the scenes characters need, etc.  But everything else — the aforementioned costumes and music and choreography and acting, and I didn’t even mention the really successful direction (from my perspective) by Michael Curtiz whose name you may recognize from little films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and something called Casablanca?  There’s a reason the film works despite having a plot that’s kind of barely there, and it’s because the creatives in every other capacity are bringing their A game.

Party Mood-Setter? You mean, is this a perfect background for your holiday festivities?  100%, as long as you don’t find the minstrel number too weird — again, my only quibbles here are with the writing, but if you want to be baking or decorating or hanging with family while occasionally tuning into a fun song or a sweet dance number or just marveling at a perfect outfit, this movie has your back.  

Plucked Heart Strings? I’ll be honest: I find Betty and Bob’s connection emotionally investing, but I definitely don’t get choked up here.  I get a smile out of seeing the positive resolutions later in the movie for multiple characters, but there are never tears in my eyes.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t tell you it has to be in your annual rotation, but it’s sure in mine and permanently.  And honestly, if you’re an appreciater of the genre of holiday movie (to the extent that there’s a good definition of such a genre), I just think this is going to be on your list already.  It’s too beautiful to look at, with too much talent to watch and listen to.  If somehow you’ve never seen it, I sure think watching it these holidays would be the right thing to do: I hope you enjoy it, if so.

To watch this holiday classic on streaming, Amazon Prime members have access via that subscription; it looks like if you’ve got some premium add-on subscription at places like Sling or Roku or AMC+, you might have access also.  You can rent it, also, from all the usual places.  Amazon will sell you the movie on disc — and with this year being the 60th “diamond” anniversary, let me tell you, there’s a sweet deal on a three disc combo pack that adds in some TV appearances by cast members, along with commentaries, etc.  Worldcat says every library on the planet has this movie on DVD (okay, they say it’s close to 1,500 libraries, but that’s huge when compared with literally every other movie I’ve checked there for this blog).