Yuletide yarns

Optimism, goodwill and bonhomie, that’s what Christmas is all about, and that’s what the best Christmas movies of Hollywood have celebrated, writes Vikramdeep Johal

Tim Allen in The Santa Clause

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas

White Christmas from Holiday Inn (1942)

Being the ultimate feel-good festival, Christmas has always appealed to film-makers in Hollywood. Scores of family dramas and comedies have been set in "the most wonderful time of the year." These films have celebrated the Yuletide spirit, usually with dollops of saccharine, and some have made the box-office cash registers jingle.

Cometh Christmas, cometh Claus. The old man from the North Pole, who is God’s gift to children, has been portrayed in several films. The most memorable is Miracle on 34th Street (1947), in which a department store Santa claims he is the "real thing." Nobody believes him, especially a little girl, and he goes on trial to prove his identity. This heart-warming comedy-fantasy won three Oscars, including the best supporting actor award for Edmund Gwenn, who played Santa with great charm.

This classic was remade in 1994 with Gandhi director Richard Attenborough as Claus, who promises a child that he would gift her a house, a father and a brother. It wasn’t bad, but the original was much better.

In The Santa Clause (1994), Tim Allen played Scott Calvin, an advertising executive who inadvertently causes the death of St Nick. He puts on the old man’s suit and slowly begins to turn into Santa — both physically and emotionally. Allen did well on his screen debut and the film became quite popular. Not surprisingly, it was followed by The Santa Clause 2 (2002), in which Calvin/Claus returns from the North Pole to search for a wife.

Call me Claus (2001) featured the late Nigel Hawthorne as the bona fide Big C. Facing compulsory retirement at the age of 200, he has to find someone by Christmas Eve to replace him for the next two centuries, failing which — hold your breath — the North Pole would melt and devastate the whole planet. Of all the people in the world, he chooses Whoopi Goldberg (!), who dislikes Christmas due to an old grudge against Santa. As the clock ticks, he tries desperately to make her step into his shoes and become the first female Santa in "history."

In X-mas movies, the bad and the ugly often turn into the good. There have been several screen adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a cantankerous miser who is transformed into a generous man after being haunted by ghosts on Christmas Eve. The fable was updated and given a satirical twist in Scrooged (1988), with Bill Murray in the title role as a venal TV executive and Carol Kane as Ghost of Christmas Past.

A Christmas Carol also inspired Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), the most successful film at the US box office that year, grossing over $ 250 million. Jim Carrey played the Christmas-hating Grinch, a green-haired creature who tries to spoil the Yuletide celebrations of the residents of Whoville by stealing their presents. However, an angelic child makes him undergo a change of heart. The role gave Carrey plenty of opportunity to ham to the hilt, but the real stars of the movie were the make-up artistes and the art directors for their fascinatingly bizarre work.

Among the other party-poopers we have the Pumpkin King, the ruler of Halloween Town, who attempts to make the Christmas festival his own in Tim Burton’s animation film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). In the 1980 movie You Better Watch Out (aka A Christmas Evil), a psychotic ruins Yuletide by dressing up as Santa and killing people.

You may call it commercialism, but an essential part of this festival is all those presents. No matter what a child wishes for, his or her parents have to get it. In Jingle All The Way (1996), Arnold Schwarzenegger breathlessly searches the whole town for the only thing his son wants — a Turbo Man electronic doll. In danger of losing his family’s love and respect, he competes for dear life with another father for the elusive toy.

In A Christmas Story (1983), a boy wants not an innocuous toy but a Red Ryder BB air rifle, much to the consternation of his parents.

O. Henry’s heart-breaking tale The Gift of the Magi was one of his five stories made into one film, O. Henry’s Full House (1952). Jeanne Crane played Della, while Farley Granger was her husband Jim, who both sacrifice their most prized possessions to buy Christmas gifts for each other.

Merry musical bells rang in Holiday Inn (1942), whose famous song White Christmas, written by Irving Berlin and crooned by Bing Crosby, not only won an Oscar but was also a big hit with soldiers fighting in WWII and their families waiting back home. The success of Holiday Inn inspired a remake of sorts, smartly titled White Christmas (1954), which again starred actor-singer Crosby but failed to repeat the original’s magic.

One movie that figures on virtually every list of X-mas classics is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). It was based on a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern, The Greatest Gift, that had originally been written for a Christmas card! It is the tale of George Bailey (wonderfully played by James Stewart), who thinks he is a total failure and wishes he had never been born. His guardian angel makes him realise that the world would be a miserable place without him. A film brimming with hope, it has the power to free anybody from the dungeon of despair.

Optimism, goodwill and bonhomie — that’s what this festival is all about and that’s what the best Christmas movies have celebrated.

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