30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

by Roger Ebert

  OK, I know, this sounds like a cloying fantasy designed to paralyze anyone over the age of nine, but not the way it’s told by director John Hancock and writer Greg Taylor. They give the film an unsentimental, almost realistic edge by making the father (Sam Elliott) into a tough, no-nonsense farmer who’s having trouble raising his kids alone, and keeps laying down the law. And what really redeems the movie, taking it out of the category of kiddie picture and giving it a heart and gumption, is the performance by a young actress named Rebecca Harrell, as Jessica.

  She’s something. She has a troublemaker’s look in her eye, and a round, pixie face that’s filled with mischief. And she’s smart—a plucky schemer who figures out things for herself and isn’t afraid to act on her convictions.

  Her dialogue in the movie is fun to listen to, because she talks like she thinks, and she’s always working an angle. She believes ferociously that her reindeer is, indeed, Prancer, and to buy it a bag of oats she does housecleaning for the eccentric old lady (Cloris Leachman) who lives in the house on the hill.

  Prancer is not filled with a lot of action. Only ordinary things happen, as when the local newspaper prints a letter that Jessica wrote to Santa, assuring him that Prancer would be back in good shape for Christmas duty. (The headline, inevitably, is “Yes, Santa, there is a Virginia.”) The reindeer finally is discovered, and Jessica’s dad sells it to Mr. Drier, the local butcher. Of course, Jessica is sure Prancer will end up as sausage meat but, no, all Drier wants to do is exhibit the animal as a Christmas attraction.

  The best thing about Prancer is that it doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence. Smaller kids will identify with Jessica’s fierce resolve to get Prancer back into action, and older viewers will appreciate the fact that the movie takes place in an approximation of the real world.

  Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale ½

  R, 84 m., 2010

  Onni Tommila (Pietari), Per Christian Ellefsen (Riley), Peeter Jakobi (Santa). Directed and written by Jalmari Helander. Produced by Petri Jokiranta. In Finnish and English, with English subtitles.

  Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking hung by the fireside with care. How else to explain an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with The Thing? Apart from the inescapable that the movie has Santa and reindeer in it, this is a superior horror film, a spot-on parody of movies about dead beings brought back to life. Oh, and all the reindeer are dead.

  I need to help you picture this. It is the day before Christmas in the far Arctic north. Young Pietari lives on a reindeer ranch with his dad and other men who would feel right at home shooting reindeer from a helicopter. Yes, they are hunting food. The Scandinavians eat reindeer. God knows they do. Years ago, I once visited Finland, Norway, and Sweden on a tour for the Scandinavian Film Institute, and at every single meal, some sort of reindeer appetizer was served as a “delightful surprise.” Between meals or when lost in the snow, they gnaw on reindeer jerky.

  I stray. Nearby, there is a huge mound that looks vaguely sinister. The Americans have been blasting away up there with dynamite. Very sinister. Pietari (Onni Tommila) and his friend Juuso have been sneaking through the fence to spy on the Yanks. Pietari is a dead ringer in every way for Ralphie in A Christmas Story.

  There is a legend that centuries ago the citizens were threatened by fearsome monsters. They were able to trick them onto the lake, where they froze. One of them was cut out inside a giant block of ice and buried deep beneath the mound. And now . . .

  It’s an idea from The Thing, where an alien was found in Antarctica and brought frozen into a hut, where drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . it began to thaw. We approach this possibility on the Night Before Christmas. Pietari’s mother is dead (lots of lumps of coal in this stocking), and his dad, Rauno (Jorma Tommila), keeps telling him to stay in the house, and Pietari, an earnest, stubborn Ralphie type, keeps sneaking out. He’s the only one who figures out what’s happening: Inside the mound, inside the ice, is Santa Claus.

