Christmas Movies on TV
(A Lament)

2025 Introduction: In mid-December 1990, I received a frantic call from a newspaper journalist who desperately required a week’s break at Christmas, and pleaded with me – all the while praising, with total insincerity, my “great”, “wonderful” prose – to write a column in her place for the TV guide on the subject of the seasonal, Christmas movies screening free-to-air on the Big Day. It duly ran – for who else but me was going to step up to fill that space (and watch so many dreadful films in rapid succession) so close to Xmas? It appeared in a version edited by the newspaper’s former football reporter; at least I was paid for it. 35 years later, here’s my unexpurgated version.

The old song has it that Christmas is my favourite time of year – but it probably isn’t if you’re a cinephile stuck on your own with the TV on that fatal day.

Indeed, every Christmas tends to prompt the same old parade of the gooiest, least stylish movies ever made. They are meant to be inspiring, heartwarming. But mainly, they are just mush.

The end-of-year holiday season has always been a prime marketing time for the film industry. On a simple but ingenious commercial logic, many of the best-known movies about Christmas – from the Bing Crosby vehicles of yesteryear to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation of last year [1989] – are made precisely to be released at Christmas time, hopefully cashing in on the seasonal ritual.

This does not mean there no truly artistic or sincere Christmas movies. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – the story of George Bailey (James Stewart) encountering his Guardian Angel on Xmas Eve, just as he contemplates suicide by jumping off the local, small-town bridge – is among cinema’s enduring masterpieces.

In a more contemporary vein, Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) recaptures the good vibrations of family life in a Capraesque suburb – and then gleefully subverts it all by introducing the malevolent, demonic little creatures named in its title.

These films offer a complex vision: weighing up both the light and the dark of the cultural mythology known as Christmas. The problem, however, with most Christmas movies is that they are, for the most part, lightweight, indulging an idiot-grin, sentimental optimism about absolutely everything.

Need to hear that all will be right with the world? That every loser will someday get a second chance to be a winner? That your lovely, extended family will ultimately survive every imaginable (or likely) personal and global catastrophe?

Well, there is bound to be a Christmas movie – a telemovie, particularly – to reassure you on all these points.

Christmas and the telemovie format were surely made for each other. Just as Christmas is so often experienced as purely a commercialised ritual devoid of any lasting significance, so too the telemovie comes on like a debased, degraded form of real cinema, lacking any complexity or finesse.

Compared even to the routine, so-called Xmas classics like Miracle on 34th Street (1947) or White Christmas (1954), the plot lines of contemporary Yuletide movies are simpler, the conflicts more easily resolved, the laughter and tears less deeply felt.

And telemovies are principally what you will be stuck with on 25 December 1990.

The programming schedule ordeal begins early with A Very Brady Christmas (1988) on Channel 10 at noon. Yes, TV’s old Brady Bunch, resuscitated 14 years after the fact in a high concept Christmas telemovie! The actors have aged, and so have the spick-and-span values of the original series – which were already completely anachronistic even back then. Sadly, however, the retro mania of 1980s pop culture – or postmodernism to some of you enlightened readers of this newspaper – could not let even the B-Bunch Rest In Peace.

Channel 9 offers The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story (1983) at 1.55pm. Cast members Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury strain for a little emotional truth in this misty-eyed tale of a woman who turns to dreams in order to escape her harsh reality. Who can blame her?

Animation aficionados have long given up expecting inventive, carefully drawn cartoons on TV – and Christmas exists to materialise their very worst nightmares. Channel 7 overloads the senses with Yogi’s First Christmas at 11.50am – in which Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss and assorted comrades fight the Evil Female Scrooge who is about to sell their favourite Xmas resort … you know the drill.

That’s followed at 3pm by The Disney Christmas Special, one of those nauseating cut-ups (another po-mo term) of Disney material old and new, new and old.

Moving into prime-time, Channel 10 has A Hobo’s Christmas (1987) at 8.30pm. This is the height of sentimental hogwash, featuring Barnard Hughes as a bum who returns to his long-ago-abandoned family. Naturally, all is forgiven, and the family unit moves toward reintegration. As Devo immortally sang: it’s a beautiful world for you – but not me.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas (1988) on Channel 7 at 8.30pm is a throwback to the 1940s-style, teary dramas about the effects of World War II on family life. Directed by Marvin Chomsky and starring Hal Holbrook and Eva Marie Saint, it once more offers an ever-cheery portrait of the restitution of familial bonds, and the renewal of personal hope after the devastations of wartime. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) it sure ain’t.

If, at this point, there’s anyone out there hoping for something just a little sobering – even subversive – to break the spell of Christmas cheer … then your sordid, tawdry dreams, like mine, have been well and truly answered – at last. Maybe its Spielbergian title misled programmers at Channel 9, but Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is a fortuitously radical Xmas gift for by-now glazed, post-prandial viewers.

In its size, scope and daring – gumption, some would say – it’s the dead opposite, at least, of the usual constricted, formulaic telemovie. And its mood and attitude are as far from the patriotic shine of Frank Capra as it is possible to get.

A vivid, demanding, quasi-Marxist mosaic of pioneering individuals swept away by the brutal, historic tide of “civilisation”, it was ridiculed by mainstream viewers (one suspects) more for its true message than for its over-publicised budgetary blow-out. So, wallow in Christmas Death and Despair with Heaven’s Gate!

Finally, mention must be made of an especially interesting late-night selection which, mercifully, has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas. Edge of Eternity (1959) on Channel 9 at 4am is the work of Don Siegel, director of (as he described them) “taut, tight and realistic” action thrillers.

Starring Cornell Wilde, Victoria Shaw and Jack Elam, this is a drama about a law enforcer tracking a gang of criminals, which takes place (as Siegel’s films often do) in extreme surroundings: the Grand Canyon.

Suitably displaced from normal society, Siegel’s heroes and villains play out, in and around that literal/metaphorical canyon, a charged, ambiguous struggle unto death.

If only Santa Claus was there with them.

© Adrian Martin 20 December 1990