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Films to set the (holiday) mood

By Matthew Sweet
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Friday, Dec 21, 2007, Page 17

The Wizard of Oz is just one of many PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

A movie doesn't have to feature Santa Claus to be a Christmas classic. Here's how a bunch of films became irretrievably associated with the holiday season - even if some of them have as much to do with yuletide as hot cross buns.

Miracle on 34th Street

It's a film about a delusional man who believes himself to be the real Father Christmas - the whiskery British actor Edmund Gwenn is the man with the sack; little Natalie Wood the girl who believes he's the real deal. You don't need a month of white noise and electric shocks to force your mind to place it in the same loop of the Venn diagram as turkey and crackers.

But in over a century of filmmaking, this is the only Santa flick we've really taken to our hearts. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians stirs no warm thoughts. We don't come back from the carol concert and settle down to anything involving Dudley Moore in an elf costume. I have a theory: unlike its competitors, Miracle On 34th Street never asks us to believe that we're seeing the real Santa Claus - only to enjoy the pleasure of submitting to the benign madness of its central character. (Though frankly, this theory is a bit screwed by the total obscurity of Do Not Open 'Til Christmas, in which Alan Lake plays another psychiatric patient in a cotton-wool beard - this time one who jumps out from behind the curtains armed with a carving knife.)

The Wizard of Oz

In 1939, the only kind of turkey associated with the Yellow Brick Road was the box office species. But when this achingly odd musical about tornadoes and devil monkeys and shoe-envy was shown on CBS in November 1956, 45 million people tuned in. So CBS began screening it every Christmas - with the respectful exception of December 1963, when the American public, mindful of the bloody events the previous month in Dallas, were in no mood to hear Ray Bolger bash his way through If I Only Had a Brain. But the BBC can take the credit for naturalizing the link between gravy granules and ruby slippers in this country - since 1975, the film has made 15 appearances in the Christmas double issue of the Radio Times.

The Man With the Golden Gun

For the past 20 years, the UK commercial TV network ITV has worked hard to put James Bond into the nativity scene. And it's done this because, for as long as anyone can remember, the BBC has driven a sturdy yule log through the main commercial broadcaster's hopes of gathering the biggest Christmas Day audience. In 1978, putting out Diamonds Are Forever was a persuasive fightback strategy.

But The Man With the Golden Gun deserves the headline here. When ITV showed it in 1980 it looked like the Crown Jewels. Then, with amazing cheek, the channel dragged it out again 1984. Moonraker provided the same service in 1985 and 1990. But here was a subtle admission: like Christmases, one James Bond film is very much like another - and both seem to generate a sense of constipation and disappointment.

The Great Escape

The Christmas movie as we know it - an all-star adventure, just about suitable for all the family, and probably involving slightly comical members of the Waffen-SS - is an innovation of the 1970s. We can think it's dead Christmassy to watch Steve McQueen scoot over tangles of razor wire on the back of a motorbike.

For the same reason, there is something ineluctably seasonal about POW camp dramas such as Von Ryan's Express, The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story, Bridge On the River Kwai and Escape to Victory. Maybe the schedulers are jiggering with some collective memory of plum duff in wartime Red Cross parcels, or that Christmas England-Germany friendly in the sludge of the Somme. It must go deep, because it works beyond the small screen, too: Where Eagles Dare, a whoop-de-do jamboree in which Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton drag up as Nazis, was a huge hit at the box office at Christmas 1968 - and duly made the journey to television, becoming a holiday staple in the 1970s.

Swiss Miss

Christmas is for the kiddies - and so are most of the films that have gained a Proustian association with the smell of pine needles. The first Christmas Day movie ever broadcast on British TV was Wallaby Jim of the Islands in 1951. Two years later the BBC plugged a gap with Swiss Miss, in which Stan Laurel chucks feathers in the air in order to seduce a St Bernard dog into giving up his barrel of brandy, and Oliver Hardy is pursued across an Alpine rope-bridge by a furious gorilla. This screening secured Stan and Ollie's place in the Christmas TV listings for decades - though the feature most favored by schedulers, over the years, is Way Out West, which has no snow at all, not even the feathery variety.

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