  Well, not Santa precisely. A savage, scrawny beast of a man with a beard, who eventually does admittedly end up wearing a Santa suit, but strictly for warmth. This creature is however arguably of the species Santus Clausium. The director of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, the Finnish Jalmari Helander, has made two Rare Export short subjects about the capture and taming of wild Santas, who are then supplied to the worldwide market for Santas. Those Finns, what cut-ups.

  Don’t let it get lost in the confusion that this is a fine film. An original, daring, carefully crafted film, that never for one instant winks at us that it’s a parody. In its tone, acting, location work, music, and inexorably mounting suspense, this is an exemplary horror film, apart from the detail that they'’re not usually subtitled A Christmas Tale and tell about terrifying wild Santas.

  The R rating was earned by the F-word and a nekkid Santa. Did I mention the reindeer slaughter?

  The Ref

  R, 97 m., 1994

  Dennis Leary (Gus), Judy Davis (Caroline), Kevin Spacey (Lloyd). Directed By Ted Demme. Produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Screenplay by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss.

  The Ref is a flip-flopped, updated version of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which a kidnapper naps more than he was counting on. The movie stars sometime standup comic Dennis Leary as Gus, a would-be jewel thief who sets off an alarm in a private house in an affluent Connecticut hamlet, and in desperation kidnaps a married couple on Christmas Eve and orders them to drive to their home.

  Once there, he assumes, he will have time to plot his next move. But he doesn’t get a moment’s peace, because the couple he has kidnapped, Caroline and Lloyd, have been fighting for years, are constantly at each other’s throats, and are both completely incapable of surrendering in an argument.

  The couple, played by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, are smart, bitter, and articulate—and boy, can they fight. Gus is almost forgotten at times; he has a gun, but he can’t get the floor. He tries to explain: “People with guns can do whatever they want. Married people without guns—for instance, you—do not get to yell! Why? No guns! No guns, no yelling! See? Simple little quiz!”

  That doesn’t stop them for a second. After the kidnapper demands rope to tie them up, for example, Lloyd says they don’t have any, but Caroline helpfully remembers some bungee cord in the kitchen, and that sets off Lloyd, who thinks his wife is being cooperative because she’s attracted to the criminal. Caroline explains that she was frightened: “Humans get frightened because they have feelings. Didn’t your alien leaders teach you that before they sent you here?"

  The situation at the house grows even more desperate after the couple’s young son arrives home from military school. The kid is a conniver who has made piles of money by blackmailing a teacher (named Siskel) at his military academy, and now he’s impressed by Gus and basically welcomes new excitement in his life. And all of Lloyd’s hated relatives are scheduled to arrive shortly for a holiday supper.

  At some point during this process, the relationship between Gus and his victims subtly shifts; he becomes not so much the kidnapper as the peacemaker. He tries to enforce silence, truces, agreements. The couple begins to cooperate with him, maybe because they’re afraid of his gun, but more likely because the situation takes on a logic of its own. (It’s pretty clear Gus isn’t going to shoot them.) Lloyd’s relatives know the couple has been seeing a marriage counselor, and so it’s agreed that Gus will pretend to be the marriage counselor so that the kidnapper can continue right through the Christmas Eve gathering.

  Material like this is only as good as the acting and writing. The Ref is skillful in both areas. Dennis Leary, who has a tendency, like many standup comics, to start shouting and try to make points with overkill, here creates an entertaining character. And Davis and Spacey, both naturally verbal, develop a manic counterpoint in their arguments that elevates them to a sort of art form.

  There are a lot of supporting characters i
n the story: The relatives, each with their own problem; the local police chief; Gus’s rummy-dummy partner; the drunken neighbor dressed as Santa Claus; and of course Siskel, the teacher from the military school, whom the kid is blackmailing because he photographed him consorting with topless dancers. The director, Ted Demme, juggles all these people skillfully. Even though we know where the movie is going (the Ref isn’t really such a bad guy after all), it’s fun to get there.

