Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys here today to provide an advance and heartfelt Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays to you, our faithful readers.
Since this will be our first our first Christmas together – www.classicmoviechat.com started last April — we thought a general discussion of seasonal movies was in order. Not to worry. Nothing terribly tendentious, just some off the cuff comments.
Dave Kehr, the sage critic who writes a weekly video column in The New York Times, hit on something when he recently questioned why one of our favorite films is pretty much the standard bearer of Christmas movies.
Wrote Kehr: With its bleak, film-noir imagery and barely suppressed undertone of suicidal despair, Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946) has somewhat mysteriously assumed an unshakable position as America’s official holiday film.
While we are delighted it has, we concede that there is an element of the downright scary in It’s A Wonderful Life.
It is, after all, the story of a small town savings and loan man (James Stewart) facing financial devastation at the hands of a banking institution run by the viciously unscrupulous Lionel Barrymore. With home foreclosures and Occupy Wall Street the stuff of daily headlines, elements of the movie’s plot resemble today’s truly unsettling conditions.
Perhaps a modicum of fear is necessary for a good Christmas movie. In 1951′s Scrooge, the fine British actor Alastair Sim etches a hard-to-forget picture of an addled, confused old man terrified by the three ghostly visions presented to him. This Scrooge is metaphorically scared straight. In 1938′s A Christmas Carol, a similarly addled Scrooge (Reginald Owen) is nicely contrasted by Gene Lockhart’s winning performance as a stalwart yet sunny Bob Cratchit.
Frightening in a wholly different way is 1954′s White Christmas, a saccharine Paramount outing — the first movie filmed in Vistavision, no less — built around Irving Berlin’s seasonal chestnut about the joys of being snowbound during the holidays. It’s a romantic comedy with music costarring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. The guys play song-and-dance men who fall for a pair of sisters. The saving grace is that Crosby’s vocal gifts actually make I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas quite listenable.
Crosby introduced the song in 1942 in Holiday Inn, which might also be considered as a film for the season.
Finally, critic Kehr has a suggestion about a suitable holiday movie in lieu of It’s A Wonderful Life.
For those in search of a more vibrant, warmhearted and subtly melancholic seasonal celebration there is Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 musical ‘Meet Me in St. Louis.’
Which are your favorite Christmas Movies? Again, Happy Holidays.
