Mainlining Christmas

I'm a little unclear on some details, but this appears to have been part of a series of adventures built around the character, "Octavius, the Amateur Detective." Based on a title card's invitation to read the story in "The Pictorial Review," I'm assuming it was a series of short stories adapted into film. If "The Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus" is any indication, these were comedy adventures. The story starts with Octavius being asked to come to a friend's family Christmas party and dress as Santa. He purchases a costume and heads over. While at the party, he's introduced to Grace, who is... some relation to his friends. Or something. He's also informed that there's a spare Santa suit in a spare room, though he decides to wear his own. Unbeknownst to Octavius, a burglar skulking outside overheard that there was a spare Santa suit, broke in, and changed. While Octavius is getting changed, the thief sneaks in and knocks him un...

I wrote this up before , though I was feeling far from charitable at the time. In my defense, we started this blog coming at Christmas media from a very different point of view, so our early reviews were intended more as brief recommendations or warnings for modern audiences. We weren't particularly interested in analyzing these, nor were we remotely experienced enough to have done so. Eight years later, I find this stuff far more interesting, and - while I'm still no expert in early cinema - watching bucketloads of this stuff at least provides me with a little context. Compared to most silent Christmas media I've come across, Santa Claus Vs. Cupid is notable for having a great deal of plot crammed into its 16-minute runtime. It also has a great deal of filler and side characters, which makes the short feel larger but also makes the narrative difficult to follow. Ultimately, there are really only four significant characters: Jack, Edward, Binks, and the unnamed love interes...

I'm grouping these two animated shorts from Ladislaw Starewicz, a pioneer of stop-motion, together despite them being made more than four decades apart. Both films are fairly easy to locate online and well worth tracking down. The Insect's Christmas (1911) I believe The Insect's Christmas is the first animated Christmas movie ever made, or at least the earliest surviving example. The Insect's Christmas is sort of a whimsical fairytale that admittedly becomes a bit less whimsical when you realize the titular insects are dead bugs whose legs have been replaced with wires, but it's worth overlooking that unpleasant detail. Before we get to the insects, the movie opens with a Father Christmas ornament coming alive on a Christmas tree and climbing down, accidentally shattering an ornament and waking a sleeping doll in the process. He travels outside and conjures a Christmas tree using his staff. Next, he uses his staff to clear away rocks and even break open the ground, ...

This fifteen-minute film tells a story about conjoined homes housing two families, the Giltons and the Biltons. The Giltons have no children but are well off financially. Mr. Gilton is curmudgeonly and selfish, though his wife seems nice enough. The Biltons, in contrast, have three kids and are relatively happy, but they are poor and struggle to make ends meet. So, yeah, we're doing a Scrooge riff, minus the ghosts.  Anyway, the film takes us through a number of brief interactions, the first few show us that Mr. Gilton is a dick. He does have a dog, though, so I guess he's not all bad. Correction: he had a dog - it gets poisoned pretty quick. We never actually learn how the dog got poisoned, and the sparse use of title cards makes it difficult to tell exactly what's going on. My impression is that Gilton suspects his neighbors were somehow responsible, though it's a safe bet they're innocent (they're pretty much paragons of virtue; besides, they liked the dog)....

Aside from a short bit at the end (more on that in a moment), this six-minute film is essentially a "how it's made" documentary showing how Christmas Crackers are produced (or more accurately how they were produced in the early 1900s). Even that's an overstatement: we don't really get a good look at the process; instead we're seeing quick glimpses of the components being made. It's all done using machines by workers performing their tasks extremely quickly, so it's not easy to tell precisely what they're doing or how the machines work. We get a feel for the environment in which they're made, but that's about it. It's worth noting the factory is staffed by a mix of male and female employees. I don't have much sense of scale, but my guess is these are unique workstations (i.e.: I can't imagine demand was so great that there were dozens more employees off-screen performing the same functions). At any rate, the film ends with a brie...

