The 10 greatest Christmas movies
1. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
There have been countless variants of Dickens’ yuletide redemption story, including versions starring Mickey Mouse, The Jetsons and Mr Magoo. But the greatest of these by far is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Having Jim Henson’s famous felt creations anchor the film automatically punches up the fantastical elements of Dickens’ narrative – after all, this is a story of ghosts, magic and time-travel. But it is Michael Caine’s performance that makes it, and he acts opposite the Muppets as if they are flesh and blood. The seriousness with which he invests his performance makes it an explosion of emotion, a deeply felt interpretation of Dickens’ story rather than a parody of it – showing that the smartest way to renew a classic isn’t always with irony, but sincerity. (Buena Vista Pictures)
2. The Snowman (1982)
Only 26 minutes long, director Dianne Jackson’s low-fi animated film adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ children’s book The Snowman plays like visual music. Completely wordless, the story of a young boy in the English countryside who builds a snowman then flies off to the North Pole with him is full of stunning images: wild horses charging across a field, revelers on an ocean liner, a whale slapping its tale into the sea, the northern lights shimmering over the Pole. Jackson makes her film look like crayon drawings in motion, suffused with wonder and melancholy – the result is as direct a line into a child’s imagination as has been put on film. (Rex Features)
3. Meet Me In St Louis (1944)
Projecting a world of gabled houses, picket fences, homemade ketchup and romances with the ‘boy next door’, Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 Technicolor extravaganza has probably done more to define a particular idea of America than any other film. A panoramic slice of family life in the year leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair in the Missouri city, Meet Me In St Louis also presents what may be the original ‘blue Christmas’: distraught that she will spend her last one ever in her family home, Judy Garland sings Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, a song shot through with wistfulness. The uncertainty of the future hangs over the cosiness of the present in Meet Me in St Louis, and this ennui makes what would have been a good movie a great one. (Rex Features)
4. White Christmas (1954)
As much of a Christmas confection as a candy cane, White Christmas, is one of the holiday season’s great explosions of joy. It’s a movie that really is the sum of its parts: perfectly constructed Irving Berlin songs, the peerless baritone of Bing Crosby, the manic comedic energy of Danny Kaye and the athletic dancing of Vera-Ellen. The story is compelling too: a couple of song-and-dance men want to stage a lavish tribute to their former commanding general in the US Army. But the decisions they make about the spectacle they’re preparing involve thought-provoking questions of taste at a time of year usually defined by kitsch. (AF Archive Alamy)
5. A Star in the Night (1945)
Before he directed hard-boiled tales of conspiracy and crime like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry and The Shootist, director Don Siegel made this delightful two-reel short film that serves as a subtle contemporary re-enactment of the birth of Christ. Somewhere in the American Southwest, three cowboys ride their horses toward a shining star in the sky – it’s not a divine or celestial object but a blazing road sign for a small highway motel. There, Mary and Joseph seek shelter for the night, despite the no-vacancy sign outside – and Mary and Joseph are reimagined as penniless Mexican migrant labourers. Siegel reinforces the political content of the Christmas story by updating his nativity in a new, more familiar context and vernacular. (Warner Bros.)
6. Going My Way (1944)
Director Leo McCarey remains one of Hollywood cinema’s great underappreciated masters. His Going My Way, which won best picture at the Academy Awards for 1944, is an episode narrative about the rhythms of daily life in a poor Roman Catholic parish in New York City, deeply concerned with struggles of class, ethnicity and faith, that is so much more than a star-vehicle for Bing Crosby, as it’s sometimes dismissed today. There has probably never been a Christmas movie that emphasises small moments more – its affinity for subtle gestures and capturing the melancholy passage of time make it unique in US filmmaking. (Paramount Pictures)
7. A Christmas Carol (1938)
MGM’s production of Dickens’ classic looks better with each year – and might actually be the best straight-forward version of the story ever filmed. Charmingly studio-bound, it shuns high-toned production values and places its emphasis entirely on its terrific actors: Reginald Owen as Scrooge and Gene Lockhart as Bob Cratchit – with Lockhart’s family playing Mrs Cratchit and the children. The movie lingers on small moments, like Bob Cratchit playing with his kids in the snow, but features big drama: in this version, Bob actually loses his job on Christmas Eve. Director Edwin L Marin and screenwriter Hugo Butler also present insights into the story that exist in few other film adaptations – for instance, it’s revealed that Cratchit’s children are as terrified of Scrooge’s unthreatening nephew as they are of the miser himself, simply because he’s related to Scrooge. (Rex Features)
8. A Christmas Story (1983)
A time-travel portrait of 1940s America that is also a powerfully nostalgic vision of childhood. A Christmas Story finds the universal in the hyper-specific. Young Ralphie, an avatar for the film’s co-writer and narrator Jean Shepherd, spends his lower-middle class childhood in Indiana listening to the radio, playing with secret decoder rings, basking in the electric glow of an appalling leg-shaped lamp and being menaced by a truly terrifying Santa Claus. A Christmas Story captures not only childhood’s joys but its frights, and shows that a little terror in childhood can be an enriching thing. (Rex Features)
9. The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
German emigre Henry Koster’s film takes a similar premise to It’s a Wonderful Life – a man beset by money troubles (David Niven) receives inspiration from an angel (Cary Grant) – and turns it on its head. Niven plays a bishop more concerned with funding a gaudy cathedral than the spiritual well-being of his flock. In helping him to gain perspective about what’s really important, Grant’s angel ends up criticising much about organised religion. He even seems to identify the most with a cranky old atheist professor (Monty Wooley). Quietly subversive as it may be, The Bishop’s Wife is also the moment in which Cary Grant, the actor, became Cary Grant, the myth – from this point in his career relied more on his star persona than stretching himself as a performer. (AF Archive Alamy / Samuel Goldwyn Company)
10. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy set in Budapest on the brink of World War Two is a masterpiece of elegant restraint about shop clerks in quite desperate situations. Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan despise each other – little do they know that each is the other’s beloved, but anonymous, pen pal. Extremely well-acted, The Shop Around the Corner features what might be the most joyous spiritual resurrection this side of A Christmas Carol. (AF Archive Alamy)
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Thao Hanh
Source: BBC
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