The Twelve DVDs of Christmas

Because my son was in Japan until December 24th, I thought we might have to skip our ritual holiday-DVD viewing; instead, he suggested we do it over the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas, starting on the 25th and running to January 5. We won't really be watching one per night, because he's off with friends part of the time and some of them are way too short to fill an evening anyway, but we've agreed on twelve that we'll definitely watch, and without which the season wouldn't feel quite complete.

A Charlie Brown Christmas
At barely over 20 minutes, this still says more about the experience of Christmas in modern America than anything else I've seen. Not just the overt message about commercialization, but the melancholy, the alienation, the desperate pursuit of getting Christmas "right," the manic participation in rituals that no one really cares about, the sudden eruptions of religious seriousness that seem like they should be important but never actually make sense with the rest of it...and then that weird way in which it all seems to come out fine in the end. Plus Vince Guaraldi, who only seems to grow more ubiquitous with the passing decades. Sometimes I wonder if this thing didn't create modern Christmas as much as it reflected it.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
This is one of those works of art that's simply perfect for what it is. At the same time, the question of just what it is remains slightly elusive. Epic fantasy? Sly satire? Juvenile cute-animal fest? In some way it transcends them all. I never get bored with it, despite having it all perfectly impressed on my memory. It's also the one show that takes me back most completely to what Christmas felt like when I was seven or eight—bright, plastic, mysterious, surprising, and ultimately safe—and it seems to do the same for Nicky, as different as the world of our childhoods were.

 Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special

This is pretty much a satire of Christmas specials, but it's so colorful and the humor is so bent that it captures the eternal, dorky weirdness of TV, Christmas, and modern childhood better than whatever it's satirizing. A lot of it is devoted to '80s camp, with guest appearances by faded celebrities my son could never have heard of—Grace Jones, K. D. Laing, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, Little Richard, Magic Johnson, Dinah Shore—which I thought would be boring for him. But somehow the utter weirdness of them all (and his initial assumption that they were all just actors playing invented characters) only made them funnier to him. Frankie Avalon, a talking cow, and Santa Claus...all just the stuff of Christmas media madness.

"Hearth's Warming Eve" from
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 
What? It's good! Nicky was the one who discovered this (no surprise), but I've adopted it as one of my own. It actually has very little to do with Christmas—the ponies' holiday pageant celebrates a national origin myth, not the birth of any equestrian savior—but it has some gorgeous evocations of winter wind and frost, the story is unlike anything I've seen in a cartoon, it's pictorially delightful, the characters are charmingly ridiculous, and it maintains that delicate balance the show strikes so well between spoofery and earnestness.

A Christmas Story
Not many movies stand up to multiple viewings for me, but this one's so rich, not just in event and character but in detail and texture, that I always find something to enjoy even when I know exactly what's coming. What impresses me most, though, is the way Ralphie and Randy are portrayed; I usually hate Hollywood's idea of kids, but these two are unlike anything else I've seen in movies, somehow more ludicrously cartoony and more humanly believable at the same time. We never call the movie by its title. It's always, "Do you want to watch Ralphie?"

Remember the Night

I asked for this one, and Nicky's going to give it a chance based on my assurance that it's got a very different tone from most Hollywood Christmas movies. In fact, it's from before there was really such a thing as a "Christmas movie," from 1941, when a comedic melodrama could make good use the holidays without having to go all preachy, cloying, and self-important. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, three years before they generated an equally intense but very different chemistry in Double Indemnity. Here too, Stanwyck is a bad girl who leads the too-straight MacMurray into crime, but this time they don't end up dead, thanks to MacMurray's oddball Indiana home folks and the bounty and limitations of a rural Christmas. It was written by Preston Sturges, who would very soon be writing and directing Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. Like everything else by Sturges, it's a unique blend of elements.

Babes in Toyland
(aka March of the Wooden Soldiers)

My father introduced me to this one, and it was the movie I waited to see every year on TV from the time I was four or five years old. It's an oddity, a sentimental musical from the end of the Victorian era mashed up with Laurel and Hardy's vaguely sadistic Depression-era comedy, an oddness that I think I sensed at some level even then. Or, at least, I was haunted by some of its bizarre and even frightening elements: that Mickey Mouse imitation that could be a marionette or a monkey in a suit or God knows what; Ollie being nearly drowned in public torture; the Bogie Men with their goggling eyes and zippered backs; the wooden soldier marching with its head knocked off, a terrified child wrapped around its chest. Apparently they were images that haunted my son, too, because although he has little interest in Laurel and Hardy or their brand of comedy, he always wants to see this one.

The Little Drummer Boy  
Books 1 & 2
The two parts were made years apart, and the second isn't as good, and yet together they're very pleasing. The original is a pretty and affecting little thing, managing to blend High Church solemnity with the Rankin-Bass style of silly animal humor. It's quite complete in itself, but at the end we like knowing that there's more to come with the same drummer boy and the same goofy beasts. And a lot more room for slapstick in the sequel.

