Holiday-Themed Films to Watch Now — and Every Year

Around our house, the holidays mean watching at least a couple of holiday-themed films. Our criteria are the film must be black and white and star Barbara Stanwyck or Jimmy Stewart, though never together, or Bing Crosby or Fred Astaire, ideally together, as in "Holiday Inn." Also, our films of choice ideally should have been made between 1939 and 1946.

I make an exception to the black and white rule for the perfect MGM musical "Meet Me in St. Louis," which is beautifully shot in Technicolor with a young Judy Garland and a very young Margaret O'Brien. They are perfectly matched as sisters and I love Garland consoling O'Brien with our favorite holiday song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

My top pick for this film list is the hip and witty "Christmas in Connecticut" (1945) with Barbara Stanwyck and Sidney Greenstreet of "Maltese Falcon" fat-man fame and a great cast of Hollywood's best players. Stanwyck plays a wised-up house and home columnist for publisher Greenstreet's magazine empire. Sitting at the typewriter in her working gal New York flat, she orders in from the neighborhood Hungarian café and looks out at her fire escape.

But to her adoring readers, she sees bucolic views of "her" Connecticut farm where she cooks  splendid meals for her nonexistent husband and baby. The trouble starts when publisher Greenstreet decides to spend Christmas with her and her family on the farm and to bring a war hero along for good measure.

Listen to Stanwyck deliver the line, "This is no time to be taking inventory," as the befuddled Greenstreet recounts all the way her (borrowed) baby is different from the baby from the day before.

Here are films that locals recommend. Some are old chestnuts to roast before the television fire. Some are more modern or decidedly off the usual winter wonderland path.

Ken Mandel's wife, Janet, an area English teacher who always has a lot of good comments to make at the West Orange Film Society screenings, has two suggestions:

"I love the music and dancing in 'White Christmas', " Mandel said. "And that whole 1950's feel."

I agree. My favorite scene is Crosby and Danny Kaye doing the "Sisters, Sisters" number as the film's singing/dancing sisters played by Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen make an escape from the local sheriff.

"I also love the scene in the Winona Ryder remake of 'Little Women,' (1994) when the father returns. It's very schmaltzy, sad-happy," Mandel said.

The Akerbloms — Anna, 7, E.J., 10, and parents Eric and Jan who are a bit older — gather for Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore as the Scrooge-like Mr. Potter in "It's A Wonderful Life," from 1946.

 "It's a classic, the whole family watches; the kids really like it," Jan said. (Right before the Christmas break, my AP American History students and I would delve the agrarian myth by analyzing the honky-tonk-Pottersville sequence.)

Claudia Zimmer also goes back in time to the original "Miracle on 34th Street," with Natalie Wood as the young daughter. "I love the scenes where you see what Macy's looked like in the 1940s," Zimmer said. She also suggested the first "Home Alone," with Macaulay Culkin left home by mistake during the Christmas holidays.

Independent filmmaker, founder and longtime director of the Black Maria Film Festival, John Columbus, takes this list to a small and powerful foreign film.

"My first choice is one maybe no one will recognize," Columbus said. "French film maker Robert Bresson's (1966) masterpiece 'Balthazar.' Balthazar was one of the Wise Men, but here it's a donkey. But, Mary rode into Bethlehem on a donkey and the film has Christian imagery. Bresson does something very out of the ordinary here."

Columbus also picked "The Christmas Story," the Jean Shepherd written and narrated 1983 classic, set in the 1940s of Shepherds' boyhood. "It's whacky; it's funny and ultimately uplifting," Columbus said. 

So, tune into Turner Classic Movies, rent or buy a DVD for this holiday and holidays to come. And, Bob DeVos (stepping out from his usual alias as the jazz musician-composer husband) and I say, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, now."

What's your favorite holiday-themed film?

Editor's Note:  This column originally appeared in December 2010.