The DVD Report #29

This week is Thanksgiving. Films built around the holiday are few and for the most part, far between.

The most famous, of course, is 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street, which begins with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but is more about Christmas than Thanksgiving. I’ll have more about that later.

It would be almost forty years before another memorable film about the Holiday and the way we celebrate it would come along. Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) begins and ends with Thanksgiving Day dinners, following the lives of three sisters over the course of the year between the two days. Allen, Mia Farrow, Oscar winners Michael Caine and Diane Wiest, Barbara Hershey, Max von Sydow, Maureen O’Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan are all members of the same dysfunctional family in this very New York movie that is one of Allen’s best.

It only took a year for another Thanksgiving flick to come along. Unfortunately, John Hughes’ 1987 film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, is a one-note comedy about two very different men played by Steve Martin and John Candy who share the titled means of transportation in their attempts to get home for the holiday.

Eight years later came Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays. The 1995 film is a frantic comedy of ill manners in which divorcee Holly Hunter goes home to Baltimore to spend Thanksgiving with parents Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning, gay brother Robert Downey Jr. and batty aunt Geraldine Chaplin. All, including the director, have done much better work elsewhere.

More recently we had Peter Hedges’ Pieces of April (2003), another comedy of ill manners about a dysfunctional family. Katie Holmes stars as the title character, but Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson steals the show as her loopy mother. Writer-director Hedges is currently represented on the big screen by Dan in Real Life, but is best known for his wonderful screenplays for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and About a Boy two films worth watching no matter what the season.

Faring much better in the movies is the treatment of Christmas. Nothing gets you in the mood better than watching an old familiar film on DVD starting with the aforementioned Miracle on 34th Street. Edmund Gwenn is a total delight in his Oscar-winning role as Kris Kringle aka Santa Claus, and Maureen O’Hara, John Payne and Natalie Wood are almost as memorable as respectively: a career woman, a lawyer and a little girl, all who fall under his spell.

We all have our favorite films about the holiday. Here in chronological order a few of my favorites in addition to Miracle on 34th Street.

A good portion of George Cukor’s 1933 version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women takes place on a Christmas day during the Civil War. The first and still best talkie version of the beloved classic, with Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker and Frances Dee as the sisters, Spring Byington as Marmee, and Edna May Oliver as Aunt March, the film is a good window into the lives, hopes and dreams of impressionable young ladies in the America of almost 150 years ago.

MGM gloss shone at its brightest in the 1938 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, directed by the pedestrian Edwin L. Marin, but executive produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who undoubtedly had a hand in the production. Originally slated to star Lionel Barrymore who had played Scrooge annually on the radio, he was replaced by Reginald Owen when Barrymore’s rheumatoid arthritis got so bad he had to be confined to a wheelchair. You would never know Owen was a last-minute replacement by the authority he brings to the role. In fact, the entire cast is pitch perfect, including the Lockharts, Gene, Kathleen and June, as the Cratchits along with Terry Kilburn as Tiny Tim, and Leo G. Carroll as Marley’s ghost. Not quite as Dickensian as the 1951 British version with Alastair Sim, but a perfect delight in its own right.

Written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, 1940’s Remember the Night is basically a tale of the redemption of a petty female thief through the love of a good man and his family. It’s a pill easily swallowed when the thief is played by Barbara Stanwyck and the good man by Fred MacMurray. He is the assistant district attorney who takes custody of Stanwyck after she is caught stealing an expensive bracelet and must keep her until the courts re-open after New Year’s. It also helps that MacMurray’s mother and aunt are played by two of the screen’s best character actresses, Beulah Bondi and Elizabeth Patterson.

Though not exclusively about the holiday, one of the best of many fine moments in Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 gem, Meet Me in St. Louis, occurs when Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to heartbroken Margaret O’Brien. One of the screen’s very best original musicals, Garland, O’Brien, Mary Astor, Marjorie Main, Tom Drake, Lucille Bremer, Leon Ames, Harry Davenport and others skip the light fantastic through such marvelous songs as the title tune, “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song”.

Actor-turned-director Peter Godfrey had a long, but rather undistinguished career. His one shining moment was 1945’s Christmas in Connecticut, an only-in-the-movies tale of a Good Housekeeping-style writer who must pass for the real thing when her publisher invites himself and a war hero to spend the holidays at the Connecticut home she doesn’t exactly have. Barbara Stanwyck is once again at her best as the writer, surrounded by an impeccable cast that includes the affable Dennis Morgan as the war hero, Sydney Greenstreet as the blowhard publisher, S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall as the world-class chef Stanwyck entices to do double duty as her cook, and Una O’Connor as a befuddled maid.

