Mainlining Christmas

Barbed Wire is one of several films mentioned in passing in Jeremy Arnold's Christmas in the Movies book that I figured I should track down. I should note Arnold is clear that the movie doesn't qualify as a genuine Christmas movie under his definition, which is quite a bit more restrictive than those we use. Even with our more expansive approach, Barbed Wire is a marginal case. The holiday section certainly doesn't come close to encompassing half the runtime, nor is it particularly important to the plot (Arnold places a great deal of significance on this metric throughout). The holiday does resonate with the movie's theme, however, which is why I think it's at least ambiguously a Christmas movie. Regardless, between being nearly a hundred years old and featuring a thematically relevant extended holiday sequence, I feel this is at least worth discussing, whichever side of the "Christmas movie" line it actually falls on. Released less a month before The Jazz...

This 9-minute film from 1928 represents something of a transition between silent film and talkies. Technically it's neither, as it includes a synchronized musical soundtrack but no spoken dialogue. In addition, it's shot in two-color Technicolor, similar to Mystery of the Wax Museum (though that movie features a much more technically advanced execution of the process). Between those features and an extremely intricate fantasy effect at the heart of the short, The Toy Shop must have amazed audiences ninety-five years ago. I still found myself surprised and intrigued today. There's not a lot to the plot. The movie opens with a poor beggar girl (presumably an orphan) begging outside a toy shop on what I'm assuming is Christmas Eve (all we get from the title cards is that this is happening in France). Visually, we only get a couple hints at the season: there's a wreath on a door in the background, and later we'll see some garlands inside the shopkeeper's home. ...

Big Business is a 19-minute long Laurel and Hardy short film in which they play Christmas tree salesmen who get in a destructive fight with an angry potential customer.  The holiday elements are fairly light here - aside from a joke or two at the beginning and end, the fact they're selling Christmas trees as opposed to literally anything else is irrelevant to the story or comedy. But it's still technically set at Christmas, so let's take a look. The plot here is simplistic. Laurel and Hardy visit a couple houses without luck before reaching the home where things go off the rails. It starts with the tree (then Hardy's coat) getting repeatedly stuck in the door, requiring them to ring the doorbell, which further annoys the home's owner. The silent picture format is useful for smoothing over the obvious plot contrivance: it's easier to avoid confronting why they're unable to explain the misunderstanding when no one's actually able to speak outside the occas...

This thirteen-minute film doesn't offer much of interest, but it's unusual in one respect: it was posted by the National Archive, which also took the time to provide some information on the movie's history and production . Context tends to be elusive when it comes to silent films, so it's nice to actually get a little insight into where this came from. This was produced by the Ford Motor Company, of all things. Apparently, they had a fairly substantial film division at the time. To clarify, while it's produced by Ford, it doesn't include any kind of tie-in, commercial, or product placement. There are no motorized vehicles in this at all. The film itself is kind of simple. Honestly, it's closer to what I'd expect from the first decade of that century, not the third: there's no real story, no visual effects or tricks, and the selling point here feels largely centered on the notion that seeing moving images will be exciting in and of itself. The movie f...

I think the official title for this is simply, "Good Cheer," as opposed to "Hal Roach Presents His Rascals in Good Cheer," but the longer version gives at least a hint as to what this actually is. My generation thinks of this property as "The Little Rascals," though that branding came quite a bit later. "Hals's Rascals" is already an alternate name for what started as "Our Gang," a series of short films about a group of poor kids who went through comical adventures. Regardless of what it's called, this is indeed a 1926 Little Rascals Christmas film. First, let's talk a little about what that means. The Our Gang shorts started in 1922 and were produced in various incarnations for decades. The premise centered on the idea that kids acting relatively naturally would make for good comedy, particularly when compared against the unrealistic behavior and dialogue they were typically directed to present at the time. Good Cheer is re...

I've been digging into old silent Christmas movies to get a better idea for how and when holiday tropes formed. This one stands out. To clarify, I'm not saying you should track this down. Most of you would find it tedious and pointless. But for me, it's the missing link for a number of ideas and concepts common in modern Christmas films. This represents the earliest example in film I've come across to date for a number of elements, and that alone is enough to make me excited. Let's back up and discuss what this is, because - setting aside all that - the film itself is a bit bonkers. It's the creation of Frank E. Kleinschmidt, an explorer and documentarian, who seems to have realized he could make more money off footage of the Arctic if he brought along a Santa suit and spliced that with some scenes filmed in a studio with a different actor. As such, this isn't remotely story-driven. The movie opens with a passage from A Visit from St. Nicholas, before cuttin...

I'd seen conflicting reports on whether or not Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush was a Christmas movie, so I decided to check for myself. I've seen several of Chapman's other films over the past year, and consider him one of the most consistently entertaining filmmakers of his era (possibly the most entertaining, in fact). While The Gold Rush might be my least favorite of his movies I've seen to date, it's still quite good, and it technically meets our definition for a Christmas movie, which you probably guessed from the fact you're reading this at all. I want to stress that the word "technically" is doing some heavy lifting. The movie doesn't mention or acknowledge Christmas itself, though both Thanksgiving and New Year's are significant dates in the narrative, making it easy to confirm the bulk of screen time is spent on or between these holidays. In fact, only the first and last fifteen minutes fall outside this range. I should mention the...

I'm worried this is going to get lost in the shuffle because we're looking at so many silent movies this year. This one's a little different, though, both because it's an incredibly influential and important work and because the subject matter is probably going to resonate more with the sort of people I expect (or at least hope) read this blog. The Phantom Carriage is a silent Swedish horror/drama hybrid built around a New Year's Eve legend in which the last person to die before the stroke of midnight is cursed to drive Death's carriage through the following year, collecting souls. The term "folk horror" isn't generally applied to movies prior to the 1970s, but this certainly feels like a pretty good fit. You could argue it's the first film in that subgenre, and one of the first horror films in general, coming out a year after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a year before Nosferatu. Before anyone gets too excited, I should add a great deal of i...

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 ...

As far as I can tell, this is the earliest feature-length Christmas talkie that still exists. There's a movie released earlier in 1929 called "Auld Lang Syne" which I'm assuming was holiday themed, but no copies are believed to have survived, and I can't find so much as a synopsis online. If anyone knows anything about that movie or any other Christmas movies from the 1920s with sound, please   reach out . But as far as extant Christmas movies featuring synchronized sound with talking, this appears to be the first. I know that sounds like a lot of qualifiers, but I think the addition of synchronized sound - particularly sound with dialogue - is functionally the boundary between an earlier art form and modern movies. I don't want to disparage silent pictures in any way: they are a fascinating medium in their own right, and I have every intention of tracking down more silent Christmas films. But watching them is a very different experience than watching a film w...