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TCM Christmas Marathon 12/17-12/25
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By Jeremy Arnold/TCM
The 2023 TCM Christmas Marathon touches eight decades, spanning the years 1925 to 1990, and includes over 100 films—enough for anyone to find the kind of holiday movie they’re looking for and to discover something new. The term “Christmas movie,” after all, is a fairly modern one that remains open to personal definition. Most movies with Christmas in them are just that: the holiday is a setting, or pops up for a brief moment or sequence. While these are entertaining to watch at Christmastime, there are also movies that use the holiday even more fully to inject real meaning into the story, the characters, the emotional spine and central themes of the film. These are arguably the purest holiday movies and the ones that have most endured.
One unusual picture, ripe for rediscovery, is being shown on TCM for the very first time: Miracle on Main Street (1939). The actress known as Margo—remembered for playing the woman who ages rapidly upon leaving Shangri-La in Lost Horizon (1937)—stars as a stripper with a shady husband (Lyle Talbot), who attempts to fleece an undercover cop on Christmas Eve. On the run, Margo hides in a church, where she finds an abandoned baby. She takes the baby in order to mask her escape, but gradually starts to feel deep attachment and decides to raise the infant herself—as well as drop Lyle Talbot and get a respectable job.
This little B melodrama is a fine early example of the “pure” kind of Christmas movie. The holiday comes off as an active force, fostering redemption and healing, as it prompts Margo to transform. Other characters including two stripper friends, a crusty landlady, and a drunken hobo will soften their cynicism as well. Produced for the poverty row studio Grand National Pictures by Jack Skirball, a former rabbi who would later become a prominent philanthropist in cross-cultural and -religious programs, Miracle on Main Street brings together many ingredients of what we now see as Christmas movies: a focus on family, especially one that unites and grows, an acknowledgement of the lonelier, more cynical aspects of the season, and transformations of characters to more compassionate versions of themselves.
By the time the film was ready for release, Grand National had gone out of business. Skirball made a deal with Columbia to release the movie domestically, and arranged for Twentieth Century-Fox to release a Spanish-language version that had been filmed simultaneously (also starring Margo). Miracle on Main Street remains a bit rough around the edges, lacking the polish of a major studio’s resources, but it compensates with some unusually frank and suggestive scenes for its time as well as an offbeat, touching story and characters. By contrast, Bachelor Mother (1939), a major RKO production starring Ginger Rogers, was in release around the same time as Miracle on Main Street, and is also about a woman whose life turns around when she finds a baby on Christmas. But the holiday is not centrally meaningful to the story, functioning instead as a backdrop to an otherwise breezy and light tale.
Both films arrived at the cusp of Hollywood’s greatest decade for Christmas movies. The defining element of the 1940s, of course, was World War II, which began in 1939 and America entered in December 1941. Over the first half of the decade, millions of families all over America (and across the world) were being broken up as their loved ones went off to serve. After the war, families had to rebuild themselves, with or without the return of those loved ones. Families were both breaking apart—sometimes forever—and reuniting on an enormous scale. All of society was touched in some way by this phenomenon, and it was inevitable that Hollywood movies would somehow reflect this. One way they did was by using Christmas much more frequently as a narrative device, often representing family or the ideal family togetherness that people wanted, missed, and maybe were reacquiring. The holiday turned up in countless 1940s movies, which incidentally were released at all times of the year, thus underscoring the fact that Christmas was being used to real thematic ends and not just as an excuse to release a movie at Christmastime.
Full link: https://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/021858?source=HTM
The 2023 TCM Christmas Marathon touches eight decades, spanning the years 1925 to 1990, and includes over 100 films—enough for anyone to find the kind of holiday movie they’re looking for and to discover something new. The term “Christmas movie,” after all, is a fairly modern one that remains open to personal definition. Most movies with Christmas in them are just that: the holiday is a setting, or pops up for a brief moment or sequence. While these are entertaining to watch at Christmastime, there are also movies that use the holiday even more fully to inject real meaning into the story, the characters, the emotional spine and central themes of the film. These are arguably the purest holiday movies and the ones that have most endured.
One unusual picture, ripe for rediscovery, is being shown on TCM for the very first time: Miracle on Main Street (1939). The actress known as Margo—remembered for playing the woman who ages rapidly upon leaving Shangri-La in Lost Horizon (1937)—stars as a stripper with a shady husband (Lyle Talbot), who attempts to fleece an undercover cop on Christmas Eve. On the run, Margo hides in a church, where she finds an abandoned baby. She takes the baby in order to mask her escape, but gradually starts to feel deep attachment and decides to raise the infant herself—as well as drop Lyle Talbot and get a respectable job.
This little B melodrama is a fine early example of the “pure” kind of Christmas movie. The holiday comes off as an active force, fostering redemption and healing, as it prompts Margo to transform. Other characters including two stripper friends, a crusty landlady, and a drunken hobo will soften their cynicism as well. Produced for the poverty row studio Grand National Pictures by Jack Skirball, a former rabbi who would later become a prominent philanthropist in cross-cultural and -religious programs, Miracle on Main Street brings together many ingredients of what we now see as Christmas movies: a focus on family, especially one that unites and grows, an acknowledgement of the lonelier, more cynical aspects of the season, and transformations of characters to more compassionate versions of themselves.
By the time the film was ready for release, Grand National had gone out of business. Skirball made a deal with Columbia to release the movie domestically, and arranged for Twentieth Century-Fox to release a Spanish-language version that had been filmed simultaneously (also starring Margo). Miracle on Main Street remains a bit rough around the edges, lacking the polish of a major studio’s resources, but it compensates with some unusually frank and suggestive scenes for its time as well as an offbeat, touching story and characters. By contrast, Bachelor Mother (1939), a major RKO production starring Ginger Rogers, was in release around the same time as Miracle on Main Street, and is also about a woman whose life turns around when she finds a baby on Christmas. But the holiday is not centrally meaningful to the story, functioning instead as a backdrop to an otherwise breezy and light tale.
Both films arrived at the cusp of Hollywood’s greatest decade for Christmas movies. The defining element of the 1940s, of course, was World War II, which began in 1939 and America entered in December 1941. Over the first half of the decade, millions of families all over America (and across the world) were being broken up as their loved ones went off to serve. After the war, families had to rebuild themselves, with or without the return of those loved ones. Families were both breaking apart—sometimes forever—and reuniting on an enormous scale. All of society was touched in some way by this phenomenon, and it was inevitable that Hollywood movies would somehow reflect this. One way they did was by using Christmas much more frequently as a narrative device, often representing family or the ideal family togetherness that people wanted, missed, and maybe were reacquiring. The holiday turned up in countless 1940s movies, which incidentally were released at all times of the year, thus underscoring the fact that Christmas was being used to real thematic ends and not just as an excuse to release a movie at Christmastime.
Full link: https://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/021858?source=HTM