A sequel to 1944’s Oscar-winning Going My Way only in that Leo Carey once again directs Bing Crosby as crooning priest Father O’Malley, 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s is completely different in tone and style from its predecessor. The focus this time is not on the relationship between Crosby’s O’Malley and Barry Fitzgerald’s lovable old codger, Father Fitzgibbon, but between O’Malley and the independent Sister Benedict played by Ingrid Bergman at the top of her game. Though the Christmas scenes make up only a portion of the film, the film’s message about giving hope as well as presents is very much in the spirit of the season. Bergman is magnificent in what is arguably her finest screen performance.

Modestly successful upon its initial release in 1946, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life became a holiday staple in the 1970s after Capra forgot to renew the copyright and the film fell into public domain where it was snatched up by independent TV stations that showed it incessantly over the holidays. Now of course it is considered both Capra’s and star Jimmy Stewart’s finest film. As the small town banker who sees through an angel’s eyes what the world would have been like without him one Christmas Eve, Stewart hits all the right notes. The wonderful supporting cast includes Donna Reed, Henry Travers, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell and Beulah Bondi.

Another film about an angel come down to Earth to help us mere mortals at Christmastime, Henry Koster’s 1947 film, The Bishop’s Wife, is another perennial. Cary Grant was originally to have played the Episcopal bishop and David Niven the angel, but they switched roles at the last minute. Loretta Young has the title role. All three are at their charming best as are such stalwart supporting players as Gladys Cooper, Monty Woolley, James Gleason and Elsa Lanchester.

No holiday viewing would be complete without the definitive 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol (released as Scrooge in the U.K.). Brian Desmond-Hurst directs the superb Alastair Sim in the most faithful rendering of Dickens’ classic ever mounted. It may sounds like a cliché, but this film really is too good just to be seen at Christmas.

A huge hit in its day, White Christmas is a quasi-remake of Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen singing and dancing to a hit parade of Irving Berlin tunes. These included the title song that won an Oscar when Crosby first performed it in the aforementioned Holiday Inn and “Count Your Blessings”, the Oscar-nominated song this time around. Michael Curtiz directed a cast that also includes Dean Jagger and Mary Wickes.

The beautifully-wrought All Mine to Give was barely released by RKO at the tail end of 1957, but has enjoyed tremendous popularity as a TCM staple over the years. Glynis Johns and Cameron Mitchell are deeply moving as a couple enduring great hardships in 1850s Wisconsin. Two of the best child actors of the era, Rex Thompson ( The King and I) and Patty McCormack ( The Bad Seed) co-star in this very poignant film with a terrific Christmas finish.

If two excellent versions weren’t already enough, Leslie Bricusse added music and lyrics to Dickens’ timeless Christmas classic, and Ronald Neame directed it. Albert Finney had the title role of Scrooge with a veritable who’s who of British actors in support, including Alec Guinness, Edith Evans, Kenneth More, Laurence Naismith and Kay Walsh. The sparkling score includes the jaunty “Thank You Very Much” and Scrooge’s 11th hour lament, “I’ll Begin Again”.

Standing out among the myriad of TV dramas about the holiday are two films, one revered as something of a classic, the other sadly not remembered quite as well.

First broadcast in 1977, The Gathering is an Emmy-winning production about a woman who gathers her estranged family together for her husband’s last Christmas. Sensitively directed by Randal Kleiser and beautifully acted by Maureen Stapleton, Ed Asner, Stephanie Zimbalist, Gregory Harrison, Bruce Davison and John Randolph among others, it was followed two years later by The Gathering, Part II in which the family comes back together to “protect” their now-widowed mother from the advances of the new man in her life.

Not as well known is 1998’s The Christmas Wish in which Neil Patrick Harris stars as a Harvard-educated yuppie who comes back to his old home town when he inherits his grandfather’s real estate business. Debbie Reynolds is his grandmother and Naomi Watts the young divorcee with a precocious kid. What sets it apart is the mystery surrounding a diary entry of the grandfather’s that uncovers a secret not revealed until the very end. All three stars are excellent with Watts especially fine in a throwaway role.

Diane Keaton gives one of her finest performances as the mother of a large modern brood in Thomas Bazucha’s 2005 film, The Family Stone. The touching film about a family’s last Christmas together was poorly marketed as a farce starring Sex and the City‘s Sarah Jessica Parker. It is not a farce, though it does contain farcical moments. Nor is it a Sarah Jessica Parker film as she is but one member of an ensemble that also includes Dermot Mulroney, Claire Danes, Rachel McAdams, Luke Wilson, Ty Giordano, Brian White and Craig T. Nelson, all of whom outshine Ms. Parker.

There are many other films I could cite, but this is enough to point you in the right direction. Happy Thanksgiving and happy viewing!

Peter J. Patrick (November 20, 2007)