Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 21 — Happy Holidays Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
For a full range of seasonal viewing options, also check our inaugural Holiday Edition column, from 2018.
141/365: Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947) (Vudu, Hulu, HBO Max, YouTube, Apple TV, Disney Plus, Amazon)
Arguably the most beloved of all Christmas movies, and anyone can see why: it’s disarmingly modern and sophisticated, and yet absolutely committed to a timeless Christmas-ian worldview. The postwar years is when “Christmas” really bloomed as a cultural juggernaut in America — that’s where Christmas songs come from, mostly — and here is that moment’s house anthem. Maureen O’Hara and nine-year-old Natalie Wood arch their eyebrows over a department store Santa’s claim to being the real Kris Kringle and a courtroom battle over his sanity makes believers out of us all. There’s more than heartwarming; this movie serves up a hearty dish of late-1940s New York City nostalgia, centering around Macy’s Department Store (which still takes up an entire city block today after most of its competitors have vanished, and still hosts a certain Thanksgiving parade), waging the midtown-Manhattan battle of mass merchants against Gimbel’s, much to the chagrin of Edmund Gwenn’s Kringle, in Manhattan to investigate the sense of modern disbelief that seems to be creeping about. The film is so powerfully familiar you probably can’t believe Edmund Gwenn or John Payne, as a young lawyer, in anything else, but try nevertheless to remain dry-eyed, just this many years after WWII, as Gwenn, at the head of a crowded meet-Santa line of shoppers, sings a song in Dutch to a war orphan.
142/365: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Larry Roemer, Arthur Rankin & Jules Bass,1964) (Hulu, Paramount +, Apple TV, AwesomeCartoons, YouTube)
Baby-boomers know this puppet-animated fable’s scary oddnesses inside and out: the Burl Ives snowman in a plaid vest, the icy toy mansion in the snow, the Island of Misfit Toys’ winged lion-king, the too-chilling Abominable, complete with giant shark teeth and autonomously mobile fur. But it’s weirder than we remember. “We all pretend the rainbow has an end/and you’ll be there my friend someday…” — so goes the chilling, enigmatic bridge verse to “There’s Always Tomorrow,” suggesting a profiteering sensibility the special doubles down on. Nearly all Christmas tales, from Dickens on down, are capitalist parables at heart, and like it or not, Rudolph’s story hinges on the North Pole’s alarming reindeer unemployment problem — only eight tenured positions and so many applicants. Rudolph begins as a mutant (born too close to the factory?), and is quickly deemed an unprofitable embarrassment by everyone from his Member of the Board dad Donner to Santa himself, the unforgiving nabob at the local industry’s helm. “Shame on you,” Santa tells Donner — not for hiding Rudolph, but for having him at all. While the snowman sings “Silver and Gold,” Rudolph tries to prove himself worthy of cost-effective membership in the machine despite his “noncomformity,” all the while skirting the advances of the Abominable Snow Monster — the subSiberian Cold War specter of Communism. A spry little Horatio Alger, Rudolph embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery until Santa, focused as always on efficient trade practice, realizes how he might profit from Rudolph’s inflamed uniqueness and enthusiastically formulates a new frontline team position for the young buck. “I knew that nose would turn out to be useful!” Donner exclaims, and Rudolph becomes Christmastown’s first freelance consultant. But his is a per project application — won’t Rudolph get laid off when the weather is clear? Along the way, Hermie the Elf Dentist evokes the obsolete craftsman losing his soul on the Industrial Revolution assembly line (complete with barking foreman), and Yukon Cornelius embodies the pre-industrial entrepreneur scrambling after the American Dream, penniless, semi-deranged and running amok in the wilderness. Is the Island of Misfit Toys — a kind of fascistic monarchy of capitalist castoffs eventually rescued from a gainless limbo — a kind of Cuba? Fearlessly righteous, the narrative assures us that every sensibility, even the finally toothless shell of Communism, can be folded successfully into the system. But during the end credits, the gift-delivering elf aboard Santa’s sleigh throws a bird overboard without an umbrella — not knowing the bird is a misfit toy and cannot fly. It’s never been said that mass production wouldn’t have casualties.
143/365: A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983) (Sling TV, Hulu, YouTube, HBO Max, Apple TV, Amazon)
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 effusive 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. It’s the only film even to attempt to capture the cosmic allure a particular toy — in this case a very particular BB gun — can have on a lower-middle-class grade-schooler. The cast is uniformly excellent, but if Peter Billingsley is brilliantly eager as the hero, and Darren McGavin equally so as his irascible, distracted furnace-fighter of a father, props must be offered as well to young Ian Petrella, as the younger brother with too many of the movie’s most quotable moments. 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, and our memories of all of the above.
144/365: Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff, 2003) (Pluto TV, Amazon, YouTube, Vudu, Apple TV)
Talk about anti-. We’ve lived in irony-saturated times for so long — since the Simpsons debuted, at least — that the culture seems to be snapping back toward strained wholesomeness and forbidden speech, so this wickedly vicious satire may be too outrageous for us in 2021. It’s the most vile, relentlessly scatological, taboo-abusive Christmas film ever made, in which a incontinent souse (Billy Bob Thornton) works as a department store St. Nick (with his African-American midget assistant, played with profane vitriol by Tony Cox) for the primary purpose of robbery. Vomit, urine and profanity flow like April rain. There’s just no underestimating this film’s dedication to bad-taste mayhem — when you think it’ll soften its very bad manners and go for a mushy story-twist, it takes the spew up a notch and pees on your shoes.
