A Film to Mark Each of the 12 Days

The barreling momentum and melodramatic inventiveness of Charles Dickens’ glorious page-turners helped inspire the invention and refinement of storytelling movies. And if Dickens deserves some of the credit for movies in general, he deserves almost all of it for Christmas movies.

Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” established the tradition of blending sentiment, preaching and melodrama into popular seasonal fiction. Dickens conveyed Christmastide’s aura of charity and goodwill with emotional depictions of the holiday’s most inviting social pleasures: lavish food and drink, warm family reunions, genteel flirtations amid a game of blindman’s buff. The spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future stress the importance of year-round generosity and kindness.

What Dickens calls for is fellow-feeling. So do the filmmakers who depict Christmas, in bona-fide Christmas films and non-Christmas movies alike, as a time when people come together.

Ranging through holiday perennials to world classics and TV fodder, the following is a brief guide to the many facets of Christmas in the movies--one picture for each of the 12 days.

1. The greatest Christmas scene in movies

It comes in one of the greatest movies, Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” (1937).

Near the end of this classic about French prisoners of war in a World War I German camp, the characters of Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) and Marechal (Jean Gabin) escape and find sanctuary on the farm of a German widow (Dita Parlo). On Christmas Eve, they show their thanks and love by making a Christmas tree out of a pine limb, putting together a manger out of wood and cardboard, and sculpting Jesus, Mary and Joseph from potatoes.

“Oh! The Virgin Mary!” exclaims Elsa, the widow, in surprise and pleasure. “Baby Jesus, my blood brother,” muses Rosenthal, a Jew. When Elsa rouses her daughter Lotte from sleep with the proclamation “Father Christmas has come,” you feel that she’s speaking the truth.

No sentimental excess mars the emotional perfection of this scene; Lotte’s response to the sight of the potato-based holy family is that she wants to eat Jesus. (She settles for Joseph.) And when the hale, gruff Marechal tries to say “Lotte has blue eyes” in German, you know that his attraction to Elsa has bloomed into romance and that his feeling is reciprocated.

Under the spell of Christmas, love bridges gaps of language and nationality in the most miraculous scene in a miracle of a movie.

2. The most haunting Christmas movie

The key sequences in “The City of Lost Children” (1995) feature half a dozen sinister Santas and a Christmas party gone rotten; that’s when this movie definitively captures the peculiar comic horror that occurs when adults take beloved childhood rituals and symbols of faith and use them in bad faith.

This picture was co-directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of the current hit “Amelie”--and I vastly prefer it to “Amelie.” It’s a one-of-a-kind movie: a gorgeous amalgam of 19th and 20th century fantasy.

The chief villain is a mad scientist named Krank (Daniel Emilfork) who’s aging prematurely because he’s incapable of dreaming. Mechanical-eyed thugs supply Krank with city kids for a Frankenstein-like lab on an offshore rig, where he infiltrates their slumber and grabs their dreams for himself. Happily, by the end, innocence triumphs.

3. The best version of “A Christmas Carol”

Remaking Dickens’ novella has become a minor industry. Although every Scrooge, from George C. Scott to Mr. Magoo, has legions of fans, you can find the hand’s-down best in the 1951 British version: Alastair Sim’s stylish caricature of a man who gets passionate satisfaction from tightness and meanness.

At the beginning of the film, he’s a superb comic grotesque. No one has put more juice than Sim into a pained scowl, an expression he wears whenever Scrooge hears mention of a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

And his silliness is inspired at the end, when he hops around in his bedclothes, euphoric over the realization that he’s alive on Christmas morning and overflowing with newfound generosity, which he expresses by calling a random child on the street “a remarkable boy.”

4. The best Christmas musical number

That would be Judy Garland’s singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to little Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944).

“White Christmas” may be the ideal secular-holiday anthem, but it never found a worthy mounting in a movie, neither when it was introduced in “Holiday Inn” nor when it became the theme song of “White Christmas.”

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” though, was introduced in the perfect setting: a movie that brilliantly celebrated that favorite MGM studio theme, “There’s no place like home.” The sight and sound of Garland at her peak trying to comfort O’Brien, who’s stricken at the thought of her family’s moving from St. Louis, captures all the poignancy of trying to feel jubilant when you’re feeling fragile.

5. The love-it-or-hate-it essential American Christmas movie

Of course: Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946). At its best, it’s a beguiling ode to a small-town American life that no longer exists and possibly never did. James Stewart is superb as the village good guy who never rises in the world because he’s too busy giving a shoulder-up to every friend and member of his family.

