Best Classic Christmas films

A Christmas Carol from 1935, there's the full version, and a cut version, both work but when and where possible, always watch the full version.

Desk Set, with Tracy and Hepburn, isn't actually a Christmas Movie. But a good portion of it involves Christmas party atmosphere in the work place. It's a film that I love to watch this time of year.

Meet Me in St. Louis, also has a lengthy segment that is devoted to Christmas celebrations.

It's a Wonderful Life
White Christmas
A Christmas Carol (1938)
Scrooge (1951)
Meet Me in St. Louis
The Shop Around the Corner
Holiday Inn
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Bell, Book and Candle
Babes in Toyland (1961)

Heard of this last year--want to check it out. Goes by the title "Scrooge."

Movies that aren't really about Christmas, but have a Christmas setting:

Moonstruck: The holidays are never mentioned in the film, but the carriage horses at the Met are all wearing Santa hats.



Trading Places: Christmas is coming, and Eddie Murphy is concerned about the investors being worried about being able to afford the GI Joes with the Kung Fu grip for their kids for Christmas. The indelible holiday image this film presents, though, is Dan Aykroyd, as a drunken Santa, getting that slab of salmon or whatever it was stuck in his ratty beard.

Actual holiday films:
  
Miracle on 34th Street (1947): Some Christmas films get away with being sloppily sentimental or corny, which is excusable because, well, it's Christmas. But this movie doesn't take that easy way out--it's actually a sharp, clever movie with equal parts sentimentality and
cynicism. A review of it mentioned that nearly every adult in the movie uses Santa to his/her own ends--from Doris, who needs a Santa for her job and patronizes the old guy; to Fred, who just wants to get with Doris; to Mr. Macy, who doesn't want a scandal attached to his store; to the judge who doesn't want to lose the upcoming election. Even the climax of the film is the result of a postal worker who doesn't
want to deal with letters to Santa, so he sends the mail to the courthouse. There are moments of real seriousness--while most of them went over the heads of child viewers, adult audiences at the time were likely more aware of what happened to the little Dutch orphan who talks with Santa; they would have known immediately about her past as soon as the mother mentions Rotterdam. Alfred is accused, by the psychologist, of borderline perversion when the "doctor" implies that he has ulterior motives for enjoying his time with little children. These moments are balanced with lots of funny scenes and great performances
by everyone, even actors in the smallest of parts--Mrs. Shellhammer, with her "simply charming" invitation to Kringle; the psychologist's secretary who has developed the same nervous tic of plucking at her eyebrows that her boss has, etc. And in the end, the story of having faith and believing that most people are capable of being good in the long run is a lovely moral for the Christmas season, and every other season. Beware the 1994 remake!! I attempted to watch that mess once and only got through the first half hour before switching it off.

A Christmas Story--A great holiday movie, maybe because it's not the sentimental, heartwarming movie it at first appears to be. Jean Shepherd was a cynical curmudgeonly type whose radio monologues (which I used to listen to for a few years in the 1970s) could get pretty dark, so on my first viewing of this movie, I thought it was somewhat sanitized and childish. Repeat viewings, however, bring out the underside of the story--it's really about disappointment and how things generally don't work out, but you just put up with them, especially when you're a kid and you can still look at Christmas with an unjaundiced gaze. Ralphie discovering that the Ovaltine company's decoder ring is a gimmick to hoodwink kids into buying their product is a disillusionment that all kids have to experience at some point; his reaction--"Son of a bitch!" is one of the few times, IMO, that a profanity in a movie is completely justified (and genuinely funny). One of Shepherd's last lines in the film--when he says that his rifle was "the best gift that I ever received...or would ever receive" implies that it was all kind of downhill from there. Still, the movie remains charming.

There are also the two contributions of the Johns family to the list of great holiday films. Mervyn Johns, as Bob Cratchit in the 1951 Scrooge aka A Christmas Carol, gives a memorable performance as Scrooge's loyal clerk, whose attempts to remain upbeat and cheerful make his breakdown in the Christmas yet to come sequence of the film that much more heartbreaking. Of course, Alastair Sim is the greatest Scrooge ever.
Over forty years later, Johns' daughter, Glynis Johns, is memorably rotten as the sniping mother-in-law in The Ref,a dark obscenity-filled comedy starring Denis Leary as a burglar who tries to rob the wrong house at Christmastime--it's occupied by a dysfunctional family he ends up counseling (to the mother-in-law: "Your husband didn't die, lady...He's hidin'"). For those who like their holiday movies with a little more bite, but don't want to go as low as Bad Santa.

They don't come with edges much more razor-sharp than Psycho.



The view of Phoenix through Marion Crane's windshield on an unseasonably warm December 11th.

You may recall multiple dialogue references to the heat in early scenes, but when the second unit got to Phoenix in late '59, the city already had its street decorations up. Rather than send them back again after the holidays, the story goes that an unconcerned Hitchcock merely decided to set the story in December, which was established just after the opening credits (Phoenix, Arizona...Friday, December the Eleventh...Two Forty-Three P.M.), so those incidental indicators are the only acknowledgement of the season that the film - which happens to conclude five days before Xmas - makes. 

Just something to be filed under Overlooked Film Trivia.
 

A similar film in my XMAS watching is the 1935 version of A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Released in the Christmas season, this production adds a sequence where Lucie Manette invites the bar-hopping drunk Sydney Carton to Christmas Mass. The scene is used to show Sydney falling for Lucie and realizing his potential to be a better man. "O Come All Ye Faithful" becomes his theme piece, playing when he tells Lorry about his plan to sacrifice himself, and it's the ending piece played after "Tis a Far Far Better Thing..." line.

There are also the Christmas scenes in LITTLE WOMEN (1933 and 1949) Both under the same script, the films begin in the holiday. The 1949 version has the March sisters go on a $1 shopping spree and sing "They Came Upon A Midnight Clear" on the way home. They then go back for refunds to buy their mother gifts. 

Mr. Johns also appeared in a Christmas episode of THE AVENGERS (1966) "Too Many Christmas Trees" He plays a Dickens Fanboy who invites John Steed and Emma Peel to his mansion for the Holiday, with the Christmas Party being a masquerade for Dickens characters. He's Fezziwig. Steed is Sydney Carton. Emma is Oliver Twist.