I must be a terrible grouch…er, Grinch…this season.  I’m not into Christmas movies at all, though I do have a soft spot for A Christmas Story (you can thank or blame me and my former TNT colleagues for the 24 hour ACS marathon stunt which continues to this day, but on a different network).  I also used to enjoy watching It’s a Wonderful Life, before it was purloined by NBC amid copyright squabbles and now has virtually disappeared from any real popular consciousness.  It used to be a ubiquitous presence during the holidays, played on every station that could get hold of a public domain copy, and people fell in love with it.  Now that it’s securely all nice and legal, it’s gone back to being only a movie for film buffs, and that’s a shame.  NBC won the battle, but they lost the war on that one.  (The photo is a neat Xmas sign my Dad put up one year on our front porch — Bugs’ arm hoisted one up, too!) READ MORE

This year, some might wish more longingly for one fewer excursion in search of something perfect for that special someone or for reasons to be rushing around. Whenever the charged emotions and high expectations overwhelm me at the holidays, I find myself looking for some forms of escape, which, of course, may sometimes be a movie.

There’s a part of me that craves the films of my youth at Christmas, even though not all of them have anything to do with the holiday.  This entry in our Movie Morlocks blogathon generally falls under the heading of Movies I Loved as a Kid (and still do). Intellectually, I can see that each of these films acknowledges that there are similar themes in each person’s life of paradise lost, found, and rediscovered, as well as the mysterious serendipitous events  that connect us and and occasionally give us a glimpse of a deeper understanding of the ebb and flow of life. Having seen more in real life–especially this last year–I can also cherish my visceral, wholly instinctive reaction to these stories and the feelings that they evoke as they unspool on film.  Perhaps you can too :

Mighty Joe Young (1949) is indelibly imprinted on my memory’s hard drive. This film, which used to be broadcast every year at the holidays, is a less ambitious successor to King Kong (1933) with many members of the original team lending a hand, including director Ernest B. Schoedsack, writer and producer Merian C. Cooper, and creator of the original Kong models, Special Effects master, Willis O’Brien. Interestingly, the legendary Ray Harryhausen was “first technician” on this movie, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, he saw “Joe as young, mischievous and unaware of his own strength”. I think that Harryhausen, O’Brien and the other special effects men did a great job of making Mighty Joe a more expressive, sensitive, and less adult creature than Kong was in the 1930s pre-code production.

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I am loath to watch anything twice; I’m a compiler, so anything that I willingly watch over and over again is an exception to my rule.  Therefore, my habit of choosing to view the same movies and programs each Christmas holiday season is unusual.  While not all of the following are movies (in the strictest sense), a Christmas without seeing these shows would be breaking a holiday tradition for me.  So here they are: 

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 I had more trouble making this list than I did finding Christmas presents for everyone. My initial list seemed so “normal” that I was disappointed with it. I kept thinking there must be films out there that I had forgotten about.  I looked at endless lists of Christmas movies online; I looked at anti-Christmas lists; I looked through catalogues of movie titles. For awhile, I got hung up on looking for really “special” movies — highly regarded classics, the rare, the bizarre.  But, then I decided that this was not in keeping with the spirit of the blogathon topic.

 Perhaps part of the problem is that I am ambivalent about Christmas; for many reasons, I truly dread this holiday, and this Christmas has been more difficult than usual. On the other hand, I know there will be genuine moments of joy, such as when the carolers come around to my mother’s house in the country and serenade us. I was torn between those favorites that make me feel like there really could be peace and good will on earth, and those that remind me that there won’t be.  Finally, I decided to include both.  Some are Christmas movies that are festive, warm-hearted, and joyful; others are anti-Christmas in their cynicism, dreary mood, or pessimism.

 So, for what it’s worth, below is my list of movies that make the holidays go smoothly for me. . . or, at least, faster. 

