It’s December again, somehow, which means that soon a great many of us will be flying, driving, or jumping on a train to visit our families and hunker down in the warm embrace of tradition. Yours and mine might look very different — mine tends to include long-winded family remembrances and a lot of leftover Portuguese stuffing reheated in a skillet — but the feelings they engender are universal. Go home, sink back into the couch, or head out into snowy woods, and the rest of the world melts away.
For filmgoers, this time of year is filled with another kind of tradition: the avalanche of holiday movies, great and terrible alike, that comes crushing down, ready to blanket theaters, TV sets, and every other kind of screen with all manner of holiday cheer. For Hollywood, that still mostly translates to Christmas movies — search Netflix for “Hanukkah” and the closest you get is the Melissa Joan Hart throwaway Holiday in Handcuffs — but some of the following chestnuts are so over-roasted that they can cross just about any religious divide. So fill up your punch cup, pull on that reindeer sweater, and settle in for the season.
If you’re looking for a big-screen experience, Hadley’s Cinemark theater is offering a couple of worthwhile holiday options this week. First up is a Thursday night screening of the 1959 film Santa Claus. Produced by K. Gordon Murray, the film was originally made as a Mexican fantasy film in which the jolly old elf is depicted as working not at the North Pole but at a castle in outer space. When the devil himself sets out to turn the children of Earth against Santa, the old man finds himself in a race to save Christmas. Luckily, he has a faithful assistant — the wizard Merlin, complete with pointy hat — to help him do the deed. Unlike most Christmas movies, this one is accompanied by the banter of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew.
On Sunday and Wednesday, the cinema will also screen a double feature that includes A Christmas Carol (1938) and Christmas in Connecticut (1945). The first is a classic treatment of the Dickens tale — Scrooge faces up to his miserly ways and emerges a changed man — and the second is a romantic comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as New York food writer and single woman Elizabeth Lane, whose fabricated articles about her family life on a Connecticut farm have earned her a nationwide following. Her bluff is called when her publisher insists she host a Christmas dinner for returning war hero Jefferson Jones. After going to the trouble of setting up a charade at a friend’s farm — they go so far as to “borrow” the neighbor’s baby — she finds herself falling in love with Jones, but trapped by her own tall tales.
For those who might not be able to make it out to the theaters, the options might be even richer. A steady Wi-Fi connection and a Netflix subscription will bring a bounty of Christmas turkeys along with a few select morsels of the good stuff. Particularly fun are two offbeat adaptations of that Dickens story mentioned above: The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) hews pretty closely to the original (if you overlook the singing puppets), with a superb Michael Caine starring as Ebenezer Scrooge. But the 1988 special Black Adder’s Christmas Carol turns Dickens’ tale on its head. It stars Rowan Atkinson (the Mr. Bean movies) as Ebenezer Blackadder, the owner of a “moustache shop” and the “kindest and loveliest man in all England.” In fact, this Ebenezer is so kind that others constantly take advantage of his generosity and good spirit, leaving him penniless and lonely. Things change on Christmas Eve, when the Spirit of Christmas (Robbie Coltrane) appears to congratulate Blackadder on his giving ways. When the spirit shows him his less generous but more successful ancestors, Blackadder is convinced to give greed a try instead.
Beyond those, you’ll find classics old and new: White Christmas and The Nightmare Before Christmas are both available for streaming, which could help put an end to familial squabbles that might span several generations. And if those don’t do the trick, The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t — an Italian production in which the cranky millionaire Phineas T. Prune tries to evict the Clauses from the North Pole — should remind us all of the spirit of the season.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
