Notes on Some Yuletide Movies Without Family Gatherings

The established canon of "Christmas movies is comprised of It's A Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and A Christmas Story (1983), along with varying favorites versions of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (I go with the 1951 "Scrooge" with Alastair Sim in the title role). I discuss these and some other old favorites here.

When I looked on IMDB for the highest-rated movies with Christmas as a keyword (there are a total of 2858 titles!) , I got some surprises:

Citizen Kane, Stalag 17, Full Metal Jacket, Godfather I and II, Goodfellas, The English Patient, Jarhead

Inclusion of the last of these brought back to my mind the image of Jake Gylenhall shirtless with a red-and-white Santa hat, but I have no memory of Christmas connections in those other movies, though I don't doubt there were Christmas scenes in them. And "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" launches investigation interrupting a Christmas dinner.

Having written about some Yuletide-set movies with dysfunctional families here last year, I decided to write briefly about five Yuletide-set movies that do not show families, though there are other social bonds on display in them. Taking them chronologically (by release year):

One of my favorite Christmas movies is "Three Godfathers," directed by John Ford with John Wayne and Pedro Armenderiz. I had not realized that the story (by Peter B. Kyne's ) had been filmed before, and by William Wyler at that. (I thought that the rather bloated 1958 "The Big Country" was Wyler's only foray into making westerns.) The 1929 Hell's Heroes has the basic plot in a mere 68 minutes, and appears to have been shot on location, which was very difficult with the new very unwieldy sound cameras then. The head bank robber who finds a woman about to give birth by a dynamited empty spring was played by the always gruff Charles Bickford, who made many movies including big-scale westerns "The Big Country", "Duel in the Sun", and "The Unforgiven." Before "Dodsworth" in 1936 and such Bette Davis vehicles as "Jezebel," "The Letter," and "The Little Foxes," Wyler made many movies I've never seen nor heard anything about.

The Barbara Stanwyck comedy "Christmas In Connecticut " from 1945 has a plot even sillier than "The Mad Miss Manton." She plays a sort of 1940s magazine columnist prefiguring Martha Stewart... except that she cannot cook, change diapers, or anything else domestic. Her publisher, a gourmandizing but unsinsister Sydney Greenstreet decides she should make Christmas dinner for a sailor who has recently been rescued from a lifeboat after the ship he was on was torpedoed. Alas, Dennis Morgan is this "romantic lead." Stanwyck, professional chef S.Z. Sakall, and suspicious housekeeper Una O'Connor provide sit-com humor, though not as much as in Stanwyck's sort of poignant, sort of screwball comedy with Fred MacMurray, "Remember the Night" (1940).

"Battleground ," an ensemble MGM sound-stage-made movie (with second string MGM "stars"), directed by William Wellman in 1949), has a typically hokey generic "cross-section" US platoon thrown into what they don't know is the "Battle of the Bulge." The platoon (in typical generic fashion) grouses a lot, but rises to every challenge (of which there were a great many). It has the typically propagandistic uplifting ending and a lot of comic relief (and a bit of cheesecake) early on. The patently Cold War Christmas Day sermon ruined the attempts at realism for me. ("The Story of G. I. Joe", made in 1945 before the war was over, is Wellman's best WWII movie in my opinion, and on my list of best WWII movies focused on combatants.

Released in 1951, but shot two or three years earlier, "Double Dynamite " is a movie about a couple of bank tellers without enough pay to get married. That seems conventional enough, but the couple are Jane Russell and Frank Sinatra, who are about as convincing as Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino were as restaurant workers in "Frankie and Johnny" (1991).Speaking of restaurant workers, "Double Dynamite" has Groucho Marx as a wisecracking waiter. He has better lines than in the Marx Brothers movies of the 1940s and somehow manages not to leer at la Russell (whose rack is the only conceivable referent of the title). Sinatra and Russell play sweet kids in a sort of screwball comedy at a lower stratum than the classic screwball comedies. The movie starts on Dec. 23^rd, but Christmas is tangential to the plot's absurdities. There is an anemic duet by Sinatra and Russell from their beds in adjacent apartments and quite a bit of slapstick. Oddly, Russell seemed more uncomfortable than Sinatra, perhaps from warding off the advances of Howard Hughes? (3 stars, count them!)

"Joyeux Noël " (Merry Christmas, 2005, in French, German, and English; directed by Christian Carion ) shows what was Literally unimaginable to the World War I commanders of each of the armies comfortably in the rear, Christmas Eve ceasefires occurred and most everything, including what seems to most preposterous detail in the movie, is based on attested events that happened in 1914-16. I expected to resist the message of peace and good will in the midst of war and hatred and the slow start and not especially miserable trench life bolstered my resistance, but the peculiarity of what happened and the development of the combatant officers melted my resistance away. The war continued for another 47 months, but hostilities were suspended briefly by those on the lines: a genuine Christmas miracle of sorts.