Holiday Film Favorites

 

Each year the Christmas season brings back to TV all the traditional holiday classics from Miracle on 34^thStreet on Thanksgiving Day to Frank Capra’s beloved It’s a Wonderful Life, right before Christmas. It’s hard for me to watch the latter anymore because I cry too much, but here are some other favorites for holiday viewing.

The Shop Around the Corner: This film premiered on January 12, 1940 but must be placed with the great films associated with 1939, the “annus mirabilis” of Hollywood’s Golden age. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it received no Academy awards and appears to have been a box-office flop. Today, it has become an enduring holiday classic. The wit and subtlety of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” is clearly evident. Lubitsch turns All-American boy Jimmy Stewart, and co-star Margaret Sullavan into believable clerks in a Budapest dry-goods store who unwittingly fall in love via mail. Both actors gave unforgettable performances but neither gained even an Academy award nomination. The rest of the cast was equally fine, especially Felix Brassart as a co-worker, and William Tracy as a savvy delivery boy. The film ends fittingly as the two lovers are united on Christmas Eve as snowflakes fall on The Shop Around the Corner.

Remember the Night. Barbara Stanwyck stars with Fred MacMurray in this little known 1940 romantic comedy set in the holiday season. Stanwyck plays a shoplifter on trial before District Attorney MacMurray, but circumstances lead them to spend the holidays together. In this film, written by Preston Sturges, who subsequently  went on to become a famous director, Stanwyck transformed her character from a petty thief to a self-sacrificing heroine. The fine cast includes Beulah Bondi, Sterling Holloway, and Elizabeth Patterson.

I’ll Be Seeing You: This 1944 film is a Holiday drama with film noir trappings. Two strangers meet on a train, but she is a woman with a past and he is a soldier suffering from war wounds, both physical and mental. She is travelling home to spend the holidays with family, and he, with no particular destination in mind, gets off at her stop in hope of seeing her again. The film stars Ginger Rogers, who turned to dramatic roles after the break-up of her great dancing partnership with Fred Astaire. Rogers had won a Best Actress award in 1941 for her performance in Kitty Foyle, but I believe she is much better in this film. Joseph Cotton, fresh off his roles in Citizen Kane, and The Magnificent Ambersons, is equally fine. Director William Dieterle not only brings out the chemistry between the two stars, but also gets the most out of a fine supporting cast, including a teen-age Shirley Temple. The film’s theme song, the popular wartime melody, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” helped make it a huge hit at the box-office, but it is largely forgotten today. 

The Holly and the Ivy. Celia Johnson, Ralph Richardson, and Margaret Leighton star in this 1952 British holiday film. A widowed minister is torn between the needs of his family and his parishioners, but his three grown children must decide between their own needs and those of their aging father.  All comes to a head on Christmas Eve as the annual family reunion exposes the long simmering family tensions. Based on a hit London play, this film is not as well known as less serious holiday films.  

The Big Little Jesus: Dragnet was a hugely popular TV series that premiered in 1951. It’s film noir trappings and low key, realism made it a long-running police procedural, perhaps the most influential of all time. In its third season, it featured a Christmas special, entitled, “The Big Little Jesus.” Two police detectives, played by Jack Webb, the show’s creator and star, and Ben Alexander, receive a call on Christmas Eve to investigate the theft of a figure of the baby Jesus from a creche in a largely Hispanic church in downtown Los Angeles. 

The half-hour episode begins with the familiar Dragnet theme over a panorama of Los Angeles, followed by the famous opening lines: “This is the city, I work here, I’m a cop.” The detectives dutifully track down the leads and interview the ordinary suspects in typical Dragnet style, but to no avail. Finally, they return to the church with the bad news that the beloved figure of the baby Jesus will not be part of the Christmas celebration.  Before every episode, it is claimed that “the story we are about to see is true.” If that is correct, this true story is far more moving than most of the other favorite fictional holiday stories. It can be seen on YouTube.

Radio Days: My favorite New Year’s film has long been Swing Time, the greatest of all the 1930s musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The beautiful dancing, the great songs, and the look at a world of class and elegance that has long disappeared makes it a wonderful way to usher in the New Year. However, I would place Woody Allen’s Radio Daysright up there as required New Year’s viewing. Allen wrote and directed this 1987 film that provides a nostalgic and often hilarious view of the world of his youth, a world that coincided with the glory days of radio back in the late 30s and early 40s.

Three Jewish sisters and their families live together with their elderly parents in a large house in the Jewish section of Rockaway, a remote beach community in New York’s borough of Queens. The story is narrated by Allen as the world in which these people live is seen through memories of his boyhood. Although the extended family and its life are far removed from glitzy Manhattan, they are connected with its life and culture through the radio which created a common culture for the extremely diverse city. 

Julie Kavner, Diane Wiest, and Rene Lippin play the three sisters. I grew up in Queens back then, and these three women reminded me of my mother’s three sisters who lived with their families in my Italian grandparent’s home. We tuned in to the same radio shows, read the same newspapers with their comics, and listened to the same melodies featured on the soundtrack of Radio Days. At the finale, the film takes us to a Manhattan night club where revelers are ushering in the year 1944 in the midst of World War II. Diane Keaton sings, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”

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PS. I like to watch these films on DVD but I believe most are available on streaming services. 

