Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Twelve

 I'll let the pin-ups do the talking today.  Merry Christmas everyone!

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Eleven

Since it’s been almost a year since I last mentioned Barbara Stanwyck’s name, I figured that my Stanwyck ban can come to an end. As mentioned in one of my previous posts about Stanwyck, she starred in multiple Christmas movies. I’ve already talked about Christmas in Connecticuit (1945) and I’ve made brief mention of Meet John Doe (1941), but I have not spoke about her first, most obscure, Christmas film.
Remember the Night ( directed by Mitchell Liesen in 1940) finds Stanywyck playing Lee Leander, a shoplifter who gets picked up right before the Christmas holiday. During her preliminary hearing for the crime she meets prosecuting lawyer John Sargent, played by Fred MacMurray. While as a lawyer John is known to be a killer, he turns out to be a pretty nice guy and offers to give Lee a ride home to her family home in Indiana while on the way to his own family's Christmas. Of course, the pair meet up with misadventure on their way from New York to Indiana, and when Lee’s mother rejects her upon her return John offers to take her home to his mother’s for Christmas. All of the warm hospitality of the Sargent family soften Lee and she and John soon fall in love. However, the specter of Lee's post-holiday court date loom heavy.  Will John take a dive in the courtroom to help Lee get off? Will Lee let him jepordize his carreer to do it?

The reason that Remember the Night has remained fairly obscure is due to the fact that it does have such a bittersweet finale.  MacMurray's character is such a good guy and Stanwyck's has such a jaded past that it is inevitable that a union between the two of them would have more than its share of difficulties.  Yet, the scenes of the Sargent family Christmas are quite lovely, and the misadventures that the two expereince on the way home are pretty enduring.  It's funny that a few years later Stanwyck and MacMurray would be play cold-blooded killers in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944).  Mind you, you can see where their chemistry began.  It's also interesting to note that the screenplay was written by Preston Sturges who would go on to direct Stanwyck in The Lady Eve a year later.

Here's the trailer...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Ten

If you're looking for Christmas cards with a retro twist look no further than The Retro Christmas Card Company.  I wish I had stumbled upon this earlier, since it's a little too late to be sending Christmas cards.  Oh well! I guess it's never too soon to start planing for next year.  I wonder if the company will branch out into other cards for other occasions. 

 

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Nine

Some of the more subversive filmmakers have looked towards the holidays as a perfect setting for horror.  The first, and most successful, example of this is Bob Clark's 1974 film Black Christmas.   In Black Christmas a sorority house full of girls is terrorized by an unseen maniac.  At first they get just explicit phone calls, but soon after girls start to go missing. 

Black Christmas is a landmark in horror films for a couple of reasons. It was the first horror film to use the first-person point of view for the killer.  Clocking in at almost four years before Halloween it is the first horror film based around a major holiday (John Carpenter's original Halloween was originally intended to be a sequel to Black Christmas).  The film also bucks the standard horror film cliches in making having the main heroine be a pregnant girl who wants an abortion (as opposed to the virgin being the one person left alive). 

Beyond this, Black Christmas is a great film overall.  It's really fun watching the suspense build as characters fall prey to the killer and it has a marvelous twist ending.  There's also a great sense of humour coursing beneath the surface. It's also Canadian for those who are counting. Here's the trailer...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Eight

Here's a couple more retro holiday ads for your enjoyment.  I'll keep refrain from the glib comments this time around.  Enjoy!

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Seven

A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector (1963) had a long way twisted path to become the landmark Christmas album that it is today.  The album, originally titled A Christmas Gift For You From Philles Records, had the misfortune of being released on the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated and was considered a flop for Spector's Philles records and faded off into obscurity.  It was re-released by Apple Records in 1972, at which point it finally started getting the recognition that it deserves.  Many of the songs have been included on various film soundtracks and have been included on countless Christmas playlists. 