 

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol

I was fascinated with this as a kid, I think largely because cartoons of this length and seriousness were nearly unknown on TV then. But after a few years I got bored and thought I'd never need to see it again...until my friend Joe sent it to me on a VHS tape, I showed it to Nicky for the heck of it, and he liked it. I still find a lot of it dull, but I do like those ghosts. There are moments when they're genuinely eerie, which isn't easy when they're playing off a character like Magoo. 
 

Scrooge  

This is the Alistair Sim version from 1951, the Christmas Carol I kept liking after I got tired of Mr. Magoo. Nicky likes this one less than me, but he hangs in for the scariest and moodiest moments. the horror-at-Christmas tradition is one Americans never really went for but the British can still do well. This one makes nearly all the ghosts, even those miscellaneous shades whirling through the air, as scary as the spirit of Christmas future. And Sim often makes Scrooge himself the spookiest character of all. 

 Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
This one snuck up on us both. What happened was: back when Gene Autry had his huge hit with Rudolph, he and his people decided to cobble up another Christmas song to exploit the market. They substituted a donkey for the reindeer, big ears for the red nose, and baby Jesus for Santa Claus. It was a pretty lousy song, but by the mid-'70s, when the Rankin-Bass people were running out of ideas to sustain their TV-special business, they saw something they could work with. And indeed they did: Romeo Muller turned in one of his most charming stories, the animals were funny, and Roger Miller's narrative sold it all with a strange conviction. It's not Rudolph, but it feels like a visit to his universe.

It's a Wonderful Life

I used to have this movie on in the background every Christmas Eve, when I'd be up until 2:00 AM wrapping presents. Now that the present-giving has gotten a lot lighter, I almost want to let it slip away, but I can't bring myself. Every time I see it, it impresses me again with its intensity, its darkness, its raw agony, its honesty about the cruel tricks life can play. Although we don't like to look at it in our smiley-face culture, there is a frightening darkness around the edges of the Christmas story: the terror of the Imperial tax, the freezing night, the slaughter of the innocents, and the foreboding gift of the one of the Magi (Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume / Breathes a life of gathering gloom. / Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, / Sealed in the stone-cold tomb. / O Star of wonder, star of night...). And, of course, for any convincing story of a soul's redemption, or any myth of light emerging from darkness, the night has to grow very deep before the brightness of the star begins to shine. Capra, Stewart, and company make me feel the deep darkness more than just about any movie, and then they make its frantic redemption very nearly believable. This year I want to use it to close off the sacred season.

Which brings us to January 5th, the Twelfth Day. But then there's the Epiphany...which doesn't mean I've just had a sudden realization, it means we usually do some final Christmas rituals on January 6, the Epiphany, the celebration of the manifestation of God on earth, to seal off the holy days. That's likely to include one last movie before I put the holiday DVD box on that shelf in the corner of the basement, where it must go untouched until the day after Thanksgiving. Nicky's likely to push for The Nightmare Before Christmas or How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the Chuck Jones version, of course), but I feel like wallowing a little longer in old Hollywood. My two candidates are:

Miracle on 34th Street

Yeah, it gets a bit tiresome with repeated viewings, but I'll always have a fascination for the era of American holidays shaped around the Macy's parade, department store Santas, New York bustle, and moanings about the commercialization of Christmas when people actually seemed to care (before that itself became just another Yuletide custom). That era was still alive when I was a kid, or at least it seemed to be everyone's assumption of how the season should be, although I saw a mostly diluted and suburban-mallified version. Nicky seems to find it all interesting too, as exotica, probably the way I like movies from before 1920. And, of course, Natalie Wood is endearing, slightly troubling, and unfailingly compelling.

Holiday Affair

Not a great movie, but sweet. And Mitchum for Christmas? What could be more weirdly perfect?

Jules Dassin

No politics this time, except a retelling of a political life. Jules Dassin, the director, died last week, and I keep thinking about him. Although it's only been recently that I've really begun to notice or understand him, he's been a presence in my imaginative life since I was a kid.

      My parents loved his movies. My dad especially liked Rififi—nothing gratified him more than a finely wrought heist movie—and explained to me what was great about Topkapi when he took me to see it when I was seven or so. For my mother, the great Dassin movie was Never on Sunday. I had no idea then, but now I understand how that sentimental comedy about a scholar in love with a whore gave voice and image to everything she wanted to believe about her own sexuality and passion for life and hunger for self-acceptance. She would speak Dassin's name with something between a sob and a sigh; although that was partly, I think, because she (like most of the art-house audience) assumed he was French, and so invested his name with wet flourish: Zhool Dah-SANH. She didn't know he was really just Julie Dassin from Morris High in the Bronx—"DASS'n"—son of a Jewish immigrant barber.

