The 2023 TCM Christmas Marathon touches eight decades, spanning the years 1925 to 1990, and includes over 100 films—enough for anyone to find the kind of holiday movie they’re looking for and to discover something new. The term “Christmas movie,” after all, is a fairly modern one that remains open to personal definition. Most movies with Christmas in them are just that: the holiday is a setting, or pops up for a brief moment or sequence. While these are entertaining to watch at Christmastime, there are also movies that use the holiday even more fully to inject real meaning into the story, the characters, the emotional spine and central themes of the film. These are arguably the purest holiday movies and the ones that have most endured.
One unusual picture, ripe for rediscovery, is being shown on TCM for the very first time: Miracle on Main Street (1939). The actress known as Margo—remembered for playing the woman who ages rapidly upon leaving Shangri-La in Lost Horizon (1937)—stars as a stripper with a shady husband (Lyle Talbot), who attempts to fleece an undercover cop on Christmas Eve. On the run, Margo hides in a church, where she finds an abandoned baby. She takes the baby in order to mask her escape, but gradually starts to feel deep attachment and decides to raise the infant herself—as well as drop Lyle Talbot and get a respectable job.
This little B melodrama is a fine early example of the “pure” kind of Christmas movie. The holiday comes off as an active force, fostering redemption and healing, as it prompts Margo to transform. Other characters including two stripper friends, a crusty landlady, and a drunken hobo will soften their cynicism as well. Produced for the poverty row studio Grand National Pictures by Jack Skirball, a former rabbi who would later become a prominent philanthropist in cross-cultural and -religious programs, Miracle on Main Street brings together many ingredients of what we now see as Christmas movies: a focus on family, especially one that unites and grows, an acknowledgement of the lonelier, more cynical aspects of the season, and transformations of characters to more compassionate versions of themselves.
By the time the film was ready for release, Grand National had gone out of business. Skirball made a deal with Columbia to release the movie domestically, and arranged for Twentieth Century-Fox to release a Spanish-language version that had been filmed simultaneously (also starring Margo). Miracle on Main Street remains a bit rough around the edges, lacking the polish of a major studio’s resources, but it compensates with some unusually frank and suggestive scenes for its time as well as an offbeat, touching story and characters. By contrast, Bachelor Mother (1939), a major RKO production starring Ginger Rogers, was in release around the same time as Miracle on Main Street, and is also about a woman whose life turns around when she finds a baby on Christmas. But the holiday is not centrally meaningful to the story, functioning instead as a backdrop to an otherwise breezy and light tale.
Both films arrived at the cusp of Hollywood’s greatest decade for Christmas movies. The defining element of the 1940s, of course, was World War II, which began in 1939 and America entered in December 1941. Over the first half of the decade, millions of families all over America (and across the world) were being broken up as their loved ones went off to serve. After the war, families had to rebuild themselves, with or without the return of those loved ones. Families were both breaking apart—sometimes forever—and reuniting on an enormous scale. All of society was touched in some way by this phenomenon, and it was inevitable that Hollywood movies would somehow reflect this. One way they did was by using Christmas much more frequently as a narrative device, often representing family or the ideal family togetherness that people wanted, missed, and maybe were reacquiring. The holiday turned up in countless 1940s movies, which incidentally were released at all times of the year, thus underscoring the fact that Christmas was being used to real thematic ends and not just as an excuse to release a movie at Christmastime.
Two great classics that opened in 1940, before America entered the war, were Remember the Night (1940) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Both integrate Christmas very meaningfully into their stories. With a witty script by Preston Sturges produced and directed by Mitchell Leisen, Paramount’s Remember the Night is a first-rate blend of comedy and romance that paired Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray for the first time. 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. They fall in love as the story moves along, but hanging over their heads is the problem of how to resolve the shoplifting case when they return to New York.
Remember the Night is one of the key Christmas movies because it uses the season to actually define the characters’ psychologies. The contrast between their lives is shown in Christmas-movie terms: Stanwyck’s mom (Georgia Caine) is one of the iciest and most unwelcoming in movie history, exactly what someone would not want on Christmas, while MacMurray’s mom, played by wonderful Beulah Bondi, is kindhearted and sympathetic to the max. Even the two 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.
