Have yourself a merrier Christmas with some old movies! Bring friends & family together with America’s famous middlebrow works of art! I have new Christmas movie writing coming up this week for my friends at the Acton Institute, but to begin with, here is a series of essays I wrote on Old Hollywood Christmas movies & their 90’s remakes.
Genuinely Christian Christmas movies are difficult to make, partly because faith is such a serious matter. Movies cannot do it justice. Movies have to obey a certain realism about our lives & do their work by creating plausible images—whereas Christmas is, in the faith, the most miraculous moment. The most movies can do is portray our predicaments & thus get at our faith indirectly.
This is all in The Bishop’s Wife, made by Sam Goldwyn, then a very famous producer, after a ’20s novel. Cary Grant starred, who was a great box office draw, a genuine star—beautiful & out of reach. He plays the angel convincingly. He was not only extraordinarily handsome, which was rare then, but he also had grace of movement & comic timing. What he had never done before was turn beauty to a higher purpose, to suggest divine authority. To judge by the evidence of the movie, this came easily to him.
I began the series with The Bishop’s Wife (1947), a story about church, the community of the faithful, and spiritual responsibility. Next, a less lofty subject, the community of the workplace & the life of commerce, but a much better movie, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), one of the classics of old Hollywood, directed by Ernst Lubitsch & starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as shopkeepers who fall in love over Christmas.
The story, if you can believe it, is set in Central Europe, in Budapest, in a leather goods shop, where we meet half a dozen men & women who work together & come to share their joys & sorrows, & whose livelihoods depend especially on seasonal sales. The movie starts with the summer sales, when a young woman in search of a job is hired, Sullavan, & ends with the Christmas sales, when Stewart is finally promoted to manage the prospering shop, a reward for his honesty & decency. In between, they quarrel in person & woo by letter, anonymously; they also break then give to each other their hearts. Christmas brings them joy & consolation, as it does the rest of the cast, whom we gradually come to think of as a family.
I continue my series on old Hollywood Christmas movies. After a movie about church as a community, The Bishop’s Wife(1947), & the workplace as a community, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), I turn to a movie about family, the smallest but most natural community: Christmas in Connecticut (1945), starring Barbara Stanwyck, one of the great Hollywood stars, Sydney Greenstreet (the Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon & Casablanca), & Dennis Morgan.
With WWII coming to a close, men were returning to America & to home, to a domestic life for which they had made such sacrifices & that was to be their reward. Morgan plays one such man, whose sacrifices included starvation, & who dreams of nothing but homecooked meals. So, while convalescing in the hospital, reduced to eating baby food so his stomach will recover, he starts reading America’s favorite homemaking columnist & dreams of those recipes. Then, in a bid to make him really appreciate home (& settle down with her), his nurse writes to the columnist’s publisher that it would be really nice if this heroic young man could experience Christmas with America’s ideal housewife & her family. The publisher finds the opportunity too good to miss. It says thank you for your service. It’s great publicity once it hits the papers. & it allows the publisher himself to be part of those delicious meals. Thus we get to see Christmas on a farmhouse in the bosom of the ideal family, in Connecticut, no less, the magical land where romantic comedy happens in Hollywood movies.
My Christmas movies series has hitherto considered church (The Bishop’s Wife), work (The Shop Around the Corner), & family (Christmas in Connecticut), the communities that constitute America. I’ll conclude with the most famous American Christmas fairy tale of all, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), in which faith, commerce, & even marriage are all in trouble, as they are today. The story is straightforward but unpredictable: the real Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) takes a job as a store Santa, a step down from myth, but a more reliable method of Christmas toy delivery, but his loving dedication to children & therefore to the families who want to make them happy lands him in court—he barely gets off on a technicality!
Kringle finds out that modernization is making it harder for people to believe in Christmas—materialism is replacing joy. Although Americans accept him on the democratic basis of equality, they can’t believe he’s Santa himself. In fact, if you’re not Progressive, you might think this movie less endearingly entertaining than shockingly prophetic. It was hilarious to put Santa on trial in 1947, but we dare not laugh when the Little Sisters of the Poor (or some guy running a cakeshop) have to defend religious freedom against federal government attacks. So we should consider the movie together with the changes that have occurred over the three postwar generations.
My newest, out today at the Acton Institute, is about Bogart’s Christmas movie: WE’RE NO ANGELS!
As is expected in comedies—& this one is practically a fairy tale, from the exotic location onward—all troubles will be solved by the time the curtain falls. Three criminals, with their morbid humor, provide a necessary correction to the innocent middle-class family. It’s almost a commedia del’arte, with the wicked rich Pantaloon set against the pair of young lovers, & the clever servants solving their problems & mocking unjust authority figures. It reminded me of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown short story of just such a comedy, The Flying Stars.
In We’re No Angels, the watchful eye & sly stratagems of Bogart & his sidekicks turn out to save Christmas, one sleight of hand at a time. They do everything from cooking dinner to cooking the books, from helping a budding romance by moonlight to preempting a miscarriage of justice in broad daylight. The charms of the actors & the humor of the dialogue help the movie considerably, & Curtiz shows his gift for directing comedy in the ease with which everything is pulled off. Watching it again, I applauded the competence & faultlessness of the acting; one almost wants to say that these are professionals free of pretense, charming the family audience in Technicolor.