Rather than running these individually, I'm posting reviews for five shorts, each of which is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. This is far from an exhaustive list, of course, but this covers every surviving version through the 1950s I was able to locate. For those of you who don't feel like digging through my notes, I'll save you a little time - these are all good for when they were made. The two that really stood out were the 1928 silent French version and the 1937 animated version. The animated probably aged the best of the bunch, as far as general audiences are concerned, while the 1928 film was the one I found the most fascinating from a technical standpoint. So, if you're interested in old movies, that's a good one to see (actually, all of these are good to see, but that's a great starting point). Those are the two I was thinking of when I slapped a "Highly Recommended" label on this post, though in both cases ...

This 41-minute silent film is based on a 19th-century novel by Nikolai Gogol and directed by the legendary stop-motion pioneer,  Ladislaw Starewicz . It's the first adaptation of this work - expect a review of the 1961 version, titled "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka," soon, but for now let's focus on the 1913 adaptation, which is... well... it's bonkers. Let me jump right into the plot. The movie starts by introducing us to Solokha, the witch, and her demonic lover. Apparently, the book makes it clear this is a devil, rather than THE Devil, but it was a bit ambiguous in the movie (there's a decent chance that might be due to the translation, though). At any rate, they climb up Solokha's chimney, fly around on her broom, and briefly steal the moon before returning to her home. Around this time, Solokha's son, Vakula, is trying to convince Oksana to marry him. She dismisses the idea but mockingly offers him a chance: if he can bring her the Tsar's d...

As you've probably guessed from the heading, this covers six separate silent adaptations of A Christmas Carol. As far as I can tell, this is the entirety of surviving footage from that era. To be clear, there are several other known versions that have been lost, including "The Right to be Happy," a 55-minute film from 1916. Not all of the films discussed here are available in complete forms, either. If you're curious about any, they're all readily available for free online - just go to YouTube and search by name and year. Before I get to my individual reviews (to the extent the term even applies here), I'll give a brief overview for those of you who'd rather not wade through four thousand words of text about a bunch of movies 100+ years old. That's all of you, right? I'm grouping these together as a single post, because I can't imagine anyone would be in the least bit interested in seeing these appear one a day for a week. In general, these mov...

I wish I were about to tell you about an obscure mystic war between the forces of winter and summer, but instead this is a little message book about injured children and giving to the poor. The intended message from author Asenath Carver Coolidge seems to be that both holidays should be less about buying things, but that the Fourth of July especially shouldn’t be about buying fireworks. This book appears to be a Christmas tie-in for the author’s pet issue: preventing injuries from fireworks and firearms. She wrote multiple books on the subject. While the Fourth of July is still a common time for injuries today, regulation has brought the numbers down from the time that Coolidge was writing. Time Magazine reports that at the height, according to the book Fireworks, Picnics, and Flags: The Story of the Fourth of July Symbols , “Over the course of five consecutive Fourths, from 1903 to 1907, 1,153 people were killed and 21,520 more were injured.” But let’s run through the book....

Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories L. M. Montgomery, edited by Rea Wilmshurst Collection 1995, Stories originally published 1899 - 1910 Premise: A collection of holiday tales by L. M. Montgomery. They can't all be winners. This volume occupies a weird space between light holiday collection and academic archive only of interest to scholars. There isn’t any scholarly commentary, but I can't imagine anyone reading this entire book who isn't either writing this review or looking for common themes in pieces from the time period for a research project. Because oh, are there common themes. The strongest pieces in the collection are the two excerpts from the Anne books: a chapter from Anne of Green Gables and one from Anne of Windy Poplars. Both of these have charm, whimsy and warmth in equal portion. The introduction explains that the other stories were among many written by Montgomery in these years for various magazines - mostly what we would now call...

Two suitors are trying to woo the same woman on Christmas Eve. One steals the flowers the other sent, so we know not to root for him. They both show up at a Christmas party dressed as Santa in order to impress the woman. At the same time, another character with a sick wife decides to rob the party. He holds up the guy we're not rooting for, locks him in a closet, then steals the sack of presents he had with him. The other suitor runs into the thief outside the house, gets him to renounce his ways, then sends him off with some money. Then the suitor enters and distributes the gifts. After, he proposes to the woman, and the rival is freed from his closet just in time to learn about the engagement. It is entirely possible the synopsis I've just laid out is the plot for the 99-year-old silent movie, "Santa Claus vs. Cupid." But I really wouldn't swear to that: I found it hard to follow due to the sparse use of speech cards. Clearly, the intent was for the audien...