Christmas: It’s not all shmaltz and treacle

by David Benjamin

“If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

— Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol

MADISON, Wis. — As I was scrolling the channel guide last night, I grudgingly faced the great annual quandary of the holidays: Why does just about every Christmas movie ever made suck?

The simple answer, brilliantly circumvented by Charles Dickens in 1843, is that Christmas poses few surprises. Whether you’re attempting a variation on the Biblical nativity or depicting a secular Christmas in modern times, you’re stuck with a pat story. Any scenario that deviates too far beyond the cozy and familiar ends up falling flat or strikes the audience as rude and vaguely blasphemous. 

When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he set the standard for storytellers trying to work a new wrinkle on this delicate theme. The Dickens Rule requires that a credible, satisfying Christmas story must chronicle a journey from darkness (the death of Marley and the embitterment of Scrooge) into light (Scrooge’s reclamation and the rescue of Tiny Tim). Also inherent in any such story is an intimation of how fragile and ephemeral is the warmth of that light.

Indeed, the Star of David shone over Bethlehem for but a single night, and we are relentlessly reminded that “Christmas comes but once a year,” after which it’s a dog-eat-Tiny Tim world for the next 364 days.

Dickens’ story has been filmed — and adapted for the stage both dramatically and musically — more than any other holiday premise. In my imposture as a theater critic in Boston, for example, I was compelled for consecutive years to sit through A Christmas Carol facsimile (with music, I think) by playwright Israel Horovitz. Every year, after the ordeal, I warned parents among my readership to avoid the Charles Playhouse and spare their children, because the Horovitz Carol was an insult to Ebenezer Scrooge and a blot on the map of Massachusetts. I advised readers instead to simply wait for Alastair Sim’s version of Scrooge to come around free on TV, where it has shown up faithfully every year since 1951.

There is an eternal debate among cineastes about who played the best movie Scrooge. The first I saw, in my childhood (on TV) was Reginald Owen’s portrayal, produced in 1938 by Joe Mankiewicz with half the Lockhart family among the Cratchits. Owen was my favorite for a while. But I ended up siding with Alastair Sim, whose face, seemingly without effort, traveled a range of feeling from seething hatred and sneering contempt to shattering remorse and boyish joy. Other actors have attempted Scrooge, from Seymour Hicks to George C. Scott and (God help us) Kelsey Grammer, but Sim lifted the bar and no grasping miser since has gone so high.

I’ll watch almost any A Christmas Carol variation when it comes around, reciting lines by memory. I’m fond of the little-seen Albert Finney version because it features one of the great Scrooge moments. During the visit of the third ghost, all of London rises up and throngs the snowy streets merrily singing Uncle Ebenezer’s macabre casket-dancing death carol, “Thank You Very Much”. 

It’s the darkness in this sarcastic tableau that makes Dickens’ original tale effective, over and over, in a dozen versions. We think of A Christmas Carol as a sentimental journey, but it never descends to the hackneyed shmaltz and toxic treacle with which lesser talents have polluted our holidays. 

The modern pinnacle of Dickens’ formula is, of course, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey is not, indeed, as despicable as Scrooge. Capra dropped that burden onto Mr. Potter. But a Dickensian shadow creeps over George when his father dies. It darkens when the Depression cancels his honeymoon. Uncle Billy’s blunder at Potter’s bank on Christmas Eve is the equivalent of a visit to George by Marley’s ghost. And Clarence, the wingless angel, standing in for Dickens’ three transformative spirits, serves as George’s savior.

Even in the film’s tearfully happy ending, a reflective viewer might well ponder how close to death and utter despair, for all his family, George Bailey stumbled. And like Scrooge, George wasn’t rescued by his own strength of character but by the agency of a magical wraith to whom none of us, in real life, has access. 

There is, after all, no Santa Claus.

Speaking of Santa, the preeminent film on this theme — with shades of Dickens — is Miracle on 34th Street (the original 1947 non-colorized version, not the 1994 imitation). Like its forebears, Miracle is rooted in disbelief. Doris and daughter Susan are doubters. The film’s vessels of Scroogian villainy are a corporate drone named Granville Sawyer and a heartless Manhattan district attorney. True to Dickens and Capra, the movie’s halting progress toward comfort and joy requires intervention by a figment of our Christmas imagination — Kris Kringle. Without ghosts, angels and Saint Nick flying through the sky, where would any of our heroes land?

Although Miracle on 34th Street might be the cheeriest of our Christmas classics, it never sinks into the sentimental quagmire that drowns most of the boilerplate holiday movies that defile our every December. As with Scrooge and George Bailey, the scene is shadowed by menace and infused with fear. It begins, after all, with a drunken, degenerate Santa. It proceeds to the near incarceration of the “real” Santa Claus in Bedlam. In the end, it leaves Kris Kringle resident of an old folks’ home with no family of his own, where his inevitable prospects are confinement, senility and a lonely death. 

Meanwhile, forsaking Kris, Doris, Susan and Fred (named after Scrooge’s nephew) drive off to live happily ever after in suburbia. 

Often, to decide whether a Christmas flick is worth your attention, you need but read the title. Any title, for example, that begins with “A Christmas in [Location]” is probably a waste of time, as is “A Christmas With (or Without) [Something or Other].” Smartass Christmas comedies stuffed with frathouse humor, (Bad Santa, Scrooged, anything with Chevy Chase) are rarely funny and they age poorly. 

In the right hands, however, Christmas is a rich lode of comedy. A Christmas Story, blessed with the writing — and voice — of Jean Shepherd, deserves classic status, as does Macaulay Culkin’s insouciant performance in Home Alone (the first one, not the sequel). My own holiday guilty pleasure is Die Hard, not only for John McClane’s steady flow of crisp one-liners (screenwriter Jeb Stuart) but also because of its cleverly chosen musical bookends. Run-D.M.C.’s “Christmas in Hollis” accompanies McClane to Nakatomi Plaza and Vaughn Monroe croons “Let It Snow” as the closing credits roll — with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in between.  

The essential measure of movie love is how often you’re willing to watch. Among Christmas movies that I’d merrily re-run, for days at a time (with egg nog and a plate of pfeffernusse), my first choice is Alastair Sim’s Scrooge. Add to this the Owen and Finney versions of same. The rest — barely enough for a “Top Ten” — in no particular order: It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street (1947, black and white), A Christmas Story, Comfort and Joy (directed by Bill Forsyth), Home Alone, The Shop Around the Corner, Die Hard and —maybe — Holiday Inn (but not White Christmas) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (thanks to Boris Karloff).

All the rest are humbug.