More Favorite Christmas Movies

I really don't have anything original to say about the inevitable inclusions on some of the best Christmas Movies.

A very young Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn as a Macy's Santa with a real beard are engaging in Miracle on 34th Street (1947, directed by George Seaton). Do I ever need to see it again? No.

Ditto for Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946). I enjoy Beulah Bondi (in everything in which I've seen her) and Henry Travers (usually), and grew up watching "The Donna Reed Show" (albeit for Paul Peterson more than her). I'm a Gloria Grahame and James Stewart fan and an admirer of the work of cinematographer Joseph Biroc (here and elsewhere). If the movie was less ubiquitous, I might be able to manage some enthusiasm for it...

There has to be a version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I think that "Scrooge (1951, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst) with Alastair Sim in the title role is probably the best one. The 1937 high-gloss MGM version (that had been designed for Lionel Barrymore, who read the book on the radio every year) is mercifully short (70 minutes) and the one I've most recently seen. Directed by Edwin L. Marin with Terry Kilburn as Scrooge, it seems to me to transform Scrooge too quickly. Also the Cratchit home is far-removed from "Dickensian" poverty, even in its genteel form.

Some other upbeat golden oldies

As in "Wonderful Life," there is an angel (Cary Grant) involved in sorting out the marriage of a(n Anglican) bishop (played by David Niven) trying to build a cathedral and his wife (Loretta Young) in The Bishop’s Wife (1947, directed by Henry Koster). It, too has been overplayed.

Once was enough for another Loretta Young Christmas movie, Come to the Stable, also directed bye Henry Koster two years earlier (1945). In it, Young and Celeste Holm play French nuns (with another building project, a children's hospital in New England). Elsa Lanchester is (as usual) a treat, and Dooley Wilson sort of adumbrates Sidney Poitier helping innocent nuns in Lilies of the Field, but Loretta Young sets my teeth on edge, as does being set in a town named "Bethlehem" (Connecticut).

I don't remember The Bells of St. Mary (1945, directed by Leo McCarey) very well, though I remember that that Ingrid Bergman was still very beautiful hidden in a habit and that Bing Crosby had his usual charm (reprising the easy-going Father O'Malley part that somehow won him an Oscar in "Going My Way") , as they try to save the slum school at which they teach by different fund-raising approaches. Lots of cute urchins along with the cute, chaste couple.

I prefer Barbara Stanwyck in another classic Connecticut Christmas movie (romantic comedy), creatively titled Christmas in Connecticut (1945, directed by Peter Godfrey). Stanwyck plays a sort of Martha Stewart of the pre-television WWII era who can write convincing advice about domestic matters, but can't cook and is not at all the rural persona of her columns. Her editor (a sly Sidney Greenstreet) thinks that it would be good publicity for her to make Christmas dinner for a war hero (Dennis Morgan) on leave. Complications are many (centering on a borrowed baby and borrowed chef) and the ending predictable, but it's a genial screwball comedy.

Source: Stephen Murray, Epinion.com