78 movies | December 18-25
TCM’s 2022 Christmas marathon pulls together some eighty titles—a few shown more than once—over eight straight days and nights, culminating on Christmas Day itself. From musicals, comedies, poignant dramas, and charming romances to westerns, fantasies, film noir and pulpy thrillers, this marathon truly offers something for everyone.
“Christmas movie,” after all, means different things to different people. The label is subject to personal definition because Christmas films have not historically comprised a distinct genre. For some fans, the mere appearance of the season onscreen, no matter how brief, is enough to make a movie a Christmas movie. What this marathon illustrates so well, however, is the dividing line between movies that integrate the season in a way that contributes real meaning to the story, and those that simply use Christmastime as a backdrop or setting, perhaps to lend irony or cheer but not really as an essential component to the audience’s experience of the story being told.
Both modes of holiday films certainly make for entertaining viewing each December. Among the enjoyable holiday-set titles, Lady in the Lake (1946), Roadblock (1951), and Backfire (1950) are three examples of film noir that use the Christmas backdrop as counterpoint to downbeat, sinister stories. Lady on a Train (1945), an underrated noir-comedy-mystery-musical hybrid, goes a little further. Throughout a tale that is otherwise presented in a strongly atmospheric film-noir style, the film uses the holiday as fodder for humor and lightness—even finding room for Deanna Durbin to perform an exquisite rendition of “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve.
The holiday is also used intelligently in Penny Serenade (1941), a heartfelt marital drama directed by George Stevens, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as a couple who lose their child; Christmas appears at key moments to underscore this tragedy for the audience. Grant received his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his sensitive work here. He would be nominated once again but would never actually win a competitive Oscar, instead receiving an honorary award in 1970.
On the other end of the movie spectrum but just as underrated, The Silent Partner (1978) uses the holiday as a backdrop to a supremely entertaining and clever heist thriller. Christopher Plummer poses as a shopping mall Santa with a scheme to rob a bank, but bank teller Elliott Gould foils the robbery by slyly stealing some of the money himself and still coming across as a hero who saved the day. Plummer is now furious and out for revenge, and the two engage in an ongoing cat and mouse dynamic, with Gould extricating himself from danger over and over again. A pulpy, low-budget Canadian production written by Curtis Hanson and directed by Daryl Duke, The Silent Partner combines suspense, comedy, eroticism and even a scene of explicit horror. Somehow it all works, resulting in something of a guilty pleasure for fans craving a breather from romantic, nostalgic, more traditional yuletide fare.
Among the full-fledged Christmas movies in the TCM marathon—films which integrate the holiday deeply into their narratives and character journeys—Remember the Night (1940) remains one of the finest of the somewhat-below-the-radar titles. With a witty script by Preston Sturges produced and directed by Mitchell Leisen for Paramount, the movie is a first-rate blend of comedy and romance that pairs Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray for the first time. Their chemistry proved so strong that they would go on to team for three more films, including Double Indemnity (1944). Here, MacMurray plays a New York assistant district attorney who is prosecuting Stanwyck for shoplifting. With the trial interrupted for the Christmas holiday, MacMurray bails Stanwyck out and drives her to her childhood home in Indiana, as it’s right on the way to MacMurray’s own childhood home. Of course they fall in love as the story moves along, though hanging over their heads is the problem of how to resolve the shoplifting case when they return to New York.
But even beyond that plot twist, Remember the Night is one of the key Christmas movies because it uses the season to actually define the characters’ psychologies. The contrasts between their lives is shown in Christmas-movie terms: Stanwyck’s mom (Georgia Caine) is among the iciest and most unwelcoming in movie history, exactly what someone would not want on Christmas. MacMurray’s mom, played by wonderful Beulah Bondi (who also played James Stewart’s mother in 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life), is kindhearted and sympathetic to the max. Even the childhood houses are presented, lit and shot in such a way as to highlight the strong contrast between Christmas warmth and the total lack thereof. Leisen had started his career as an architect, art director and costume designer before transitioning to directing, and his experience in using these design elements to express story was key to the film’s success.
The same year, MGM released a film destined to become another beloved holiday classic: The Shop Around the Corner (1940). James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play bickering coworkers at a Budapest store who are meanwhile falling in love as anonymous pen pals. That setup allows for a richly satisfying exploration of human vulnerability, especially in terms of what one does and doesn’t allow to come to the fore. As Stewart says poignantly at one point, “People seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.”
The film was a deeply personal project for its producer-director, Ernst Lubitsch. He bought the rights to the underlying Hungarian play in 1938, with the intent of making it as an independent production. But no studio would agree to distribute it—until Lubitsch struck a deal with MGM to first direct Ninotchka (1939), with The Shop Around the Corner to follow. For Lubitsch, the film was a way to honor his father’s shop in Berlin, where Lubitsch had worked as a boy. Shop’s story progresses steadily towards Christmas, and as the holiday approaches, yuletide imagery begins to fill the frame more and more—as if the season itself is exerting an influence on Stewart and Sullavan, pushing them to be together romantically. Shop is also notable as a Christmas movie in which workplace employees come to feel like one big family, again spurred on by the season to treat each other with more kindness. Lubitsch later wrote of this film, “Never did I make a picture in which the atmosphere and the characters were truer”—strong words indeed from one of the greatest artists ever to work in Hollywood.
Family, of course, is at the heart of the vast majority of Christmas movies, with reunions of dysfunctional families among the most common themes of all. In the 1940s, however, the trend was not so much on dysfunctional families as it was on families trying to rebuild. World War II had torn families apart, and the second half of the decade saw millions of families coming together again, often without the loved ones who had gone off to war. Christmas became a popular element in stories that delved into this dynamic, since the holiday is so instantly relatable as a time of family togetherness.
One example that has steadily grown in popularity over the years is Holiday Affair (1949), produced and directed by Don Hartman and starring Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh, who was just 22 at the time. The film was clearly an attempt by RKO to capitalize on the success of Fox’s Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Like that classic, Holiday Affair centers on a single working mother with a young child in Manhattan. Both films prominently incorporate department stores and their owners, and devote much time to their child characters. But while Miracle touches on fantasy and explores the child in all of us, Holiday Affair is geared more toward adults, and adult-relationship issues. Leigh, whose character is a young war widow, finds herself having to choose between two men: rugged, free-spirited Robert Mitchum, and more traditional, steady Wendell Corey. Simmering under the surface is Leigh’s continuing heartbreak over having lost her husband in the war. She has projected her husband onto her little boy, played winningly by Gordon Gebert, often calling him “Mr. Ennis,” for instance, instead of “Timmy.” The mournfulness of her situation is touching in the way that it feels so of the moment in late-1940s America; there were millions of Janet Leighs in real life at the time. Holiday Affair’s Christmastime setting is key, for it emphasizes the importance of family not only during the season but at this overall time in American society.
Unfortunately, Holiday Affair fizzled at the box office. This despite the film’s winning, poignant blend of drama and comedy (with Harry Morgan shining as a comically befuddled police lieutenant), and the great public interest in Robert Mitchum, whose recent serving of jail time for marijuana possession had become a national news story. Thanks to TCM, however, Holiday Affair lives on, there to attract new audiences every year.
