Christmas films you haven't seen but should
The Holly and the Ivy (1952) is described as Chekhovian for a reason. Family members gather in a vicar’s manse on Christmas Eve: clergyman’s daughter who puts her life on hold—and declines a marriage proposal from the man she loves—in order to stay with her father who, she believes, couldn’t cope without her; her sister who moved to London to work as a fashion reporter and avoid the childhood home as long as possible; their young brother who’s making a hash of his time in national service. There is also the widowed aunt, the never married aunt and a male relative who volunteers to drive the fashionista who, it transpires, is developing a drink problem. There’s a background story to her unhappiness that is revealed, alongside many other inconvenient truths, between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Two of the siblings, though brought up Anglican, have lost faith, and with it the need for any kind of a father - or so it seems. The 1952 is close enough to the war for some of the characters to still be scarred by it, and far enough from 1963 when, as per Larkin, sexual intercourse was invented. Anglican influence over private life was ebbing, but having children out of wedlock, or a relationship with a married oversea solder, or daughters leaving widowed fathers to live alone, or even skipping family dinner to go to the pub to drink, remain object of moral reprobation. Peaks of the film are the scenes in which two characters finally say what they’ve been silent about for years, and then hash it all out on the meaning(lessness) and purpose of life. The bells will ring, but no consensus enforced: the best of both worlds. (Kanopy, free with a library log-in.)
The Dead (1987): Technically not a Christmas film, but a Christmas holidays film, The Dead, based on James Joyce’s story, takes place on Epiphany Eve, January 6 of the year 1904, in what is still British Dublin. Most of you will have seen this but also only remember—well, that was my issue at any rate—the last scene, when the wife tells the husband of the young man who left his sickbed to see her one last time, shivering under her window in snow. “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland,” we hear the narrator thinking. “It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.” We all know that.
What is worth seeing the film again for is the menagerie of characters that fill its three quarters preceding the final scene. The two spinster sisters and their younger niece (a talented pianist, likely on her way to spinsterhood too) who host the annual party. The disheveled cousin who always comes “stewed” and often says silly things except those times when he doesn’t. His old mother who lives in Glasgow with her daughter and SIL. The operatic tenor. (The entire conversation about opera, which voices are good, who can still be heard in Dublin and for which singers you’ll have to go abroad, the analysis of voice timbre and consistency and the high Cs could have been lifted from Parterre dot com circa 2010.) Lily the servant. The republican lady who leaves the party early so she could attend a committee meeting. The dancing! So much dancing and music playing. And Gabriel the narrator, his minor annoyances and awkwardness, his pre-prepared toast. His wife Gretta, whom he realizes he doesn’t know at all. (Kanopy, free with a library card.)
The Crowded Day (1954). Most of you will have seen The Shop Around the Corner (1940, US) and other American workplace soap-comedies like The Apartment (1960) and of course Carol (2015) - this little known British flic set among the staff of a busy department store a few days before Christmas is a mix of all that but also has a storyline or two I’ve never seen before. A young shop assistant pretending to have an affair with the HR chief so she could make her car-obsessed boyfriend jealous, for example, and all of it is handled lightly and is quite funny, ending with a friendship between the two. Or, said boyfriend being promoted by the company CEO after making a marketing plan ripped off from the old man’s business book. There’s melodrama (unwanted pregnancy, attempted suicide and being chased by a rapist late at night are all given to a single character), sexual deception (chauffeur from a movie set pretending to be a big shot director fools a movie-crazed shop assistant), class prejudice, a woman hiding the fact that she’s married (so she could continue working) and gorgeous scenes in communal baths in shop girls’ hostel. The action in the movie lasts one day exactly, starting with the cleaners and the maintenance worker opening the department store before dawn and ending with the same, 24 hours later. (YouTube, $1.99+tax)
Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (2018). This is a mad film in so many ways and it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, especially its hand-held camera, shortest cuts possible, fast jumping between unrelated characters, and the improv, so much improv. Everyone’s on the edge, it seems, in the large Burstead clan even before the NYE celebrations start in this (hired) English country pile (the owner, who is a penniless lord, lives in a shack in the back but keeps showing up when least needed). Mother is a drama queen who demands a wheelchair after stumbling on the tiny front door step, father a chronically indebted manchild about to lose the house unless one of his two adult sons bail him (again). Colin, the son who organizes and pays for the whole thing, is perilously close to exploding at all times and needs to go jogging to decompress (the explosion is, of course, inevitable). The other, prodigal son who abandoned his wife and kids, is on his third partner since and is not supposed to have been invited. There’s history of cross-dating all around, and some of the broken-up-with have never moved on. Money issues and success anxieties sprinkled liberally. Brexit is still fresh in memory and present in conversations. Discreetly anchoring the film in deeper, darker waters, an uncle who doesn’t get a chance to inform the family of his terminal diagnosis. (Hoopla, free with a library log-in.)
