You’re not obligated to watch holiday movies come Christmas, but Christmas movies have become as much a part of the holiday season as overcrowded malls and mistletoe. So I’ve compiled a list of Christmas movies for the ages. It’s not all inclusive. And you won’t find “It’s a Wonderful Life” here, but if you’ve got a problem with that get your own damn Christmas movie list.
Shop Around the Corner
By day, Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are bickering coworkers. By night they’re conducting a romance–on paper. And it all takes place at the Shop Around the Corner during the busiest time of the year. The final scene comes Christmas Eve, which is reason enough to include it in this list.
There have been two remakes–as a musical starring Judy Garland and updated for the Internet age as “You’ve Got Mail”. But nothing can match the charm of the original.
Old movie buffs love to talk about the great couples of the silver screen of old: Hepburn and Tracy, Bogie and Bacall, Fred and Ginger. Stewart and Sullavan have the same great chemistry. The couple starred in four movies together; it’s time for us to recognize their place together in the pantheon. “Shop Around the Corner” is the best of the best.
Holiday Affair
Janet Leigh is a single mother who makes her living as a commercial spy. During the course of her duties, she causes salesclerk Robert Mitchum to lose his job. Romance follows, aided by Leigh’s son Timmy, who desperately wants an electric train for Christmas and desperately disapproves of his mother’s relationship with a buttoned up lawyer.
Also known as “The Gift” and “The Man Who Played Santa Claus,” this 1949 movie provides a welcome change for those of us who have vowed never to sit through another showing of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as long as we live.
Meet Me in St. Louis
Not a Christmas movie, you say? This one makes the list for Judy Garland’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” one of the gold standards of Christmas pop. Plus, the climax of the movie comes at Christmas when the family’s dreams come true. How much more Christmas-sy can you get?
Scrooged
Everyone and his brother’s brother has done some sort of spin on the Christmas Carol, Bill Murray’s modern day Ebenezer Scrooge as a heartless TV executive is the best of a generally bad lot. You gotta give props to a show with a movie within a movie that’s a musical version of the original starring Buddy Hackett as Scrooge and Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim. “She won’t just throw away her crutches. She’ll do a double somersault!”
A Christmas Carol
Speaking of Ebenzer, the straight up version played by Alastair Sim is the one to watch this or any year. It’s been done to death, but this is the best.
A Christmas Story
“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” This tale of a boy’s lust for an “official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock” has become a cult classic. But don’t let that stop you from watching it.
Miracle on 34th Street
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And he works for Macy’s. Another flick that’s being constantly remade; accept no substitutes. “Miracle” stars Natalie Wood as an unbelieving child and Edmund Gwenn as the jolly old elf. It’s the movie that made the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade world famous.
Holiday Inn
The movie in “White Christmas” debuts has got to make the cut. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are one-time partners and romantic rivals. After Bing loses a girl to Fred he opens a club that’s only open on holidays. Conveniently, Irving Berlin writes the songs for the club.
Berlin’s “White Christmas” went on to become one of the most popular recorded songs in history. For many years it remained the largest-selling single in history, only to be supplanted by Elton John’s rerecording of “Candle in the Wind” in honor of Princess Diana. Which just goes to show you what a degraded age we live in.
White Christmas
Not to be confused with “Holiday Inn,” on which this 1954 film is loosely based. Crosby’s back with Danny Kaye as his partner. The two fall in love with a pair of singing, dancing sisters–Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen–and they all band together to put on a show.
The Santa Clause
When divorced father Tim Allen inadvertently kills St. Nick, he finds out he’s got to take the fat man’s place. Though Allen kicks and screams against fate, he suddenly develops a white beard that will not go away, an alarming propensity for seasonal sweaters and a diet of milk and cookies. A kid’s movie that grownups can enjoy.
Christmas in Connecticut
Barbara Stanwyck plays a magazine writer with a popular column titled “Diary of a Housewife” that details her life with her husband and children on a small farm in Connecticut. Chock full of recipes and homespun wisdom, it catches the eye of a wounded war hero who wants only to spend Christmas at this real-life Eden. Too bad Stanwyck really lives in New York, is single and can’t boil an egg. Hijinks and romance ensue as the magazine’s editor corrals Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan and a pair of infant twins into a borrowed farm for a manufactured Christmas. Add Sydney Greenstreet and you’ve got the perfect present for Christmas.
Elf
Will Ferrell’s performance really raises this fish-out-of-water tale above the commonplace; Bob Newhart, Ed Asner, Zooey Deschanel and James Caan help, too. But it’s the sincerity of Ferrell’s character that makes it work. Buddy is a human raised as an elf on the North Pole who goes to New York to meet his real Dad, a denizen of the “naughty list.”
Home Alone
An eight-year-old’s fantasy come true. McCauley Culkin’s parents forget to take him on a Christmas trip to Paris, leaving the kid free to eat sundaes for breakfast, stay up all night and booby trap the house in an effort to stop two burglars from getting in.
