Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 22 — Holiday Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming (the Best Holiday Movies) (A SMASHCUT Reprise for the End of the Worst Year)
148/365: Remember the Night (1940) (WatchChristmasMoviesOnline, PeacockTV)
An overlooked screwball masterpiece, written by satiric genius Preston Sturges and directed by premier woman’s director Mitchell Leisen, in which whimsical bachelor-DA Fred MacMurray takes sexy shoplifting lowlife Barbara Stanwyck with him to his country homestead for Christmas. Sturges’s dialogue, volleyed by these pros four years before Double Indemnity, is mint, but the idiosyncratic comedy slowly, organically seeps into melancholy. The film is as smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate, and Sturges’s fat heart comes through in ways that are unique in a Christmas film: as in, the characters’ feet are planted in the real world, and the season’s triumph is a rescue from the memory of a poisoned childhood.
149/365: Comfort and Joy (1984) (YouTube, BFI Player)
Scottish director Bill Forsyth was a master of gentle discombobulation, and his Christmas movie is appropriately wacky, but in a quiet, generous way. The holiday here is experienced by a middle-aged Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson), whose sexy kleptomanic girlfriend walks out on a mysterious whim, and whose subsequent Christmastime loneliness is abated only by his involvement in a turf war fought between two rival ice cream vendors. With Forsyth it’s all in the details and rhythms, and the movie has a thoughtful, ruminative personality that could do wonders, as the titled implies, for the sad-sacked and lonesome.
150/365: Gremlins (1984) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Sling)
A nasty, fantastically clever holiday-antidote film, in which seemingly innocent Christmas presents have a Hyde side, take on carnivorous lives of their own, and hunt down their recipients. The mayhem of Joe Dante’s badtime-dream — in which adorable Muppet-ish furball creatures, once introduced into suburbia as gifted pets, transform into raving homunculi — might be the most astute metaphor for holiday capitalism ever devised; what seems at first an ordinary act of giving becomes a bloodthirsty battle to the death. Should we all have to fight our gifts? We’d certainly give the exchange, and the intent behind it, a lot more thought.
151/365: Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Bergman’s career summation and the kind of rich, timeless, cautionless magnum opus we can only receive, like benedictions, from artists who’ve paid their generation’s dues of sweat, risk, tears and honesty. An demi-autobiographical saga, this mega-movie views the oceanic heavings of a close-knit theater family circa 1907 from the perspective of the eponymous lad, from glowing Christmas memories through a medieval stepchildhood and beyond. You have a choice between the 3+-hour version is available — reportedly the version Bergman liked best — but we’ll tell you, the 5+-hour edit, made for Swedish TV, is the shit.
152/365: The Dead (John Huston, 1987) (Vudu, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The near-death Huston’s swansong is an indelibly mournful, Old-World Christmas experience, materialized from James Joyce’s most famous short story. Two spinster aunts host a Christmas dinner in turn-of-the-century Dublin, a candle-lit occasion for discussing this tribe’s scandals and politics before setting aflame the Christmas pudding — until a plaintive singing of a sad Irish ballad, and then suddenly the past returns and the present begins to decay and the season’s marking of time and age inspires a deep and universal melancholy. Something of a family affair (Huston’s son Tony wrote the ingeniously expanded screenplay, and daughter Angelica stars as the wife with a secret story), this dreamy adaptation refuses to be hurried, and Joyce’s prose (narrated by Donal McCann, as the husband) is surpassingly eloquent.
153/365: That Joyous Eve (Makkers Staakt uw Wild Geraas) (Fons Rademakers, 1960) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A rare, chilly Dutch film, the second by Rademakers, who stood as a kind of one-man Dutch New Wave in the ’60s, and a nuanced portrait of contemporary Euro-life, following three modern Amsterdam families, on the verge of Christmas Eve, suffering their own inner torments and collapses, despite middle-class luxuries and advantages. A prize-winner at the Berlin Film Festival, and a challenging seasonal option for the exploratory cinephile.
154/365: Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (Carroll Ballard, 1987) (YouTube)
It may be one of America’s best kept secrets: we don’t really like the ballet of The Nutcracker very much, and can come resent having to ingest it every year as if it were a citizenship requirement. Ballet films have always been risky in any case, but this film version, made by Ballard after the visual journeys of The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf, has several saving graces, beyond the score: it’s designed by master illustrator Maurice Sendak, and begins with bewitching opening act, in which the Drosselmeier figure embarks on his epic toymaking, shot in intricate close-up. Then, dancing.
*
A few extra, classic salvos, for the season’s sake:
Beyond Tomorrow (A. Edward Sutherland, 1940) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A fiercely odd septuagenarian Christmas tale from the authoress of Love Affair, this forgotten dilly concerns three bachelor fogeys (buoyant Charles Winninger, crusty/affable C. Aubrey Smith, dyspeptic Harry Carey) who die and return as ghosts to facilitate the seemingly doomed romance of young ‘uns. The character-actor star-power alone makes it worth seeking out, but the story is a fabulous lark. Sometimes retitled Beyond Christmas.
A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983) (Vudu, Hulu, YouTube, Sling, iTunes)
No one had use for this witty dose of ham-fisted-yet-clear-eyed nostalgia in 1983, but Clark’s realization of Jean Shepherd’s immortal memoir In God We Trust — All Others Pay Cash has since acquired the patina of a godsend. Truly, Shepherd’s fulminative narration and Clark’s cartoony style take getting used to, but after you’re acclimated, the saga of Shepherd’s semi-fictionalized 1940s Indiana boyhood is blissfully funny, sharp and sermon-free. Christmas here isn’t about charity or good cheer or “faith” — it’s all about being a kid, getting presents, writing Santa letters, dealing with bullies, negotiating playground arguments, fearing the wrath of Dad, fantasizing comeuppances, suffering the ill-bought gifts of distant relatives, ad infinitum. The cast is uniformly excellent, but it’s Shepherd’s enthusiastic asides, moist with amused memory and sardonic self-regard, that fuel the film. He knows what Christmas is about, without a crumb of sentimentality: our pasts, our childhood selves, our lost innocence.
It’s a Wonderful Life! (Frank Capra, 1946) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
If you’re wary of this all-American Divine Comedy, having seen it too often or in too many over-broadcast fragments over the years, take a few years off, grow up a little, and then sit down and subject yourself to one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most passionate visions. Much more than merely a Christmas film, Capra’s magnum opus is an open exploration of mid-century American humanity, in all of its sacrifice, resilient humor and dark self-pity, as it comes up against the inexorable hungers of post-industrial capitalism. But it’s also, helplessly, a Christmas movie, the most heartfelt of all Christmas movies, free of cliches, shopping incitements and the need to “believe” in anything but your neighbors. If you’re not a kid — and you probably shouldn’t be, what with all the talk of bank runs and mortgage equity — Christmas is really about home, devotion, family, self-sacrifice and the sometimes rueful passage of time, and this may be the only film ever made about the season that takes these simple realities as matters of fact.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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