Every Christmas at Mill Brook House we bring out our “Christmas movies,” It’s a Wonderful Life and The Shop Around the Corner. For some reason we’ve added To Be or Not to Be to the mix, perhaps because, like Shop Around the Corner, it takes place in winter in another Lubitsch-in-Hollywood evocation of an Eastern Europe city (Warsaw).
Actually, my favorite Christmas scenes occur in films not strictly devoted to Christmas: who can forget Margaret O’Brien destroying her snow people in Meet Me in St. Louis just after Judy Garland sings a teary Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Although not a Christmas film per se, Meet Me in St. Louis was released just after Thanksgiving in 1944, and Garland crooned more to a war-weary nation waiting for its sons to come home than to Margaret O’Brien: “Someday soon, we all will be together/If the Fates allow. /Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.” Those downer words would later be changed to: “Through the years/We all will be together/If the Fates allow./Hang a shining star upon the highest bough!” But the original words fit the times. Within two weeks of the film’s release, the Battle of the Bulge began. “It ruined our Christmas,” my father, still serving stateside at the time, recalled, citing the sudden increase in War Department telegrams informing neighbors that loved ones had been killed in the offensive.
In Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, which treats the fragility of love in wartime directly, the lovers, Maréchal and Elsa, first connect over the tiny, table-top Christmas tree and crèche--its Christ Child constructed of potatoes--that Rosenthal and Maréchel have created for Elsa’s daughter Lotte. These heart-ache-y Christmases, along with the beginning of Empire of the Sun--where the children sing the hauntingly beautiful Suo Gân, followed by the ship-of-fools-like Christmas party in the British Concession of old Shanghai--move me more than the straight-out Christmas films. But it wouldn’t quite be Christmas without Jimmy Stewart rejoicing with his neighbors in It’s a Wonderful Life or making a fool out of Margaret Sullavan in Shop Around the Corner. And how could we let a year go by without watching the beautiful Carole Lombard outfoxing both her husband and the Nazis while Jack Benny makes a fool out of himself? What could accompany the familiar, well-loved ornaments and tinsel on our tree better than these funny, timeless, feel-good gifts from Tinseltown?