By: Lucinda Smyth / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com
Over the past three months, I've watched 100 Christmas movies. As it says in the movie Elf, I have passed "through the seven layers of the sugar cane forest and into the sea of swirling gelatins" and came out with a blocked neck and tired eyes. It's like seeing, non-stop, for six days straight. I searched endlessly for writers, producers and directors of Christmas movies, most of whom didn't want to talk about the movies they made 30 years ago.
Why did I put myself through this? Christmas movies are one of the most critically underrated genres. The rituals of seeing them are just as important to the holiday as pulling goodie bags and traditional Christmas carols. This year, thousands of families will sit down and re-watch their favorite movies. But, at least in the UK and US, these classics tend to encompass a narrow standard. I thought there was more to discover about this genre. How did Christmas movies become what they are today?
Christmas movies are beloved and despised, legendary and forgettable. But very few of them are considered really good. Only one Christmas movie regularly appears on lists of the 100 greatest movies of all time: It's A Wonderful Life of 1947. However, these films continue to be produced - more than 100 each year. The 2024 offering includes the film Hot Frosty of Netflix, where a widow experiences a love story with a charming scarecrow, and Red one of Amazon, where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson rescues a kidnapped Santa Claus. From these descriptions, it may seem as if we have strayed far from the origins of the genre. But, in fact, they have not changed much.
If your first thought, when asked to name the first Christmas movie, is something like Holiday Inn (1942) or Meet Me in St.Louis (1944), you are incorrect. The first Christmas movie came out in 1898, a year before Marie Curie discovered polonium. Santa Claus, directed by British magician-turned-filmmaker George Albert Smith, is a minute and a half long and shows two children hanging their stockings by the fireplace. Santa comes down the chimney, carrying a Christmas tree, stuffs the presents into the stocking and disappears. End.
The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992
Santa Claus it was a pioneering film in several respects: it was the first example of a side-shot scene, with Santa appearing on the roof of the house in a lighted corner while the children were sleeping in bed. Bryony Dixon, curator of silent films at the BFI (British Film Institute), says Smith was part of a group of Victorian filmmakers experimenting with Christmas content. The following year, among many other accomplishments, Georges Méliès created his whimsical snow montage, A Christmas Dream (1900), and James Williamson made the sentimental tragedy The Little Match Seller (1902). These films were conceived from the beginning as "commercial entertainment". They were performed in fairs and theaters with a capacity of up to 700 people, mostly aimed at children.
Given the Victorians' reputation for piety, it may seem surprising that none of these films touch on the subject of religion. Mark Connelly, the book's editor Christmas at the Movies and emeritus professor at the University of Kent, says this was partly due to censorship. At the end of the 19th century, films could be banned as "offensive or blasphemous", so filmmakers preferred to use magical realism and pagan imagery to attract as many audiences as possible.
The most popular films of the silent period are adaptations of Clement Clarke Moore's poem, Twas The Night Before Christmas (1825), and the works of Charles Dickens. Before 1951, fifteen versions were produced A Christmas Carol. Dickens' own relatives attended a private performance of the 1910 version by Thomas Edison's company. What did they think compared to the 1901 version, Scrooge, where the Christmas Present Spirit appears covered in a sheet, remains forever a mystery. Today there are over 100 versions of it A Christmas Carol, including interpretations of the 80s and 90s of the XX century, as scrooge and The Muppet Christmas Carol.
There is an inverted quality in all Christmas movies. As a genre, they tend to embody what Mikhail Bakhtin called the "carnival woman": social orders are overturned, and eccentric characters gain complete freedom. Many feature a neglectful or absent parent (usually a father) who learns to see the world from a child's perspective. 1909 film, A Trap For Santa Claus, directed by DW Griffith, is about two children who try to trap Santa after their alcoholic father leaves home. This is very similar to the movie The christmas chronicles (2018), where a brother and sister, grieving over their dead father, capture Santa Claus (Kurt Russell) and string him up with Christmas lights. In both films, Santa Claus becomes a substitute for the absent parent.
Remember the Night, 1940
In the melodrama Alfonse Frenguelli's Christmas Eve (1915), a child stops his recently fired father from shooting his former boss and in the process convinces the boss to rehire him. This absurd solution is made possible only by the concept of "The Spirit of Christmas", predating dozens of future classics, including Home Alone and Love Actually. Edison Film, Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus (1914), is about a thief who steals presents dressed as Santa Claus and, just like The Grinch (2000), is captured by an amateur detective. Even the strangest early films look very familiar: the animation The Insects' Christmas (1913), where dead insects come back to life and spend time with a clay Santa, reminds me of the Tim Burton film, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
By day 40 of my Christmas movie marathon, reality was starting to set in. It was Halloween and I was standing in a supermarket aisle humming the song Jingle Bells. For over a month, I had spent all my free time watching Christmas movies. At social gatherings, I did psychoanalysis for the child in The Snowman and I tried to start discussions with friends about "the meaning of Christmas joy". Before my partner went to work, I promised him that I wouldn't watch any more movies. When he returned, he would find me secretly wiping away tears after a quick mobile viewing session of the classic pre-war film, Remember the Night, while I was in the bathtub. By October 31st, it was clear that I was dealing with a Christmas-induced emotional breakdown.
