Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 8
How to Enjoy Christmas Without George Bailey
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Every American knows what Christmas means. It means Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Year after year. For readers who have found themselves finally half wanting Porter Hall to lock up Edmund Gwenn, Scrooge to fire Cratchit, and James Stewart to jump, here are 12 movies just as good that have avoided such wearying ubiquity. They may even reawaken that old holiday spirit in you.
Of course, you remember this movie, but did you remember it was a Christmas movie? Besides the urbane banter of Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) and the genuinely clever murder-mystery plot—and Nick’s gang of friends from the wrong side of the tracks, and his coolness under fire when Ed Brophy breaks into the bedroom waving a gun, and the Repeal-happy bar scene where Nora orders five martinis—there’s also a great Christmas morning sequence with a most thoughtful gift for Hollywood’s greatest dog, Asta.
Both versions ace the test of time. Three outlaws fresh from a bank job run across a pregnant woman at a desert water hole just before Christmas. They help her deliver her baby; she dies, but not before they promise to get the infant to safety. The later remake (it was already a movie twice before 1936), directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, has the happier ending; the 1936 version has more conviction, and it stars Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, and Walter Brennan. Stone eventually became the lovable Judge Hardy and Brennan the generic lovable old coot, but here they are tough, scary hombres whom you’d want on your side in any bar fight.
One of two stories set in a Manhattan department store by the great comedy screenwriter Norman Krasna (the other is The Devil and Miss Jones ). Ginger Rogers, a shopgirl laid off from the store right before Christmas, runs across an abandoned infant the same day; David Niven, the store owner’s son, assumes, as does everyone else, that it’s her baby and decides to help. Rogers without the dancing, a fine comic actress, makes a superb partner for an extremely funny Niven in one of his first movie roles.
The last of Frank Capra’s populist classics has Gary Cooper in top form as a washed-up baseball star whom Barbara Stanwyck, a newspaper columnist, and Edward Arnold, her would-be-politico boss, wangle into becoming the representative “common man” for a national campaign protesting world conditions. It dawns on Cooper that he’s the front man for a fascist type of movement and he tries to alert the public. The Christmas framing device works flawlessly. But the ending? The New York Times critic Howard Thompson says,