Each year the Christmas season brings back to TV all the traditional holiday classics from Miracle on 34thStreet 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.
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