Remember the Night is a classic from the Golden Age of the 40s, the era when the Christmas movie genre really took off and Hollywood started investing in different formats: romance as A Shop Around The Corner, western like Three Godfathers of John Ford and, of course, the musical as Holiday Inn with Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, which includes the best-selling single of all time, White Christmas. The crown jewels of this period are two dramas from 1947: Miracle on 34th Street and It's A Wonderful Life. Both are remakes of A Christmas Carol, which culminate in their Christmas miracles, tinged with tragedy: lonely children, financial problems, suicidal thoughts, and the apocalyptic prospect of the institutionalization of Santa Claus.
Holiday Inn, 1942
It's normal for the best holiday movies to be defined by sadness. The most wonderful time of the year is often associated with stress, family conflicts and financial difficulties. Mark Connelly describes how Christmas movies help us deal not only with seasonal depression, but also with "the nature of contemporary social concerns or the nature of contemporary culture". In postwar America of the late 40s and 50s, common themes included alcoholism, psychological crises, and dead husbands or fathers. In the 1965 animation, Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie struggles to find the meaning of the holiday amid an existential loneliness: "I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards," he says, "but I'm still not happy." Today, we see countless stories of lost loves, cruel bosses, dead parents, and exhausted workers (see Love Actually of 2003, Klaus of 2019 and Our Little Secret of 2024 for all of these).
It's A Wonderful Life it wasn't an instant classic. It was ranked 26th on the list of the highest-grossing films of 1947. Only in the 70s, when the film lost its copyright and began to be broadcast on television, did millions of Americans change their minds. It seems that most Christmas movies take decades to mature and become part of the cultural fabric.
With his powerful laugh, white hair and his collection of toys, director Brian Levant is not far from identifying with Santa Claus. I speak with Levant in Zoom on a sunny October afternoon. Behind him hangs a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Turbo-Man, the action hero from the film Jingle All The Way, which he directed in 1996. He turns the camera to a three-foot-tall Turbo-Man doll in the corner. "After the premiere of the movie, I didn't even want to look at that toy," he says. "It sat in a box in my garage for almost 20 years."
Jingle All the Way, 1996
In Jingle All The Way, Schwarzenegger plays a single working father who tries to win back his son's love by buying him a Turbo-Man toy for Christmas. The story had all the ingredients for a hit: a big name, a crazy action premise, and a $60 million budget. However, it fell short of expectations: despite a solid commercial performance, it attracted terrible reviews and, later, legal battles. Levanti describes it as "a miserable failure" and refused to make another Christmas movie for 30 years. "I turned down Elf!" he laughs. "Yeah, but maybe I was wrong."
Over the years, Jingle All The Way gradually entered the public consciousness. By the mid-1900s, it had become a classic, and young people were telling Brian Levant that it was their favorite Christmas movie. Gradually, Levant’s opinion of the film changed, and he rescued Turbo-Man from the garage. I ask him why the film resonates today. Critic Sarah Marshall has called it a “predictable commentary on holiday consumerism”—does he agree? “I think that’s what critics like to say, right?” he says. “I was just trying to create a world where the story would feel believable.”
At Christmas, critical opinions don't usually carry much weight. Many films that we now consider classics were not well received at first. Wiz (1978), a musical version of The Wizard of Oz with a cast of black people, including Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, was controversially panned after its premiere. The film Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) was banned in the UK due to parents objecting to the idea of a murderous Santa Claus - today it is a favorite of "nihilists" and one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite films, who calls it "the only holiday movie worth discussing."
Red One, 2024
Even the classics of the 2000s, like Love Actually and The Holiday, were not warmly received at first. Nancy Meyers, the director of The Holiday, told me he never thought of it as a Christmas movie: “It's turned into one, which makes me happy. But while I was writing and making it, it didn't occur to me." Famously, Die Hard was released in July 1988 and was never meant to be released in December.
Christmas is a time without shame, when eccentric choices are tolerated, even celebrated. In the broadcast age, this includes a host of Netflix and Hallmark-type releases, with scripts that often resemble those created by AI and a marked social conservatism. What we choose to see at Christmas reflects our individual tastes. We might describe, for example, a movie where Bruce Willis attacks terrorists as "in the spirit of Christmas," or say that Hot Frosty is a wise commentary on the difficulties of modern dating. Because, after all, it is Christmas - and, to quote Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas is about "believing in things when logic tells you to do otherwise."
By the end of November, the festive lights were on in Oxford Street and I was feeling giddy and sick. When the credits rolled on my 100th Christmas movie, Gremlins (1984), I couldn't imagine watching another one. But I also felt strangely happy looking forward to the next movie. Finally, I pulled some Halloween treats out of the cupboard, pulled back the curtains, and turned on the A Nightmare on Elm Street. /Telegraph/