  Scrooge

  G, 113 m., 1970

  Albert Finney (Ebenezer Scrooge), Laurence Naismith (Mr. Fezziwig), Alec Guinness (Jacob Marley’s Ghost), Edith Evans (Ghost of Christmas Past), Kenneth More (Ghost of Christmas Present), Paddy Stone (Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come), David Collings (Bob Cratchit), Richard Beaumont (Tiny Tim). Directed by Ronald Neame. Produced by Robert Solo. Screenplay by Leslie Bricusse. Based on the novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

  The notion of Albert Finney playing Ebenezer Scrooge is admittedly mind-boggling, and so is the idea of A Christmas Carol being turned into a musical. But Scrooge works very nicely on its intended level and the kids sitting near me seemed to be having a good time.

  Still, I’m not sure the movie should have been in color (Scrooge having, of course, the definitive black-and-white personality). And I’m not convinced it should have been a musical. With so few musicals being made today, it’s our loss that so many of them are written by Leslie Bricusse. Here he is, after Doctor Dolittle, back again with still more forgettable tunes and inane lyrics with titles like “I Like Life” and “Thank You Very Much.”

  Bricusse’s songs fall so far below the level of good musical comedy that you wish Albert Finney would stop singing them, until you realize he isn’t really singing. He’s just noodling along, helped by lush orchestration. To get the lead in a big-studio musical during the long dying days of the genre, you apparently had to be unable to sing or dance. How else to account for Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon? Or Finney in this one? Finney adopts Marvin’s singing style, which is a sort of low-register growl. Meanwhile, countless dancers and a children’s choir keep up the pretense that music is happening.

  So if all of these things are wrong, why does Scrooge work? Because it’s a universal story, I guess, and we like to see it told again. Ronald Neame’s direction tells it well this time, and the film has lots of special effects that were lacking in the 1935 and 1951 versions. I was less than convinced by Scrooge’s visit to a papier-mâché hell, but the appearance of Christmas Present (Kenneth More) surmounting a mountain of cakes and candies was appropriately marvelous.

  The whole problem of the Ghosts of Christmas have been handled well, in fact. Reviewing the 1951 British version of A Christmas Carol for the Chicago Sun-Times, Eleanor Keen noted appropriately that the three ghosts are “a trio that resembles fugitives from an eighth-grade play in costumes whipped up by loving hands at home.” My memory of that version is that she was right and the ghosts looked ridiculous.

  In this version, the ghosts are handled more believably (if that’s possible). The Ghost of Christmas Past is a particularly good inspiration: They’ve made the role female and given it to Dame Edith Evans. She plays it regally and sympathetically by turns, and seems genuinely sorry that Scrooge’s childhood was so unhappy. Christmas Present, played by More, is a Falstaffian sort of guy with a big belly and a hearty laugh, who doesn’t look like a ghost at all. And Christmas Future is simply a dark, faceless shroud, not unlike Lorado Taft’s figure of Time in his Fountain of Life sculpture on the Midway at the University of Chicago. All three figures are miles better than conventional eighth-grade ghosts.

  Alec Guinness contributes a Marley wrapped in chains; the Christmas turkey weighs at least forty pounds; Tiny Tim is appropriately tiny, and Scrooge reforms himself with style. What more could you want? No songs, I’d say.

  The Thin Man

  NO MPAA RATING, 93 m., 1934

  William Powell (Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Maureen O’Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant), Cesar Romero (Chris Jorgenson). Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. Produced by Hunt Stromberg. Screenplay by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett.

  William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he’s saying. That’s certainly the case in The Thin Man, a murder mystery in which the murder and the mystery are insignificant compared to the personal styles of the actors. Powell and Myrna Loy co-star as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired detective and his rich wife, playfully in love and both always a little drunk.

  Nick Charles drinks steadily throughout the movie, with the kind of capacity and wit that real drunks fondly hope to master. When we first see him, he’s teaching a bartender how to mix drinks (“Have rhythm in your shaking . . . a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time”). Nora enters and he hands her a drink. She asks how much he’s had. “This will make six martinis,” he says. She orders five more, to keep up.

