These titles will usually pop up in the algorithmic lists of even the most selective of subscribers. Even if you’re like me and mostly watch Britbox and basketball, you’re going to see the same few choices. They are Home Alone, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Elf, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (starring Jim Carrey), A Christmas Carol (the Alastair Sim version), The Santa Claus, A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life and, more and more often since its star’s diagnosed condition became known, Die Hard. The arguments about whether that one is a Christmas movie are over.
Those are the ornaments on the Christmas tree of classic and recent film. Many of us have the need to turn them on, either while wrapping presents or, if you’re me, fitting them into bags you got three for $3 at Dollar General. But if you’re my age, there’s a chance you’ve seen those same ornaments so many times, you’d like to try other shapes. Maybe a plastic sugar cookie in the shape of a blitzed snowman instead of the same old foggy silver globes. Maybe a little wooden gingerbread hovel instead of another green ball.
That’s why some of us arrow through the established Top Ten when we’re looking for a Yuletide classic. Maybe we try something that flopped when it first came out but which impresses anyway when seen in the living room. Maybe there’s a leading actor we can’t get enough of but who just couldn’t bring their performance enough into Netflix’s good graces to show up in the top tiers. Well, these are those films for me. I say try them out. Give them a vote. See if they can break next year’s top 15.
The Gathering (1977) Yes, I’m one of those 70s kids who definitely dug Mary Tyler Moore, but thought Ed Asner was the second star of the show that bears her name. He had me from the pilot when he said, “I hate spunk.” Well, I DO like spunk, but I admired his conviction. Asner brought a solid, tried and proven heart to his role in the sitcom and does the same in this TV movie in which he plays a successful businessman given only months to live. His impulse is to gather the family he distanced himself from after a divorce to see them all one last time. The writing is minimalist but signifies reserves of history and tension, some of which is based on a falling out over Right v. Left politics. (How relevant is that now?) Then you see such future 80s TV standouts as Gregory Harrison, Stephanie Zimbalist and Jean Stapleton, more renowned for theater, but very much an actress of convincing subtlety in this film. You’ll get a catch in your throat at the end. Trust me.
The Polar Express (2004). I realize this one has been popping up lately in some streaming services’ lists, but it is not one of the canon. It’s encouraging that this ambitious CGI animated piece is becoming better known lately. When it opened, it was compared unfavorably to the Toy Story franchise and criticized for the faces not being as expressive as other movies using similar technology, but I make the case that TPE’s characters aren’t toys, but people. These kids are six-to-eight-year-olds, not older toddlers. It takes more to astonish them. Hero Boy, Hero Girl and Lonely Boy are a bit more blasé about Christmas now. They’ve seen their younger siblings get excited but they’re looking for new reasons to believe. And thanks to their trip to the North Pole on a magical train they may get the experience that clinches their belief that there’s still a generous mystery that can guide their lives.
Scrooge (1970). This lush, well-financed musical adaptation of the Charles Dickens novella drew investors and drew heavy-hitting UK talent because of the success two years earlier of Oliver! Albert Finney ages up and dresses way down from his lady-killing Tom Jones turn to make a rambunctiously arch Ebenezer. The songs just work, because of the writing of Leslie Bricusse, who would become better known for such indelibles as “World of Pure Imagination” in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I remember first seeing this one on KTVT’ Dallas’ then independent cable station. They’d only run it at night because of the sequences when Jacob Marley (played by an unrecognizable Alec Guiness as a friend come to scare Scrooge to empathy) flies him through a skyful of zombified ghosts and when Scrooge takes a visit to regions lower after seeing The Ghost of Christmas’ Future’s face. But as a nine-year-old I stayed up, having been brought to care for Finney’s Scrooge because of the heartbreak the film has him nursing and the film’s adroit showing of all the good a man like him could do. You do earn the scenes of post-redemption Scrooge the hard way and the movie nicely plays up the hilarity in them even as the production value ramps up quite impressively to suit its $5 million budget (twice the cost then of Beneath the Planet of the Apes). Five million in 1970 would be about $42 million now, the approximate cost of this year’s The Naked Gun remake.
The Apartment (1960) isn’t underrated as a movie, having won a Best Picture Oscar as well as statues for Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine and for director Billy Wilder, who was then reeling off a string of hit movies that would put almost every director working today to shame. But it’s underrated as a Christmas and a New Year’s movie. Lemmon is the low-ranking accountant at a New York insurance concern who finds that if he lets the executives use his convenient mid-Manhattan apartment as a woo-pad, he can get promoted. But then he meets the vivacious on-off-again mistress of the company’s president, played by MacLaine and can’t get her off his mind. Decision points come during a raucous company Christmas party and a New Year’s bash that end a marriage and seal what we hope is a new romance for the lonely Lemmon, and we’re in painful doubt to the very end. See it with your love partner. This one will also save till December 31st.
And, if I may permit myself, one TV episode.
Father Ted Season 2 Episode 11 “A Christmassy Ted” (1996). This most irreverent of Britcoms is set on fictional Craggy Island, a dreary little glob of green off the northern Irish coast where three Catholic priests who were deemed hopeless at their vocations are exiled. The good-natured, sometimes well-intended title character, played by Dermot Morgan, is given to astonishing turns toward self-destruction, while the young Father Dougal lacks the intelligence of a potato. Meanwhile, Father Jack is so addled by drink, senility and bad-temper he resembles nothing so much as an unwillingly awakened walrus. Ted makes his mind up to seek the Golden Cleric Award, which he wins by rescuing a group of priests who've become lost in a mall lingerie section with the elan of a WWI lieutenant steering his regiment through the Ardennes, but during his acceptance speech, reveals the reason his proper place may well be exile. The funny doesn’t stop.
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