Review: Ken Burns, Leonardo Da Vinci

A few years ago I attended a lecture at my local senior center about Renaissance art given by a young art historian. The room was full and I thought she did a fine job except when she discussed  Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. She gave the standard interpretation that claims that Leonardo depicted the moment when Christ tells the Apostles that one of them will betray Him. 

Afterwards, I went up to her and asked if she was familiar with the interpretation of famed twentieth century art historian Leo Steinberg in which he argued that Leonardo depicted the institution of the Eucharist, and the Apostles startled reaction to the words, "This is My Body...this is My Blood." Her answer was puzzling. She said that she was familiar with Steinberg's interpretation but thought that her audience would not be able to handle it.

I thought of her words the other day when I watched the section on The Last Supper in documentarian Ken Burns' four-part series on Leonardo that aired on PBS. Burns also failed to mention Steinberg's magisterial interpretation that has been around for years. Why? Burns is so popular that he can do virtually anything he wants on PBS. Could he and his art history advisors have been ignorant of the Eucharistic interpretation? Or do he and they and the PBS audience find it difficult to handle?

Burns and other moderns believe Leonardo to be a great genius but what would they think if Leonardo, like most people of his time, actually believed that Christ meant it when he said "This is My Body," or what would they think if Leonardo, again like most people of his time, believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? What kind of a genius would it be who could hold beliefs that in the eyes of moderns appear to be ignorant, and superstitious? In Steinberg's words:

"Ideal art was believed to reveal humane truths which the service of religion could only divert and distort. And it was again in Leonardo in whom these highest artistic goals, originally embodied in ancient Greece, seemed reaffirmed. In this projection of nineteenth-century values upon Renaissance art, the masterworks of the Renaissance were reduced to intelligible simplicity, and Leonardo’s Last Supper became (nothing but) a behavioral study of twelve individuals responding to psychic shock."

In other words, modern secularist believe that  Leonardo spent two years of his life creating a magnificent mural for a monastic dining room, but deliberately left out any religious meaning or significance. In Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, Leo Steinberg demonstrated that Leonardo did just the opposite. For those who can see, Leonardo told the whole story of the Passion. Here is just one example. 

Christ becomes the capstone of a great central pyramid… And midway between the…slopes of Christ's arms and the floor lines that transmit their momentum, exactly halfway, there lies the bread, and there lies the wine.

Below I append a review of Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper that originally appeared on this site ten years ago. \

The damage to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper is well known. Even after the most recent restoration the huge fresco that measures over 29 by 15 feet is in such perilous condition that viewing access is strictly controlled and limited. 

We know from early copies that much of Leonardo’s work has been irretrievably lost or covered. Early on, the feet of Christ and the Apostles had so disappeared that the monks had no reluctance to put a door in the wall under the figure of Christ. We know of this from copies but even the earliest copies are often unreliable.  They either omit or alter certain important details. Finally, although the painting is still in its original venue, it is impossible to replicate the monk’s dining room and see the painting as its original viewers would have seen it.

Compared to the physical damage that Leonardo’s work has suffered, the interpretive damage has been even greater. Since the eighteenth century art historians and critics have generally believed that in the Last Supper, Leonardo depicted the moment immediately following Christ’s announcement of his betrayal. Over 50 years ago in the very popular series of Metropolitan Museum seminars in Art, critic John Canaday wrote,

The Last Supper is a great picture with a religious subject. That is not exactly the same thing as saying that The Last Supper is a great religious picture, which it is not…. Nor did Leonardo intend it to be one. In all reverence he conceived of the moment when Christ says to his disciples, “One of you will betray me”, as a moment of unparalleled human drama. 

Even today, a quick web search shows that the lead Wikipedia article begins with the following pronouncement.

“The Last Supper specifically portrays the reaction given by each apostle when Jesus said one of them would betray him.” 

It was this common but mistaken interpretation that the late Leo Steinberg set out to repair in an extended essay, “Leonardo’s Last Supper,” that appeared in the Art Quarterly in 1973. Almost thirty years later in 2001 he published his definitive revised update, “Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper.” Steinberg’s thesis was controversial but anyone reading “Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper” today would have to acknowledge that it is a revolutionary masterpiece by one of the greatest art historians of the twentieth century. [i]

Steinberg took on an academic tradition that had been entrenched ever since the time of the Enlightenment. In a famous essay German philosopher and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s claimed that Leonardo had depicted the psychological shock on the faces of the Apostles at the moment immediately following the announcement of the betrayal. Goethe’s interpretation had seemingly settled the matter for all future observers. Steinberg, however, blamed nineteenth century secularists for a profound mis-reading.