Scrooge (1951) and The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017). The Christmas-industrial complex has been foreign to me until relatively recently. The NYE was the biggest event of the season, the gift-giving occasion and the reason to celebrate, in the part of Eastern Europe where I grew up. Religion was muffled and muzzled and put out of sight in this communist-lite country; otherwise, there would be two Christmases to mark (Western and Orthodox) and Ramadan a couple of months later. There’s been a revival of religious sentiment since the fall of the Wall - it all over-corrected, I’m afraid, with churches among the most influential political and social forces in the region today.
And NB, Dickens wasn’t such a beloved author in Eastern Europe - he was deemed sentimental and a children’s novelist, essentially. Lame children and orphans and redemptions and sentimental Christianity and a worldview where individual benevolent acts can improve the lot of the poor, not collective action for justice e.g. creation of unions and legislative changes - and we’d rather read Dostoyevsky if we’re after a Christian take on the lives of the poor, if you don’t mind. (Richard Rorty argued that the education of moral sentiment, something that the nineteenth-century novel is skillful at, the Uncle Tom’s Cabins and the Dickenses, can aid hugely the progress of justice… but communists did not read Rorty, the sentimental bourgeois liberal.)
So I am torn on A Christmas Carol: it’s terribly cheesy and also a clear-eyed treatise on the march of corporate capitalism, both. The arguments used in favour of small local businesses against the oligopoly of national or international behemoths are still fresh and with us today. The “because it’s Christmas” (ie we’ll be decent to each other and generous to strangers because it’s Christmas) is a little less digestible. If The Man Who Invented Christmas is correct, Dickens is the man who came up with that mythology and the paraphernalia. Christmas was a minor holiday apparently before A Christmas Carol, could this be true? The Victoriana, especially the German component of the Victorian era, made Christmas into a spectacle and a major family occasion, nein? The Man is not one hundred percent accurate about Dickens and even psychoanalyzes him occasionally — and like Scrooge with Alastair Sim, it adds the housekeeper character who was not there either in A Christmas Carol or in Dickens’ life. For the better, though: both women are excellent additions. Written by one of Canada’s most literary TV and film writers Susan Coyne, The Man is full of delicious gossip about writing life, the world of publishing, Dickens’ rivalry with Thackeray (which in reality developed some years after A Christmas Carol), Dickens’ creative block and family life. (Scrooge: free on Kanopy with a library card. The Man Who Invented Christmas: free on CBC Gem).
And now that my soundtrack for this post is finished (Nine Lessons and Carols live-streamed from St. James Cathedral; I should go in person next year, the singing was excellent), I’m off to listen to Tom Holland do his history of Christmas / how Christianity remade the world thing that he does so well, on The Free Press’ Honestly podcast. To be followed, most likely, by the episode ‘Why Jews Wrote Your Favourite Christmas Songs’. Temperature is the civil -1C, might go out for a walk with the podcast in my ears.
Hope your day has been tender. Merry Christmas!
A very Merry Christmas to you, Lydia.