Mainlining Christmas

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

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

This fifteen-minute film was directed by D.W. Griffith, which should probably be addressed before we get into the movie itself. Griffith of course also directed the 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, which glorified the founding of the KKK. I am not a film historian, nor have I actually seen Birth of a Nation, so I will not be commenting on its significance in the history of the medium. I will say that any discussion of Griffith as a filmmaker - or any of his films - should probably acknowledge his legacy is at least as connected to the history of white supremacy as it is to the evolution of early film. For what it's worth, I actually watched A Trap for Santa Claus and wrote the remainder of this review prior to realizing who directed it. In short, I'm not just attempting to separate the art from the racist here: I literally didn't notice until after. The story starts with a family down on their luck. Unable to find work, the father is taking their misfortune particularly hard a

I'll warn you upfront this falls in a sort of awkward space between "conceptually good" and "actually good," at least by today's standards. The fact I'm comparing a movie 116 years old to anything remotely modern should be an indication there's something pretty neat about this, so if you've got 14 minutes to kill and don't want to be spoiled, go look this up on Youtube: it's not hard to find. And make no mistake, there's absolutely something in this to spoil. Let's get into what this is, because I doubt it's what you're expecting from the title. Or more accurately, it starts like what you're expecting then goes in a wildly different direction about halfway through. The first half is a bit slow. We're introduced to the characters: a kind little rich boy with tons of toys, and a poor girl who lives in a small shack. While on a walk, the boy comes across the girl, who's standing in the cold. He gives her his coat

I'm not entirely certain this was originally intended as a Christmas film, but apparently it's included in at least one modern holiday compilation, so I'll count it. This film is a 7-minute-long short about a group of women riding in a couple horse-drawn sleighs who are attacked by a group of men armed with snowballs. The women then chase down the fleeing men, push them into the snow, and pelt them with snowballs. It's not entirely clear whether the women are motivated by good-natured play or rage-fueled vengeance, so I guess that's up to the viewer. If that sounds fun... it kind of is. The scope of this is impressive: I didn't get a precise count, but it feels like it involves a substantial number of participants. Likewise, this involves some fairly large stunts. At one point, one of the sleighs tips over, throwing the riders into a snowbank, and they all rally to get it upright again. There's also a sequence where the women - now on foot - slide down a ste

This is a short film from director Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the pioneers of early film who quite literally helped invent the form. She's arguably one of the most important contributors in the medium's history, and yes, it's maddening she's not more widely known and discussed (apparently she thought so, too, and spent a great deal of time later in life lobbying for her legacy). The Parish Priest's Christmas tells a fairly simple story of a priest trying to prepare for Christmas. The story is entirely told through visual media; there are no title cards and the only words we see are the date to inform us this is set at Christmas. The priest goes to the home of two poor members of his parish, who appear to donate a cradle full of straw that a figure of the baby Jesus can go in. Next, he goes to what looks to be a well-off man selling such figurines - I can't tell if he's meant to be an artist or just a dealer. Regardless, he has a figure the priest wants, but he