This lenient, generous home financier is the one man who threatens the power of the town Scrooge, a vicious banker named Potter (Lionel Barrymore).

What George Orwell rightly said was Dickens’ theme is also Capra’s: “If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.”

What turns some of us off by the end is Capra’s single-mindedness: His Scrooge doesn’t have a change of heart; the entire movie is like “A Christmas Carol” told from the point of view of Scrooge’s bedeviled clerk, Bob Cratchit.

6. The best update of “It’s a Wonderful Life”

It came out a year ago, but you might not have noticed: It’s the much-maligned and overlooked “The Family Man,” starring Nicolas Cage as a Wall Street tycoon who is given a glimpse of the life he might have led if he hadn’t left his college girlfriend behind to study international banking in London.

Everything about this movie has genuine warmth and smarts, whether it’s Don Cheadle’s daring portrayal of a street-tough guardian angel or the affectionate, satiric vision of the New Jersey suburb where Cage finds himself trapped--or liberated--with a wife (Tea Leoni) and small daughter.

Cage makes his natural eccentricities work beautifully for the character; the daughter thinks he’s an alien who’s replaced her real father, and Cage shapes his performance around the notion of an alien becoming human.

Leoni has never been better on the big screen: She’s the epitome of passionate and playful domesticity.

7. The most TV-movie-like Christmas movie

The 1994 hit “The Santa Clause” was just the kind of prefab movie that people mistook “The Family Man” for: Tim Allen’s talent for dry regular-guyness fails to kindle this soppy big-screen Yule log.

Allen plays a toy company sales whiz who startles Santa fatally on Christmas Eve and becomes the new Kriss Kringle.

The handling of Santa myths is both sassy and sanctimonious, and the subplot about Allen’s son (Eric Lloyd) and ex-wife (Wendy Crewson) and his ex-wife’s shrink husband (Judge Reinhold) both mocks and respects “inner child” psycho-drivel.

8. The most overrated Christmas movie

It’s undoubtedly “Miracle on 34th Street.” The icky 1947 Christmas fantasy became a hit and a TV perennial by having things both ways when it comes to St. Nick worship: It wraps the spiritual in the mercenary.

In the original and in the slavish 1994 remake, the real Kriss Kringle takes a job as a Santa in a New York City department store and sets off a toddler-level debate between reason, in the form of the store’s promotions director, and imagination, in the form of Santa.

The moviemakers hold faith above pragmatism but confirm Santa’s identity as well as his validity in court.

And though the promotion director’s young daughter supposedly learns that faith is its own reward, she achieves certain belief only when Santa gives her what she wants, including a dad and a big house in the suburbs.

9. The scariest Christmas movie

Curtis Hanson, the director and co-writer of “L.A. Confidential,” made his first big mark as a screenwriter with “Silent Partner” (1978), starring Elliott Gould as a meek, underestimated Toronto bank teller.

Correctly reading a clue that he’s about to be held up by a robber in a Santa suit (Christopher Plummer), Gould makes out like a bandit: He stashes away most of the loot in his own safe-deposit box and the act stays his, and Santa’s, secret.

Unfortunately, Plummer’s pseudo-Santa is a vengeful psychopath.

10. The most garish Christmas perennial

“White Christmas” (1954) is a flagon of flat eggnog concocted by a trio of old Hollywood hands (Norman Krasna, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank) and served up by director Michael Curtiz at his least adept.

Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are Army buddies who use their postwar nightclub act to bail their general, now retired, out of debt. In the course of rehearsals, Crosby and Kaye fall in love with a sister act--Crosby with singer Rosemary Clooney, Kaye with dancer Vera-Ellen.

The whole movie is done up in the gaudiest Technicolor--it flashes like the most metallic artificial Christmas tree, with blinding scarlets and greens.

11. The most original Christmas movie

Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” directed by Henry Selick, is a sublime piece of puppet animation. It actually intensifies the Christmas spirit for the viewer in a deliciously naughty way.

This 1993 picture depicts yule delights from the perspective of Halloween and a delightful and unexpected antihero: Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King.

12. The best Christmas Americana

Bob Clark’s “A Christmas Story” (1983), based on parts of Jean Shepherd’s novel “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” is above, beneath or to the side of criticism: It was advertised as “A Tribute to the Original, Traditional, One-Hundred-Percent, Red-Blooded, Two-Fisted, All-American Christmas....” All those who revel in the 1940s boy hero’s pursuit of a Red Ryder BB gun love it for being just that.

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Michael Sragow is film critic for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.