Christmas hasn’t been all that merry on the screen in the past couple of decades. Santa was as likely as not to be Gene Hackman in costume to make a drug bust in The French Connection; the holiday itself became a horror in films like Black Christmas and Silent Night, Bloody Night; and there was even an extraterrestrial turkey called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. So every holiday season, television late shows and repertory movie houses have to reach far back to find films suitable to the season. Of course there are the many versions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with Alastair Sim’s winning out by a wide margin. And there is the inevitable Miracle on 34th Street, in which Edmund Gwenn convinces Natalie Wood, a skeptical child, that there is a Santa.

But Christmas also has a way of turning up in movies that ostensibly have nothing to do with the holiday. And so, this winter, we will certainly see reruns of Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis, chasing the hysterical Margaret O’Brien into the snow and calming her about the prospect of the family’s move to New York with a song: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Grave little Margaret went on to have other Christmas experiences on film—in Tenth Avenue Angel and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. And Judy had had a Merry Christmas one of the first times she appeared. In Love Finds Andy Hardy, Mickey Rooney, in one of his customary Andy Hardy dilemmas, has invited both Ann Rutherford and Lana Turner to the big Christmas dance. He winds up with the little girl next door. And that was Judy.

No December goes by without Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” in Holiday Inn, and you’ll also get to see Crosby, twelve years older, singing the same number in a follow-up movie named after Irving Berlin’s song. Bing was probably the movies’ foremost Christmas caroler. He warbled “Silent Night” in Going My Way, ” Adeste Fideles” in The Bells of St. Mary’s, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” in High Times, and “The Secret of Christmas” in Say One for Me.

“Adeste Fideles” also provided the choral background to the scene in Since You Went Away in which Claudette Colbert discovers at Christmas that her missing-in-action soldier husband is alive. And, of course, “Silent Night” has been sung again and again, notably by Deanna Durbin (in Lady on a Train, not in the mishmash she made called Christmas Holiday).

You probably recall all those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, lonely in their foxholes, dreaming of a white Christmas. But in what movie? War pictures