A Christmas Puzzle : A commentary: Why today’s holiday films lack the spirit of movies made years ago

This year, come yuletide, a number of familiar rituals will be re-enacted in homes across America.

From New England to Texas to Orange County, Christmas trees will crop up in our living rooms, real or fake, humble or ostentatious, their decorations scanty and made of plastic foam or a rich panoply of bulbs and lights, with a complement of beribboned presents spread out in a loving bounty below.

There may be caroling, eggnog and turkey, huge family gatherings, Christmas cards lined on mantles. On record or compact disc players will be seasonal music: Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio,” Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Nat King Cole’s “Chestnuts,” Mahalia Jackson’s spirituals or more recent efforts by Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger.

Topping it off will be Christmas movies on the TV or video player: holiday favorites holding everyone spellbound around the old-style 19-inch or a modern high-definition tube.

But there will be a catch. Most of the movies people will watch and most of the ones that will affect them most deeply (with a few key exceptions) will be 40 or 50 years old (or more).

First of all, there will be the uncontested yuletide champ, Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), with its timeless “Christmas Carol”-like tale of desperate small-town savings and loan director George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, at his all-time peak) discovering on Christmas Eve, through a guardian angel’s intervention, that the life of self-sacrifice and generosity that has driven him to ruin and near-suicide was not in vain. There will be the actual versions of Dickens’ “Carol”--the most beloved of which star Reginald Owen (circa 1938) and Alistair Sim (circa 1951), while the best recent ones, from the ‘80s, feature George C. Scott and Scrooge McDuck.

There will be the Father O’Malley films of director Leo McCarey and star Bing Crosby, “Going My Way” (1944) and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945), with the melodious priest triumphing over irascible superiors, beautiful nuns and cantankerous skinflints alike. There will be Crosby again, crooning “White Christmas” in “Holiday Inn” (1942) and, of course, in “White Christmas” (1954).

There will be Cary Grant as an angel in “The Bishop’s Wife” (1947) and Edmund Gwenn as the mysterious Kris Kringle (Is he Santa?) in “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947). And John Wayne staggering across Monument Valley to bring a child to Christmas safety in John Ford’s “Three Godfathers” (1948).

There will be young Judy Garland, keening her devastating rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to a near-hysterical Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944). There will be the old cartoons: Max Fleischer’s “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” (from the ‘30s) and the various Disney efforts with Mickey, Donald, and Pluto cutting up at yuletime (mostly from the ‘40s and early ‘50s.)

From the late ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s? Very little.

And what little available is mostly cartoons or TV films, rather than big studio releases.

Why?

What happened to Christmas movies?

Did the Christmas spirit dry up sometime during the postwar era? Why do we still cling to these early movies--most made during the Depression, the WWII years or immediately afterward-- rather than the ones made since?

Why doesn’t everyone get pumped up about sitting around the set and watching Bill Murray in “Scrooged” (“A Christmas Carol” updated in 1988 to big-time network corporate TV)? Or “It Happened One Christmas” (“It’s a Wonderful Life” updated in 1977, with Marlo Thomas in Stewart’s role, and Stewart in Lionel Barrymore’s)? Or “Santa Claus: the Movie” (a 1985 multi-multi-million dollar extravaganza with Dudley Moore as Santa’s head dwarf)? Or the 1985 “One Magic Christmas” (decent, but unexciting, again modeled on Capra’s “Life”)?

And why are the few ‘80s Christmas movies that do work usually somewhat sarcastic: for example, Bob Clark’s 1983 “A Christmas Story,” based on Jean Shepherd’s acerbic boyhood reminiscences? And producer-writer John Hughes’ “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” in which Chevy Chase endures a yuletide Purgatory? And, again from Hughes (and director Chris Columbus), last year’s “Home Alone,” in which a small boy is trapped in a posh suburban house at Christmastime, with two burglars humorously terrorizing him?

The one ‘80s Christmas movie that does seem to have become a semi-classic: “Gremlins” (from writer Columbus and director Joe Dante), in which a cuddly little Christmas pet spawns a brood of homicidal beasties, who overrun a town, wreaking yuletide havoc and murder before meeting their own destruction.

In the wake of all this, it may be darkly appropriate that the ‘80s was also the decade of the infamous “Silent Night, Deadly Night” series, with a maniac in a Santa suit running around town yelling “Ho! Ho! Ho!” while murdering teen-agers with an ax.

Some of you will have a ready answer for all this: The increasing secularization of American life and media is to blame. From the post-war period on, those forces doomed the Christmas movie. Americans lost their faith in God, therefore they lost their faith in Christmas.

But this seems a tenuous theory--or, at best, only part of the story. It’s clear that the religious impulse didn’t die, especially on TV; nor did the desire to see Christmas movies. Christmas thrived on TV, from the ‘50s through the ‘70s. And, during the ‘80s, there was actually a resurgence of Christmas-themed Hollywood movies, including the ones mentioned above. So why, in comparison, do most of them seem so frail, so overblown, so insincere, so lacking in emotion or conviction? Or, as with “Gremlins,” so comparatively dark?

Perhaps, more than anything else, we have to look at the times, including our own. After all, most of the vintage Christmas classics come from the ‘30s and ‘40s, a period that included the Great Depression, a devastating world war and a painstaking period of postwar rebuilding. (Few come from the ‘20s, a boom-and-bust decade of boosterism, rampaging speculation and orgiastic excess that strongly resembles the ‘80’s). Those were times, perhaps, when people felt more intensely the uncertainty of life, the crunch of circumstance, the harrowing possibilities of poverty, loss and death.

They were times, to put it bluntly, when people probably felt they needed Christmas--and its spirit--more than they did later, during the postwar years of prosperity.

How, in the ‘80s, were Americans supposed to respond to the simple, heartfelt message of most Christmas movies--”It is more blessed to give than to receive”--when they were bombarded on every side by political messages that told them it was more blessed to take than to share; when a plague (AIDS) ravaged the country and was largely ignored or neglected; when real-life savings and loan directors, let loose by the government, drove the nation into financial catastrophe; when the environment was despoiled or looted and we were encouraged by politicians to divide ourselves along racial, financial or sexual lines and keep the “outsiders” forever out.

And what of our movies in the ‘80s? At the same time some, feebly, tried to reawaken the Christmas spirit, the vast majority tended to exalt the triple “virtues” of success, sexual pleasure and revenge--in comedy after comedy, thriller after thriller. Is it surprising that the holiday celebrated in the most popular and “inspirational” mass hit of the ‘80s, “E.T., the Extraterrestrial” was not Christmas but Halloween: the night of Trick or Treat?

If a community, or a whole country, is sold on the idea that it is good to take and suspect to share, how can they respond to the core of the true Christmas movie?

Yet they do. And that may be the real lesson. A half century after they were made, the “It’s a Wonderful Lives” and “Going My Ways” still draw faithful audiences who largely accept them as they were made: not with “sentimentality” or false commercialism, but in a genuine, albeit sometimes whimsical, mood of benevolence, family and community feeling, of amity and “Christmas spirit.”

Despite the dubious optimism of some politicians, many experts paint a gloomy picture of the years ahead. And if that is so--if once again we have to make a determination to tighten our belts and pull together--then maybe there will be room again for Christmas movies, even “classic” ones, and stimuli enough to create them.

After all, it was only in his very darkest hour that George Bailey met the angel--and discovered that it was a wonderful life.