Reviews

Christmas films

The Sound of Music

Directed by Robert Wise, starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer

The Christmas movie as we know it - an all-star adventure, just about suitable for all the family, and probably involving slightly comical members of the Waffen-SS - was an innovation of 1970s British TV.

There is something ineluctably seasonal about PoW camp dramas such as Von Ryan's Express, The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story, Bridge On the River Kwai and Escape to Victory.

Maybe the schedulers are jiggering with some collective memory of plum duff in wartime Red Cross parcels, or that Christmas England-Germany friendly in the sludge of the Somme. It must go deep, because it works beyond the small screen, too: Where Eagles Dare, a whoop-de-do jamboree in which Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton drag up as Nazis, was a huge hit at the box office at Christmas 1968 - and duly made the journey to television, becoming a holiday staple in the 1970s.

It took a while for the BBC to acknowledge that a movie premiere could form the dense object around which a Yuletide TV schedule might coalesce.

But at Christmas 1978 they carved out a new place in the Christmas movie canon for a picture with no particular seasonal content - except, of course, for gray uniforms and swastikas - and everyone discovered that The Sound of Music was best viewed through a haze of Harvey's Bristol Cream.

Swiss Miss

Directed by John Blystone, Hal Roach, starring Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy

Christmas is for the kiddies - and so are most of the films that have gained a Proustian association with the smell of pine needles. The first Christmas Day movie ever broadcast on British TV was Wallaby Jim of the Islands in 1951.

Two years later the BBC plugged a gap with Swiss Miss, in which Stan Laurel chucks feathers in the air in order to seduce a St Bernard dog into giving up his barrel of brandy, and Oliver Hardy is pursued across an Alpine rope-bridge by a furious gorilla.

This screening secured Stan and Ollie's place in the Christmas TV listings for decades - though the feature most favored by schedulers, over the years, is Way Out West, which has no snow at all, not even the feathery variety.

It's a Wonderful Life

Directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart, Donna Reed

The chunkiest item in the Christmas movie selection box got there through an administrative cock-up. Like the Wizard of Oz, Frank Capra's fable of personal responsibility and smalltown capitalism was considered a flop - until 1973, when someone forgot to renew the copyright and the film escaped into the public domain, providing a lovely Christmas present for cash-strapped United States TV stations looking for something to fill their holiday schedules.

All that exposure elevated the status of the film - its critical reputation rose and Jimmy Stewart's Christmas Eve suicide attempt became part of America's winter rituals.

Then in the early 1990s, one of Aaron Spelling's companies realized that it owned the rights to the story on which the film was based, and to some of the music on the soundtrack - including the Irving Berlin song This Is the Army, Mr Jones - and public service broadcasters dropped It's a Wonderful Life like a hot sprout.

The Guardian

(China Daily 12/26/2007 page20)