While the tracks from The Ronettes, The Crystals, and Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans are all wonderful, to me the two tracks that stand out the most on this album are Darlene Love's renditions of Marshmallow World and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).  With the unmistakable Wall of Sound treatment and Darlene Love breathtaking vocals elevate these tracks above the rest of the album.  Here's a listen...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Six

I really wish we still had honest to goodness variety shows like they did in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.  By variety show, I mean the kind with skits, musical numbers, and a jovial yet nonthreatening host.  Having recently watched  Andy Williams: Best of Christmas, a DVD that shows a compilation of some of the highlights of his annual Christmas specials, I have come to wish for these simpler times.  I was taken aback by the complete lack of cynicism that Andy Williams and his family had when producing these specials.  They just wanted to put on a great family friendly show that would be the highlight of the Christmas viewing schedule in years gone-by.  It is also clear that the Andy Williams crew spared no expense when producing these shows.  The costumes and sets are amazing for a show that in those days would only ever be shown on television once or twice. 

To modern eyes something like the Andy Williams show may seems like something incredibly quaint and geeky (it seems like the Osmonds were perpetual guests), but I urge people to seek out some of the clips on YouTube.  You can have a laugh about the goofy clothes they wear and enjoy some warm Christmas television like our parents used to enjoy.  Here's a sampling...

Tweleve Days of Christmas: Day Five

Have yourself a merry little suicide? For Frank Capra, the holidays were the perfect time for dejected men to find redemption after being snapped from the brink.  This occurs in two of his classic movies.  The obvious Capra film that falls into this category is the Christmas standby It's a Wonderful Life (1946), where Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey reconsiders suicide with some help from his guardian angel Clarence.  The second is Capra's 1941film, Meet John Doe, where the titular character (played by Gary Cooper) almost jumps form the top of City Hall on Christmas Eve, after being used by a scheming political magnate to be the spokesperson for the common man.  Instead of an angel, John Doe finds the will to live when common men everywhere come to his rescue to show that men can triumph over society's evils. In the end both men learn that there's something worthwhile in life, but the suicide angle seems a little extreme...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Four

Bogie and Bacall

What is it about vintage Christmas trees and tinsel?  It seems like all Christmas trees of a certain era were considered outcasts if their boughs aren't dripping with long luscious tinsel tendrils.  Let's commemorate some of the glorious firs of yesteryear...

The Bishop's Wife (1947)

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Three

There are few Christmas specials that are as iconic as A Charlie Brown Christmas.  You can buy your own Charlie Brown tree and the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack has found its way into permanent rotation in Christmas playlists.  For me, perhaps the most iconic part of the special is when the Peanuts gang breaks into spontaneous dance.  If you think about it, it's a pretty simple scene.  Every character on screen must have no more than a dozen cells devoted to their individual dance motion, and those movements are repeated over and over again, yet somehow it's magic. It makes me wish that everyone would break into their own spontaneous Charlie Brown dance.  Here's the original and a pretty convincing imitator...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Two

Two morally questionable retro ads for today's Christmas offering...

  Santa hocking cigarettes?  No it's just Alan Hale, father of Gilligan's Island's Skipper.  But doesn't he look just like Santa.  He's obviously very classy with his cigarette holder.  He's probably a big Holly Golightly fan.  And look, Coke isn't the only company who uses Santa's image to decorate their packaging.  Way to go Chesterfield. 

Oh look, it's 1963's NRA poster family.  These squares don't hold a candle to Red Rider.  Clearly this mother isn't worried about her kids shooting their eye out. I wonder why the middle child gets a double barreled shot gun?  Mom and Dad have probably just gotten through with reading one of those Pinko books on middle-child syndrome. 

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day One

Although I'm not a huge fan of the film, White Christmas (1954) consistently comes up as one of those perennial Christmas favorites.  I don't think that I would have a such a problem with the film if it had a different name.  But, as it is, for a film with the word Christmas in the title, there's barely any scenes that involve Christmas.  Sure, in many of the musical numbers the performers are wearing red, and there's the requisite singing of White Christmas by Bing Crosby, but ultimately had the studio that produced White Christmas had not wanted to bank on the popularity of the song, the film could have easily been released as a regular old, let's put on a show, musical. 

The film revolves around a showbiz duo (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) who team up with a sister act (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to help save their former general's Vermont Inn.  Of course, romance blooms between the four leads, and by the end the inn is saved and the group puts on a magnificent show.

If you're looking for an old fashioned Christmas extravaganza, you're bound to be disappointed by the five to ten minutes of the run time that is actually devoted to yuletide revelry.  If you're looking for a delightful technicolor musical, you could do worse.  To save you from watching the entire film and being disappointed by the lack of Christmas, here's one of the two Christmas scenes... enjoy!