  Powell plays the character with a lyrical alcoholic slur that waxes and wanes but never topples either way into inebriation or sobriety. The drinks are the lubricant for dialogue of elegant wit and wicked timing, used by a character who is decadent on the surface but fundamentally brave and brilliant. After Nick and Nora face down an armed intruder in their apartment one night, they read about it in the morning papers. “I was shot twice in the Tribune,” Nick observes. “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids,” says Nora. “It’s not true,” says Nick. “He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”

  After a prologue set three months earlier, most of the movie takes place over the holiday season, including cocktail parties on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and the exposure of the killer at a dinner party sometime around New Years’ Eve. The movie is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir, and it does technically provide clues, suspects, and a solution to a series of murders, but in tone and intent it’s more like an all-dialogue version of an Astaire and Rogers musical, with elegant people in luxury hotel penthouses and no hint of the Depression anywhere in sight.

  The Thin Man was one of the most popular films of 1934, inspired five sequels, and was nominated for four Oscars (best picture, actor, direction, and screenplay). Yet it was made as an inexpensive B-picture. Powell and Loy had been successful together earlier the same year in Manhattan Melodrama (the last film John Dillinger ever saw), and were quickly cast by MGM in this crime comedy that was filmed, incredibly, in only two weeks. The quick shooting schedule was possible because there are very few sets and negligible exteriors, because there is much dialogue and little action, and because the director, W. S. Van Dyke, was known for sticking to a schedule. That The Thin Man cost so little and looks so good is possibly because the interiors are simple and elegant, and the black-and-white photography flatters the loungewear and formalwear worn by a great-looking cast (which in addition to Powell and Loy, included Maureen O’Sullivan and a young Cesar Romero). And there is a kind of grace in the way the six-foot Powell hovers protectively over the fix-foot-six Loy (or sometimes simply leans as if blown in her direction).

  Although Dashiell Hammett was known for hard-boiled fiction, and John Huston’s 1941 film of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was one of the first examples of film noir, The Thin Man is essentially a drawing-room comedy with dead bodies. The plot is so preposterous that no reasonable viewer can follow it, and the movie makes little effort to require that it be followed. Nick Charles typically stands in the midst of inexplicable events with a drink in his hand, nodding wisely as if he understands everything and is not about to share. When a reporter asks him, “Can’t you tell us anything about the case?” Nick replies: “Yes. It’s putting me way behind in my drinking.”

  Briefly, the film involves the mysterious disappearance of an inventor (Edward Ellis); the concern of his daughter (O’Sullivan), who is an old friend of Nick and Nora; the greed of the in
ventor’s ex-wife (Minna Goimbell); the even greater greed of her gold-digging husband (Romero); the suspicious motives of the inventor’s mistress (Natalie Moorhead), and various other thugs, gunsels, cops, reporters, and the untiring cast of partygoers who turn up nightly at the Charles’ suite for free drinks.

  One of the movie’s charms is the playfulness with which Nick and Nora treat each other, and life. During one ostensibly serious scene, Nick pretends to find a piece of lint on her blouse, and then flicks her on the nose when she looks down; she jabs him in the side; he pretends to be about to sock her, and then they both try to put on serious faces. On Christmas morning, Nick tests the new air-rifle he got as a present by firing at the balloons on their Christmas tree. Nick throws a dinner party for all of the suspects, with plainclothes cops as waiters, and Nora tells one of them: “Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?”

  The movie’s only real skullduggery comes when Nick goes on a midnight prowl through the inventor’s laboratory, and even then the real sleuthing is done by Asta (Skippy), the couple’s high-spirited terrier. Nick and Nora included him in all of their activities, and Asta became one of the most famous movie dogs of his time, in part through his ability to shield his eyes with his paws when life grew too disturbing to contemplate.