145/365: A Christmas Past (Edwin S. Porter et al., 1905–25) (Kanopy)
No other holiday is as haunted by past eras as Christmas — the very decor and trappings of the event are anchored in obscure, mysterious, ancient history. This collection of forgotten old silent shorts, professional and amateur, assembled by Kino, is a lightning rod for that feeling about Christmas, the idea that we’re somehow doing something unfathomably old-fashioned when we celebrate it. (This probably has everything to do with adults remembering the distant pasts of their own childhood Christmases.) A keynote film here is Porter’s 1905 “The Night Before Christmas,” a fabulously arthritic Edison production from the infancy of film history, and a dusty dream of Victorian faerie-ism, opening with Santa feeding a herd of real reindeer and teeming with antiquey landscape paintings and pre-tech toys. The genuine antique-ness of it — like a visit to a 19th-century toyshop — should hit the mark. Also included are D.W. Griffith’s fiercely moralistic “A Trap for Santa” (1909), the utterly lovely Edison film of realistic snowfall frolicking “A Winter Straw Ride” (1906), and “Santa Claus” (1925), an amateur film proudly shot on and around the Alaskan glaciers. At the very least, all of them together is a hypnotic time capsule and an effective pre-modern weapon in the war against shopping and commercialism.
146/365: My Dog Tulip (Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, 2009) (Vimeo, Amazon)
Not a holiday tale, but a refreshingly personal, non-industrial animated film, drawn by hand on newfangled computer pads, and literally conceived and crafted by a husband and wife team in the solitude of their suburban house. The Fierlingers adapted Brit author, editor and proto-snob J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir of the same name, in which he details his 16-year relationship with an “Alsatian bitch” named Tulip (Ackerley’s pet was named Queenie; names changed to preserve privacy), and the Fierlingers’ film attends carefully to Ackerley’s prose, ironic-haughty tone, and the undulating textures of his ruminations, recollections and barbed observations. Their style is ostentatiously sketchy and unstable, looking very much like a cartoonist’s impromptu drawing pad, often devolving further into wild and free-hand doodlings. But the filmmakers capture both human fussiness and canine reflexes beautifully, and that strange and lovely aspect of animation — the thing that allows us to accept “reality” as something apparently drawn, and to revel in it empathically — happens in a way that eludes most big-budget, movie-star-voiced kids’ epics. The voice in this case is Christopher Plummer, making the most of Ackerley’s regal, Britishly witty language, and the tale itself is as beguiling as a yarn spun by an old East London uncle in a tweed chair. Simply, Ackerley, a single gay man and loner, decides in middle age to adopt a dog as what he hopes to be his “ideal companion” — and thus begins what Ackerley defines as, simply, the most important and passionate relationship of his entire life. (The ordinary travails of dog-owning strike Ackerley as fantastical in their intensity and unrelentingly foul — for a line-drawn film, this is exceptionally disgusting, with special attention given to the beast’s fecal decisions, swollen anal glands, and even an episode of spontaneous vomiting in a cemetery.) Ackerley’s sardonic voice makes outrageous fun of our tendency to anthropomorphize our pets, and in doing so — describing Tulip in very ladylike terms even as she squirms in heat and destroys furniture — comes out the other end, evoking a genuine awed respect for the animal and the role she played in his life. Episodes come and go, although Ackerley’s decision to finally mate Tulip — to give her the “full life” he alone cannot manage — becomes a huge and pivotal debacle, testing one potential sire (and owner) after another, and suffering the hordes of neighborhood dogs during Tulip’s estrus, envisioned by Ackerley as paparazzi waiting in crowds by his front door, and as sailors emptying out of bars once Tulip’s sexual scent hits the open air. There’s the specter of death, too, and separation, and grief — in other words, Ackerley and the Fierlingers both contrive to pack all of the ingredients of an epic soap-operatic saga into a slim, off-hand story about a simple dog and her bewitched owner.
147/365: Santa Sangre (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989) (Tubi, YouTube, Amazon)
Alright, that “Santa” isn’t Xmas-y at all. Neo-Surrealist and “cult film” provocateur, Jodorowsky famously had huge midnight movie success in the ’70s, and predictably watched his profile slip into fringe obscurity by the time he crafted this headlong, almost autobiographical myth-movie, which could be called a return to form. His sensibility is equal parts Theater of Cruelty nuttiness, ersatz Christian imagery, south-of-the-border nihilism (life seems cheap in Jodorowsky’s world, and for farm animals it often is) and grand circus orchestration. The filmmaker’s years working as a traveling circus performer — think about that: in the ’40s, in South America — left him with a knowledge and ardor for the milieu that no filmmaker can rival (not even Fellini), and in this film, made when he was 60, he returns to it in earnest. The story is, as always, dopey with self-importance, salacious as a freak show, and storybook innocent about the real world, tracing the pulpy tragedy of a circus family destroyed by the lust of the knife-throwing father (a grotesquely corpulent Guy Stockwell) for a tattooed contortionist (cabaret diva Thelma Tixou), resulting in the evangelical mother (Blanca Guerra) getting her arms cut off, and, years later, embarking on a performing career and a revenge rampage with her grown, traumatized son (Axel Jodorowsky) literally acting as her hands. Take that synopsis on face value, and you can see where Jodorowsky’s imagery becomes interesting — the armless woman and her son locked together pretending to be one body, the sexual thrill of knife-throwing, the circus life elevated to the stuff of legends and Greek tragedy. Indeed, the scene everyone remembers best from the film is a solemn street funeral for a dead elephant, complete with a black coffin the size of a truck. This might actually be his most grounded film, and the one that feels closer to the concerns of actual human beings — that is, the characters aren’t merely symbols. They are, though, scenery-chewing iconic stereotypes, put to work by a yarn-spinning sensibility closer to the Arabian Nights and underground comic books than any normative notion of “art.”
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
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, 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 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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