There's no easy answer when people ask what movies to watch around Christmas. Some want them gooey, some don't. Here's a few suggestions that are simply the best Christmas movies that I know.
An acquaintance who was once a studio head told me that there are three perfect movies made in Hollywood so far. Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 The Shop around the Corner is one of them. I agree. (The other two? Oh, that's a story for another time...) Lubitsch was the legendary maker of sophisticated comedies in this country in the '30s and '40s. I've found that the more times I watch The Shop around the Corner, the richer it gets.
http://youtu.be/xr3nsHRKZJA
The setting is a gift shop in Budapest – at least MGM's version of Budapest – and the shop is "just around the corner," so it's slightly out of the way. For the next hundred minutes, you're in the company of a group of mild eccentrics, all excessively polite and nervous that someone might think them even slightly improper.
Mr. Kralic (James Stewart), the number one employee, is hopeful about a romantic correspondence with a young woman he's yet to meet – but he thinks it may lead to marriage. Then Klara (Margaret Sullavan) stumbles into the store, talks her way into a job and spends much of the movie annoying Kralic – and she too is having a romantic correspondence which she hopes will lead to marriage.
Lubitsch, working with the great screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, is never so superficial as the elegantly trivial surfaces of his films suggest. What's at stake in the film is honesty, trust, generosity – and the lack of it – and the tremendous, complicated task of finding love. Lubitsch comes close, but never gets sentimental. Everytime something soft takes place, Lubitsch follows it with a gentle kick. The Shop around the Corner is the only film I know in which love becomes possible because the guy has great legs.
Vincente Minnelli's 1944 Meet Me in St. Louis is also pretty close to perfect. The picture takes place over the course of a full year, in which a family in St. Louis gets ready for the great Louisiana Purchase Exposition that took place there in 1904. The Christmas sequence is stunning. Judy Garland sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to her little sister who's frantic that the family might move.
http://youtu.be/yudgy30Dd68
Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the great films about change and the loss of the Victorian comforts and styles we so idealize. The movie came out near the end of World War II, when the world as people knew it was vanishing. So the film shows a family that might have to uproot, gas lights in their lovely Victorian home that will soon be replaced by electric lights, daughters who may soon marry and move away, and a telephone installed in the family dining room that will change how people talk to each other. The film caresses the same sadness and wistfulness that Irving Berlin wrote into his song "White Christmas."
It's a gorgeous film, and funny and playful to boot.
A newer film is 2003's Love Actually, which manages to be sentimental, baudy, nasty and funny all at once. Several stories wrap around each other – a youngish man whose wife has died, a new and unmarried prime minister in London, a sweet and naïve young couple who work as stand-ins on a porn movie set, and a horny young London geek who flies off to a mysterious American place called Wisconsin - which he believes to be some kind of sex capitol. Then, there's a decadent aging rock singer, played by the wonderfully sarcastic and obscene Bill Nighy, who records a terrible old song with new lyrics for Christmas.
The effect overall of Love Actually is sweet, and its cast includes Laura Linney, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson. But you might want to be careful about showing it to skittish friends or relatives.
Not enough?
Another film that's worth a watch is an improbable 1940 melodrama called Remember the Night, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray – and written by the incomparable Preston Sturges. Or for the non-traditionalists, try The Godfather.
Happy Holidays.
