Who doesn’t love a good Christmas movie?
Whether seeing Maureen O’Hara come to believe in Santa Claus, or Jimmy Stewart realize that he’s had a wonderful life, or Ebenezer Scrooge find redemption, classic Christmas movies are one of the best parts of the season (at least not counting, you know, the big part).
Of course this time of year people will produce top-ten lists of the greatest Christmas films ever, mostly involving the same handful of movies: It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, and so on.
But there are a lot of really good, classic Christmas films out there, some of which seem to have rather slipped through the cracks, either because people forget they exist, or forget that they’re Christmas movies. With that in mind, I offer the following three forgotten Christmas Classics for your consideration.
1. The Man Who Came To Dinner
When acerbic, arrogant author and theater critic Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Wooley) accepts a dinner invitation from the conservative Midwestern Stanleys (Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke AKA Glinda the Good Witch), he ends up slipping on their icy front steps and injuring his hip, which means that he’s their guest for the whole Christmas season.
Well, guest is probably the wrong word; Whiteside’s a guest of the Stanleys in the same sense that Julius Caesar was the ‘guest’ of the Gauls. In fact, he simply moves in and takes over their house, assuming complete control of the downstairs rooms, ordering about both the servants and the family members, and carrying on his holiday itinerary uninterrupted from his wheelchair. Meanwhile, his efficient secretary (Bette Davies) has fallen in love with a local man, threatening to disrupt Whiteside’s comfortable little private world. But when he moves to separate them, has he finally gone too far?
Adapted from a popular play, The Man Who Came To Dinner is mostly an opportunity to watch a hilariously mean old man be insufferable in witty and creative ways. Monty Wooley (who reprises his role from the play) is equal parts charming and horrible, tossing off elaborate insults and snide comments left and right non-stop while somehow remaining oddly lovable (“Is there a man in the world who suffers as I do from the gross inadequacies of the human race?”).
He’s ably supported by a hilarious cast, which includes Jimmy Durante as Whiteside’s skirt-chasing Hollywood crony and Mary Wickes (in her film debut) as his much abused nurse. Of course, Bette Davies is effortlessly charming as the one person in the world who can manage Whiteside…for the most part (though the actor who plays her boyfriend is pretty stiff, especially compared to the rest of the cast. Fortunately, he doesn’t have a lot of screen time).
Whiteside himself, with his white beard and deep, melodious voice, comes across like a rude, capricious Santa Claus, chuckling over games and treats while dolling out presents and punishments as he sees fit. It’s a great film for a cold winter’s night in with the family, especially if you’ve just gotten rid of an unwanted holiday visitor.
“My great aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be 102 and when she'd been dead three days she looked better than you do now.”
2. Christmas in Connecticut
Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is a popular columnist, known coast-to-coast as “America’s Best Cook” for her mouth-watering recipes and delightful essays describing her bucolic domestic life as a happily married homemaker in rural Connecticut.
One day her ample and amiable publisher (Sydney Greenstreet), finding that his own family can’t come home for the season, and that he has a lead on a returning war hero (Dennis Morgan), hits upon a brilliant plan: why not invite the man to spend Christmas with him on the idyllic farm of America’s best cook? He’ll get himself a great human-interest story and a fabulous Christmas dinner all in one go!
There’s just one small problem: Lane doesn’t actually have a house in Connecticut. She’s unmarried, lives in New York City, and couldn’t cook to save her life (she gets her recipes from a chef friend down the street). Her columns are complete fiction, and if her scrupulously upright boss ever found out, that’s the end of her career. Desperate to save face, she enlists a couple friends to fake-up the perfect Christmas for her employer at a friend’s Connecticut farm. Things are complicated even further when she finds herself falling in love with the war hero.
A light, sweet, charming little romantic comedy, this is a classic ‘zany scheme’ film in which the humor comes from watching the characters struggle frantically to prop up a tottering edifice of deceit. Stanwyck and Morgan (both big stars in their time) have great chemistry and are a lot of fun to watch. Stanwyck is especially funny as she tries to maintain a mask of competence while actually being completely out of her depth.
Of course, anyone who knows how charming and funny Greenstreet could be even when playing sociopathic villains (e.g. The Maltese Falcon) can readily imagine how delightful he is as a roly-poly businessman. An entertaining supporting cast includes British actor Reginald Gardiner as Stanwyck’s nebbish would-be fiancée and veteran character actors S.Z. Sakall (best known as Carl the waiter from Casablanca) and Una O’Connor (the sharp-tongued Irishwoman from every film made between 1930 and 1950) as “Uncle Felix” the chef and Norah the maid, respectively.
Meanwhile, the film offers for real what the characters try to fake up: a quintessentially American Christmas, with snow covered landscapes, gorgeously decorated trees, carols, sleigh-rides (yes, it is a one-horse open sleigh), and, of course, sumptuously cooked meals: it’s a Currier and Ives picture print brought to life.
“What a Christmas! Ho ho! What a Christmas!”
3. The Shop Around the Corner
A particularly relevant film for those of us on CatholicMatch, this is a movie about the difference between meeting someone by letter and meeting them face-to-face, the unreliability of early impressions, and the need to seek out a person’s true character before you judge them. Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart star as coworkers in a Budapest gift shop owned by the stern-but-fair Frank Morgan (the wonderful Wizard of Oz himself). Stewart is a senior, experienced worker; Sullivan is an over-enthusiastic newcomer, and, naturally, they loathe each other almost from the beginning.
The thing is, though, they’re also in love with each other, though they don’t know it yet. They have been exchanging letters through a ‘lonely hearts’ ad in the newspaper, neither knowing the other’s name, but each deeply attracted to the person they are writing to. The question is, which will turn out to be their real relationship: the one they have in person, or the one they have by mail?
This is a very sweet and very funny film. The romance is immensely charming; Stewart and Sullavan have good chemistry (they were players in the same stock company before making it in Hollywood), and are both extremely engaging actors playing expertly sketched characters.
Mixed in with the sweetness is a lot of great comedy. Anyone who’s worked in retail will laugh a lot, especially at the scenes where the characters switch in an instant from shouting at each other to fawning politeness as a customer shows up. The clashing personalities of the two leads, and the misunderstandings that result, are another great source of humor, as is the clever dialogue.
Meanwhile, like Jimmy Stewart’s other great Christmas movie there is a surprisingly dark lead up to the happy ending, involving hypocrisy, infidelity, and an attempted suicide. Typical of the film’s quirky humanism is the fact that the attempt is averted, not by a jolly angel, but by an annoying shop boy.
The ins and outs of everyday people, both their surface appearances and hidden depths, are the film’s main theme as each character discovers the reality behind the others’ facades. Sometimes they’re pretty much what they seem to be, but other times the exterior hides a completely different person, whether a sensitive and poetic soul behind a prosaic facade, or a heartless liar under a cheerful face.
Also like that other Christmas movie, there is a strong emphasis on friendship and the camaraderie of people who have worked together a long time and care about one another. From the very first moments we have a perfect sense of the bond between these characters, and we soon grow to feel like we’re among old friends as well.
“You know, people seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.”
Merry Christmas everybody!
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