In MGM’s The Shop Around the Corner, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play bickering coworkers at a Budapest dry goods 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, “People seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.”
The film was deeply personal 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 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.
Among the more offbeat holiday movies made later in the decade, one of the most fascinating is the B film The Curse of the Cat People (1944), a misleadingly titled sequel to Cat People (1942), which had been an unexpectedly huge horror hit. Producer Val Lewton resented the lurid title now being forced upon him by RKO and instead turned out a poignant, only mildly spooky, fantasy drama about a lonely little girl. Six-year-old Amy finds in her parents’ things a photo of Irena, her father’s former romantic partner and the “cat person” who died in the first film. Played by Simone Simon, Irena returns as a conjuring of Amy’s mind—an imaginary friend and mother figure, who loves Amy unconditionally and appears whenever Amy needs someone to talk to, play with, or confide in.
The exquisitely photographed movie is a touching journey into the mind of a child but also a surprisingly perceptive exploration of child psychology, marital relationships, parent-child dynamics and trauma—all in a scant 70 minutes. Christmas enters the story for its last quarter, with the feel of the season blending with snowy imagery and gentle visions of Irena to result in cinematic poetry. Christmastime heightens the effect of Amy’s loneliness, and the film even works in two Christmas movie houses—a cozy one and a sinister one—a la Remember the Night, with the story climaxing in the sinister house late on Christmas Eve.
Another B of the era that deserves to be better known is The Cheaters (1945), from Republic Pictures, about a Scrooge-like New York family facing bankruptcy who try to cheat an unemployed actress out of an inheritance. The season, however, prompts their hearts to slowly change. The cast is a movie lover’s delight of character actors, including Eugene Pallette, Billie Burke, Ona Munson and Joseph Schildkraut, who plays a down-and-out former Broadway star who teaches the family a thing or two about kindness and humanity. A whopping (for Republic) 87 minutes in length, The Cheaters was one of the studio’s occasional bigger productions, and it opened in the summer of 1945 as part of Republic’s tenth-anniversary celebrations.
Two later, also lesser-known, titles illustrate the fascinating relationship between Christmas movies and film noir, two storytelling modes that didn’t mix well because one so naturally leaned toward the optimistic and the other moved far into the pessimistic. Cover Up (1949), which combines a small-town murder mystery with a burgeoning holiday romance (between the highly appealing pair Dennis O’Keefe and Barbara Britton), feels as if it is trying to be a noir, but Christmas wins out. A last-minute story revelation in particular makes the audience realize they have in fact been watching a genuine Christmas movie. O’Keefe, who co-wrote the screenplay, felt so strongly about the importance of this revelation that when he arrived on the set and learned that the script had been altered to remove Christmas altogether, probably to save money by eliminating snow scenes, he refused to go before the camera until everything was changed back.
Blast of Silence (1961), on the other hand, is a rare example of genuine film noir and genuine Christmas movie, with the holiday used to stress the negative truths of the season: loneliness, cynicism, the sense of the holiday as something insufferably saccharine. These are the thoughts that swirl in the mind of a weary assassin as he arrives in New York to carry out a hit on Christmas Day. Christmas is referred to countless times in the vivid voiceover narration, and the indie filmmakers behind the low-budget movie—Allen Baron and Merrill Brody—capture real 1960 New York Christmastime. Filmed all over New York from Staten Island to Harlem and even inside the original Penn Station, which was demolished three years later, Blast of Silence is a fascinating tour of the city in this era as well as a powerfully bleak noir. Martin Scorsese later cited this as a major influence on Taxi Driver (1976), and it’s not hard to see why. But it is also a Christmas movie: even at the very end, when the plot has moved beyond Christmas Day, there is a reference to the holiday just before the final fadeout, an indication of how engrained the season is into the story.
These titles represent only a sliver of this year’s TCM Christmas Marathon. But whether you crave something merry or curmudgeonly, there will definitely be a movie for you in the series.
