Arguments over which Christmas film to watch? This book might help

CINEMA
Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas
Alonso Duralde
Bloomsbury, $33.29

Alonso Duralde’s Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas is a “revised and updated” version of the extensive listing of Christmas movies he originally compiled in 2010. With a cover inviting buyers to regard it as a Christmas gift, the book is a useful, if not entirely satisfactory, consumer guide.

Like the marketplace it’s entering, it breaks the films down into categories, chapter by chapter – they’re for kids or grown-ups; comedies or tearjerkers; action vehicles or horror spectacles – with the final two breaking the mould to warn us away from the worst of what the genre has to offer and steer us towards the best. For the most part, each film is given a brief plot description and a general comment, with a “fun fact” or two attached.

Sensibly, Duralde sidesteps the deluge of throwaway, Hallmark-style Christmas movies currently on offer on the streaming services and generally as forgettable as the wrapping paper beneath your tree. (He co-authored a book about them in 2021, I’ll Be Home for Christmas Movies.) Instead, he mostly focuses on films made for the theatrical circuit.

Mining the past for those that have endured, he invites readers to consider America’s output and also to look beyond it for something a bit different. In the process, he draws attention to different kinds of films in which Christmas plays a key role, including Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969), Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), master documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s The Store (1983), John Huston’s final film, The Dead (1987), and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023).

Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, a Christmas movie with a difference.Credit: FOCUS FEATURES

Some worthwhile Christmas movies are overlooked, such as Australian writer-director Heath Davis’s Christmess (2023), with Steve Le Marquand delivering one of his best ticking-time-bomb performances. (The only Australian features to make the cut are Puberty Blues and Starstruck.)

But the variety of productions that Duralde references is impressive. He’s clearly done his homework, his comments throughout indicating that he’s actually watched everything he’s writing about, knows his wider film history and is alert to the possibility of, as the late American film critic Andrew Sarris used to put it, “finding diamonds in the slag heap”.

In an otherwise tedious chapter devoted to 23 screen adaptations of Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, he highlights a fascinating obscurity: Carol for Another Christmas, a 1964 telemovie with an intriguingly prescient political bent, written by Rod Serling, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and featuring a powerhouse cast. And his comments about Tangerine (2015), an American drama about a group of transgender characters, and Romania’s R.M.N. (2022), a thriller written and directed by Christian Mungiu that is, in Duralde’s words, “the opposite of a feel-good movie”, suggest they are well worth chasing up.

And if Christmas movie trivia happens to be your thing, there are also plenty of “fun facts” to feast on with the turkey. “If the Connecticut farmhouse [in 1945’s Christmas in Connecticut] looks familiar,” Duralde notes, “it’s because the set was also used in Bringing Up Baby (1938).” And, he asks, did you know that the artfully titled Santa With Muscles (1996), starring Hulk Hogan, “was produced by Jordan Belfort, who would later become the subject of Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street?”

Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge in one of the 23 adaptations of A Christmas Carol.Credit: Robert Viglasky/FX

What the book’s format precludes is any substantial scrutiny of the mechanics of the Christmas movie as a genre (although they can be detected between the lines). Some of the films might be about Santa’s sleigh, snow, reindeer, presents and the like, but more often than not they’re about the ways in which people – families, friends, strangers – come together at Christmas. In many, it’s almost as if the festive season is the MacGuffin and what the films are really about is who the characters are, what happens between them and the so-called “spirit of Christmas”.

Also missing is any serious consideration of the cultural aspects of the book’s topic. Duralde recognises that films “can be educational” as well as entertaining, recalling how his childhood viewings of Frank Capra’s irresistible 1946 “Christmas classic”, It’s a Wonderful Life, provided him “with an early lesson about banks, home loans, and the Great Depression”.

But if he’d thought a bit more about Capra’s film – as Nora Gilbert, professor of Literary and Film Studies at the University of North Texas, did recently in The Conversation – he might have concluded that it was also, if inadvertently, giving us a preview of what America would be like 80 years on.

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Along the same lines, his entry for Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) – which features Judy Garland’s heart-rending performance of the famous Christmas song to which his title knowingly alludes – is a letdown. He includes it as one of his “classics”, expressly for its “idyllic” depiction of the Smith family and “their beloved home town”. But he overlooks the ways in which the film subtly allows us glimpses of the darkness lurking beneath its ostensibly sunny surfaces.

The limitations evident in Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas mean that it’s not exactly an indispensable inclusion in Santa’s sack this year. But if you’re looking for a guide to what films might make for appropriate viewing during the coming week or two, you could do a lot worse.

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