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I remember spending one perfectly nice Christmas day in my dark basement watching Cannibal Holocaust. Now, aside for that whole business of eating the body of Christ during the Last Supper, this was clearly not a Eucharist-themed movie spree I was engaged in (although, hey! - there’s an idea)… Nah, this was just a bloody and depressing mistake on my part - but one I was able to indulge in since my family celebrates Christmas Eve together and then leaves me to my own devices on Christmas proper. While I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to watch this December 25th, there’s a good chance it’ll be on the dark side because, to make a cliche out of appropriate movie titles, Bad Habits.. Die Hard. It’s not that I’m a nihilist myself, but I do feel a kinship to those who might smuggle in a copy of Nietzsche to a Sunday mass so as to appreciate the sermon that much more. With that in mind, here are my (unholy) three, in - of course - descending order: READ MORE

Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn in DESK SET

I don’t know about you but in my family there were certain rituals practiced every year during the Christmas holiday that included a traditional meal on Christmas eve (roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, green beans with tiny onion rings, fruit salad and sweet potato casserole with baked marshmellow topping - who came up with this?) and the inevitable Christmas film viewing. It was usually either MIRACLE ON 34^TH STREET or the 1938 Reginald Owen version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. During my pre-teen years, I usually looked forward to this ritual and as the years passed some new films would occasionally usurp the old such as Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or Laurel and Hardy’s MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS (1934) aka BABES IN TOYLAND. Sooner or later, though, the annual Yuletide film viewing can get stale so in later years I started screening movies that venture beyond the holiday focus with an occasional return to the tried and true. Below are a few of my favorites that still have a bit of holiday cheer or gloom (depending on your mood preference) and just might help you liven up a ritual that has become a boring habit.       READ MORE

Not everybody loves the holidays… and I’m not just talking about those cranks in Al-Qaeda.  The rush to shop and entertain or even just to attend countless house and office soirees, school pageants, key parties and gubernatorial keggers can be overwhelming.  While some folks get blue at Christmas, others get angry and still others get even, dressing in blood-stained Santa Claus costumes and wielding fire axes.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the holidays are here and have to be dealt with or at least gotten through.  We Movie Morlocks are going to spend these last days before December 25th offering up a wealth of movie suggestions to help you make your way through the Yuletide.  Let us begin. READ MORE

Van Johnson had, according to my mother’s sarcastic remark whenever she saw him in an old movie, “a face like a bowl of corn flakes”, meaning wholesome and familiar, if not necessarily something you’d want as daily fare.

Despite this early attempt to influence my taste for what Mom undoubtedly believed was “the better”, I liked the guy. There was something about the man that struck me as sympathetic. He seemed, like many of us sometimes are, to be a bit awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin, sometimes irritable when he meant to be direct, uncertain when most of Hollywood’s movies insisted on self-confidence in their leading men. In  later roles, inarticulate restlessness was occasionally used to good advantage by perceptive filmmakers, who tapped into an edgier side of the increasingly less boyish man.

MGM studio, ever on the lookout for a new boy-next-door,  produced a flock of these seemingly harmless young men on their assembly line in the ’40s. There was Tom Drake, James Craig, Don Taylor, and even a British version of the type in Peter Lawford, all on prominent display during and after the war in movies that emphasized their polite if bland niceness and their passing resemblance to other stars, (i.e. James Craig as “Clark Gable Lite”). Some went on to smaller roles once the studio system broke up, some moved into the production end of the business and some left acting entirely. One of the actors marketed most prominently as the “nicest” of all these boys was Van Johnson, who died last week at age 92. READ MORE

I own a copy of René  Cardona’s SANTA CLAUS (1959) on DVD and yet there I was, sitting up at midnight on December 16th, less than 10 days to go until Christmas, watching the darn thing in bits and pieces on YouTube.  I’m twelve kinds of fascinated with this movie - have you ever seen it?  You’d remember it if you have… it’s the one with The Devil! READ MORE