It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
At the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, you’ll sit there blinking with tears in your eyes, and your breast all aflutter with far-flung hopes and distant dreams, just like the young boy who – in the years following the First World War, making the best of things with only one ear – fixed ice creams and delivered prescriptions while mapping out his impending trip to Fiji. You’ll wish you had a million dollars, only so that you could put the lot in George Bailey’s fraud fund, and hear for the first time truly those bells ring out on Christmas.
I thrive best hermit style. The outside world would be more than okay, if only it weren’t for all the people. But once a year – in the masculine-feminine arms of the cranky and careworn Jimmy Stewart – I laugh and I cry and I understand for a precious moment what it means to be endowed with community spirit.
* * *
Die Hard (1988)
‘They can teach you everything except how to live with a mistake’. Remember that the next time you engage in the perennial debate about whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It is of course, because why shouldn’t it be? Drop a C-4 or drive a sleigh: do whatever it takes to plow through those barriers which would prevent you from embracing the festive season.
Contemplating the politics of Die Hard is like walking on broken glass (arriving at Holly’s house late that evening, John McClane’s immediate task was to ask Santa for a brand new pair of booties). Most perversely of all, the successful resolution of the plot depends on a jumpy black cop recalibrating his trigger finger. But it’s all in good fun, and thirty years on, Die Hard the first is regarded as a classic.
Did you know that 20th Century Fox was contractually obliged to offer the lead role to Frank Sinatra? Did you know that the original title for Die Hard was The Nakatomi Plaza Clusterfuck?
* * *
Home Alone (1990)
Home Alone – conceived by John Hughes, who almost single-handedly ensured that a generation of teens came of age in the 1980s – was meant as a quirky if well-worn Christmas fable. An undersized guerrilla warrior and a trampish veteran were to come together to pay homage to family values, with assorted other messages like ‘Appearances can be deceiving’, ‘Be careful what you wish for’, and ‘Be sure to heat the door handle’.
Instead the film – which opened in November and played at cinemas until the following April – only encouraged a spate of oily gluttony, as people stayed at home and ignored their neighbours while placing order after order for individual cheese pizzas. Delivery drivers across the land turned up at doorsteps only to hear the sound of gunshots and the cackling of a maniac who advised, ‘Keep the change, ya filthy animal’.
Kevin McCallister’s family are a horrid bunch. We understand implicitly that a young Macauley Culkin would be better off without them. The success of Home Alone rests on his winning smile, the earnest portrayal by Roberts Blossom of Old Man Marley, and the oddball chemistry between the young whippet and the Wet Bandits.
Joe Pesci is notoriously difficult to work with, so that when it came time for Roberts Blossom to dispatch the Bandits with a shovel, he cracked Pesci with unusual vigour. As the esteemed actor of a trio of Scorsese films held the back of his head and whimpered, Blossom was heard to mutter the indelible phrase from the movie, ‘Keep the change, ya filthy animal’.