Ideal art was believed to reveal humane truths which the service of religion could only divert and distort. And it was again in Leonardo in whom these highest artistic goals, originally embodied in ancient Greece, seemed reaffirmed. In this projection of nineteenth-century values upon Renaissance art, the masterworks of the Renaissance were reduced to intelligible simplicity, and Leonardo’s Last Supper became (nothing but) a behavioral study of twelve individuals responding to psychic shock. [ii]

Reading Steinberg’s “Incessant Last Supper” not only brings one deeper and deeper into a great masterpiece, but also deeper and deeper into the mind and culture of the genius who was Leonardo. Beginning with the general principle “that nothing in Leonardo’s Last Supper is trivial,” Steinberg asserted that the subject of the picture was the whole story of the Last Supper; the Institution of the Eucharist, the Passion, and the significance of it all to the viewer.

To  illustrate his thesis I would like to concentrate on Steinberg’s analysis of Leonardo’s portrayal of the Apostles. Leonardo obviously knew his Apostles and the legends that had grown up about them. Their appearance, their gestures, and their placement show that they are reacting in their own characteristic way to the announcement, “This is My Body…Take and eat.”

From left to right the Apostles are Bartholomew, James (the eventual head of the Church in Jerusalem), Andrew, Peter, Judas, and John. On the other side there are James (the son of Zebedee), Thomas (who has thrust himself ahead of James), Philip, Matthew, Thaddeus (sometimes called Jude), and Simon.

Much of the detail of the original has been lost but an anonymous copy c. 1550, gives a very good look at the hands and feet of the 13 men in the picture. Steinberg’s stressed the significance not only of the feet of Christ but of the Apostles. Christ’s feet are central and larger and they announce his impending crucifixion. The feet of the Apostles are there to be washed but also represent their role and future destiny.

this very night, each of these feet is washed and wiped dry by the Master. In view of the gospel…how negligible can these feet be; surely, this is their hour![iii]

While he stressed the importance of viewing Christ and the Apostles as a whole, Steinberg also broke them down into groups of six, three and two, and discussed the various relationships in these groups. Here are some examples.

 Let’s start with the triad of Simon, Thaddeus, and Matthew on our right at the end of the table.  

A flotilla of six open hands in formation strains toward Christ, as if in immediate response to the word “take!” ….the Communion of the Apostles is imminent.[iv]

Hands take on special significance. The “affinity” of the left hand of Thaddeus to the left hand of Christ “leaps to the eye.”

Thaddeus’ hand toward Christ; Christ’s toward us. It is missing a lot to dismiss the correspondence as accidental.

Feet, hands, even fingers are important. In the triad at Christ’s left hand (Philip, Thomas, James) the finger of Thomas, who has thrust himself forward toward Jesus, is a veritable sign marker, “the finger destined to verify the Resurrection, the Christian hope….“

this upright finger occurs in Leonardo’s rare paintings no less than four times, invariably pointing to heaven…The steeple finger is Leonardo’s trusted sign of transcendence…[v]

The triad closest to Christ’s right hand includes Peter who denies, Judas who betrays, and John who remains to the end at the foot of the Cross.

The inner triad refers to imminent Crucifixion. It contains the dark force that sets the Passion in motion, then, behind Judas, St. Peter. Peter’s right hand points the knife he will ply a few hours hence at the arrest. And the interlocking hands of the beloved disciple are pre-positioned for their grieving on Calvary.

None of these gestures can be explained as a reaction to the betrayal announcement.

Finally, no review can do justice to Steinberg’s discussion of the figure of Christ, who can no longer seen as a passive figure sitting back while the Apostles react to the betrayal announcement. 

as the person of Christ unites man and God, so his right hand summons the agent of his human death even as it offers the means of salvation….the Christ figure as agent—both hands actively molding his speech, and both directed at bread and wine…[vi]

Unfortunately, Goethe only saw the painting briefly in Milan. In his analysis he relied on a copy that left out the bread and wine of the Eucharist. For Steinberg, the institution of the Eucharist is central to the painting.

Christ becomes the capstone of a great central pyramid…And midway between the…slopes of Christ arms and the floor lines that transmit their momentum, exactly halfway, there lies the bread, and there lies the wine.[vii]

Steinberg backed up his interpretation with a virtuoso display of all the tools available to a modern art historian. He displayed a magisterial familiarity with the interpretive history; the texts; the traditional legends; the related paintings; and with the whole oeuvre of Leonardo. More than anything else, however, was his ability to immerse himself in the whole culture and devotion of Medieval and Renaissance Christianity.  He was born a Russian Jew and emigrated to America right after World War II. He somehow managed to graduate from Harvard and land a position at New York University where his original field was modern art. But he eventually gravitated to the Renaissance, and his integrity and great learning allowed him to see the “Last Supper” through the believing eyes of Leonardo’s contemporaries. 

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[i] Steinberg, Leo: Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, New York, 2001.

[ii] Ibid. p. 13.

[iii] Ibid. p. 61.

[iv] Except where otherwise noted this quotation and all the following can be found in the relevant sections of chapter IV, “the Twelve.”

[v] Ibid. p. 70.

[vi] Ibid. p. 57.

[vii] Ibid,. p. 58.