Jeremy Arnold - Christmas in the Movies: 30 Classics to Celebrate the Season

The Christmas movie house of our memories, from A Christmas Story (1983)

The season, of course, can mean different things to different people, from compassion, togetherness, and nostalgia to commercialism, cynicism, and loneliness. All have been themes for great holiday movies ranging from farce to tender drama. Genre doesnt matter: musicals, westerns, fantasies, action, and horror tales can all become Christmas films with the right approach.

This book presents thirty of the best and most intriguing English-language holiday moviesbeloved classics, under-the-radar gems, and a few familiar titles you may not have considered for their yuletide slants. Some were made and marketed with their holiday content in mind; many others were released with barely a mention of Christmas. A few take place entirely on the holiday; in others, its only a short part of the running time.

For all their differences, they share some interesting patterns and similarities. Nearly half these films, for instance, were released in the 1940s. Christmas no doubt resonated on the screen in those years because it was so often used to represent romance, nostalgia, and the idea of a complete family unitall while millions of moviegoers were separated from loved ones or rebuilding their own families.

Family, in fact, is at the center of the vast majority of films profiled in this book. In Christmas movies, families form, grow, divide, and especially reunite. They can be generally loving (A Christmas Story) or highly dysfunctional (The Lion in Winter). They can be part of an idealized past (Meet Me in St. Louis) or reflect a more complicated present (The Holly and the Ivy). They can be made up of coworkers (The Shop Around the Corner) or even random strangers (Love Actually). Closely tied to family is the notion of the home, and as a result, many Christmas films prominently incorporate houses, sometimes to the point of the houses becoming charactersas in Holiday Inn, Christmas in Connecticut, and Home Alone. Remember the Night uses two houses, one inviting and one cold and dark, to make a point about the value of family. Its a Wonderful Life does the same, although thanks to a fantasy sequence, its the same house in each case!

Part of the fun of these films is in seeing recognizable elements of the season arise in different ways: office holiday parties, family dinners, the exchanging of presents, and department store Santas all take on entertainingly different tones from film to film. Even the idea of the bad Santa appears at least as early as Miracle on 34th Street, in a bit part played by Percy Helton. Holiday movies are also ripe for fantasy devices, with ghosts, angels, disembodied voices, and supernatural creatures popping up in Beyond Tomorrow, The Bishops Wife, Gremlins, and others. (Squirrels, for some odd reason, are played for laughs in three pictures. Who knew?)

The lonelier, more cynical aspects of the season are covered as well, sometimes with biting honesty, as in The Apartmentone of four titles that contain attempted or contemplated suicides. Even after countless viewings, Its a Wonderful Life tends to shock us with the trauma it inflicts upon James Stewart and many other characters. Stewarts transformation is so powerful that the joy and uplift of the ending blot out thoughts of the films darker sectionswhich, of course, have helped to make the joy all the more stirring.