      Dassin's journey to the movies was a fairly standard one for a New York Jew of his generation: Yiddish Theater, Group Theater, radio, Broadway, then the invitation from RKO to learn directing by assisting a master (Hitchcock in this case). And like most of the creative kids who came up through that world he got involved in left-wing politics, joining the Communist Party during the "Popular Front" days and leaving it when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in 1939. If you were a son of Yiddish immigrants in the Depression, that was how you expressed your humanity, your civic responsibility, your essential patriotism. It showed in his movies, too. They were never overtly political, but his inclinations and talents led him to stories of exploitation, alienation, and crime—Brute Force, Naked City, Thieves' Highway—and his brutal focus on the agony of individuals struggling against an indifferent environment turned those stories into indictments of the culture of money and what it did to people.
      He was just becoming an important American artist when America turned on him, as it turned on so many of the idealists who had held up the progressive pillar of our national coalition through the Depression and the War. In the late 1940s the House of Representatives and the mavens of the movie industry teamed up to destroy the careers of left-leaning filmmakers, and the great mass of those filmmakers' coworkers and fellow citizens, even their own labor unions, sat by nervously and let it happen. Never mind that Americans of all political stripes had eaten up the dark images of corruption and conflict that left-wing moviemakers had perfected. Never mind that stories of the little guy battling plutocracy were a staple of the American imagination on the right wing as well as the left. We were in one of our fits of ideological madness when any call to change is heard as a threat to our identity, and the word went out to sacrifice the "Communists" to our terror.

      When Dassin took on Night and the City, he knew he was about to be blacklisted, that it would be his last movie for an American studio, and it showed in the nausea and hysteria, the mad persistence of dreams in the face of hopelessness that shaped every scene. With a good crew, a strong script and one brilliant actor—Richard Widmark, who also just died—he crafted a whole vision of a fear-driven world with its soul out of joint. There was not an explicitly political line in the entire thing, no angry laborers or cruel bosses, only touts and conmen and B-girls and cabbies and wrestlers, and yet without a moment of posturing or cant he made it one of the cinema's most relentless critiques of capitalism, its psychological, spiritual, and social costs, like Brecht without the speeches or surrealism. And then his American career and life were over.

      The blacklisters weren't just cowardly or conciliatory, they were petty and mean-spirited, too: American film distributors passed the word among their European counterparts that no movie in which Jules Dassin was involved would ever be exhibited in the United States. That kept him from landing a movie job even in France for five years, and when one came to him it was nothing special: a low-budget crime flick called Du rififi chez les hommes. But his loving attention to the mechanics of theft made it a nasty delight. It was a huge hit in Europe, and American distributors wanted a piece of that cash. So money became Dassin's savior and the blacklist began to crack. But Dassin never wanted to be an American again. He directed a movie with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, fell in love with her, fell in love with her country, and became a "first-generation Greek."

      Even in Europe his work was rarely political on the surface. His best movies were sentimental comedies and ingenious crime capers. And yet, through his amused fascination with thieves, prostitutes, and fly-by-nighters he continued to make brisk points about the effect of cash on morality and law. He cast himself in his most personal movie, Never on Sunday, as an American intellectual named Homer who is disappointed when Greece will not reflect back to him his own fantasies of its cultural purity. He falls in love with a Greek prostitute but cannot accept her for what she is, trying to reform her through education until he finds himself sinking into the muck of the modern Greek underworld. In the end he arrives at the essential Dassin understanding: that we and the world are painfully flawed and money is stronger than any of us, that we can save ourselves only through honest acceptance of what we are. Dassin wasn't a very good actor, and that's part of the reason the movie doesn't hold up as well as his Hollywood work, but in his fragility and eagerness to please and sometimes too self-conscious effort we can see his journey out of pain and into love.

      (And it launched my mother on her own version of Homer's journey. For years after seeing that movie she was desperate to see Greece, but when she got there she found no sign of the singing, stomping, glass-tossing gaiety Dassin had promised. My father took her to a taberna to hear bouzouki music, but the music was overamplified and everyone smoked. She hated it.)

      Dassin's interest in movies—and his talent for them—faded as he grew older, and he gave more and more of his energies to helping Mercouri, his wife and moral compass, in her work as a socialist politician and eventual Culture Minister of Greece. After she died in 1994 he devoted himself to her last cause, the return of the British Museum's Elgin Marbles to their original home on the Parthenon. Not a quixotic battle, exactly, because it might yet succeed. But still a heartbreaking one somehow. For over two centuries those marbles have sat there, white and serene in their London tomb, far removed from the passage of time and the turmoil of Greece and the racket of New Oxford Street, and the British are in no hurry to let them go. The corrosive smog of Athens, they say, would damage them. Dassin outlived his wife by fourteen years, but in those years he came no closer to bringing the marbles home. So they stay frozen, those Centaurs and Lapiths and horsemen and basket-bearers, some headless, some handless, but all imperturbed, so far from the building they were meant to glorify.

      There's a trace of the pain of all those early 20th century left-wing patriots in that unrealized dream: the return of a pure, shattered beauty at long last to its rightful home.