Posted on 12/21/2005 11:51:41 AM PST by Rummyfan
Mark's Yuletide Movie Vault CHRISTMAS AT WAR
As is traditional, I'm pleased to offer my annual round-up of great Christmas movie moments. This year, it seems appropriate to present a seasonal selection with a military connection, in honour of our boys fighting overseas. True, if you're Canadian, British or a citizen of most other western countries, an alarming number of those boys seem to be chaps from West Bromwich or Toronto fighting for the other side, but maybe these recommended highlights from the Great Satan’s cultural imperialism division will urge the lads on to even more glorious martyrhood. Have yourself a merry little jihad!
The best “White Christmas”: The quintessential Hollywood Christmas image is homesick young GIs in their foxholes, chins on rifle butts, thinking of family and friends and girls next door thousands of miles away. It’s in a hundred pictures, but we might as well salute the song that says it best in White Christmas (1954). Irving Berlin had written “White Christmas” for the earlier film Holiday Inn (1942), which had no military content whatsoever. But it was the boys shipped out to the Pacific who fell in love with it, and, 12 years later Berlin, in bulding a movie round the song, wanted to pay tribute to the men who made it a hit, and the biggest selling record of all time. In a film with some very loud and vulgar stagings, the title song gets the simple treatment – Captain Bing singing it in the rubble of a burnt-out building as part of a Christmas Eve entertainment for the troops, accompanied only by Private Danny Kaye winding up a music box. Very poignant.
The best wet Christmas: On the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, here’s a film that follows part of the preparations for the Doolittle Raid, the morale-boosting if otherwise not militarily significant strike on Tokyo that the US mounted a few months later. Destination Tokyo (1943) is set on board the submarine USS Copperfin, where Cary Grant and his men celebrate Christmas under the sea deep in Japanese waters.
The best “Silent Night”: Music is at the heart of the most famous wartime Christmas anecdote – the truce in the trenches, when German and British troops sang their bilingual version of “Stille Nacht”. There’s an eastern reprise of that moment in Balalaika (1939). It’s Christmas on the Russian front, and in his trench Cossack Nelson Eddy begins singing “Silent Night”. From across enemy lines, the foe respond with choruses that echo across the stillness. Then the song ends and the killing resumes.
The best Christmas Day message to the Empire: To be honest, John Boorman’s Hope And Glory (1987) is such a dream-like cine-memoir of childhood in the Forties that I tend to fall into a trance somewhere around the bit where they do “Slow Boat to China”. But, as an accumulation of authentic details of life on the home front, it’s hard to beat: the scene of Boorman’s family on Christmas Day listening to the King on the radio gamely struggling with his stammer captures a genuine British folk memory.
The quickest German anti-Nazi Christmas scene: The end of the second world war presented certain very obvious problems for the German war-movie genre. But the Berlin studios quickly reinvented the form, cranking out a string of pictures in which all the villains are lurid German sadists. In Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), a vicious Nazi officer decides to celebrate Christmas Eve by having a lot of Polish partisans are rounded up and killed.
The best Korean War Christmas: The Men of the Fighting Lady (1954) is set on a US aircraft carrier with a Christmas scene built around an oddly contemporary technological gimmick: the pilots and crew have been sent video messages from their loved ones back home. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Commander Ted Dodson (Keenan Wynn) is shot down the day before and there’s a lump-in-the-throat moment when his family’s Christmas tape is inadvertently played and the greetings and images of Ted’s wife and children fill the room.
The best war movie tree ornament: In a spirit of goodwill to all men - even you hopeless peaceniks - here’s one of my favourite anti-war movies. A Midnight Clear (1992) is less plonking than most pacifist parables and stays focused on the story: two platoons, one German, one American, circling each other in the Ardennes in the snowy Christmas season of 1944. The Germans know the war is lost, and are looking for a way to give up without being either shot or humiliated. The Yuletide scenes include carols drifting on the wind, a snowball fight, a snowman Hitler, and a US-German tree on which a German soldier tenderly hangs an American grenade.
The second best “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”: You can’t beat Judy Garland introducing the song in Meet Me in St Louis, but there’s an ironic reprise in Carl Foreman’s The Victors (1963), a big sprawling drama of George Hamilton, Peter Fonda, Albert Finney and co on the march through Europe, loving and leaving Melina Mercouri, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moureau, Elke Sommer and other Eurototty en route. The most memorable moment is the execution of a deserter by a firing squad. Anyone who thinks Quentin Tarantino started this sort of thing with “Stuck In the Middle With You” should check out the scene where the guy’s comrades are driven through the snows to witness his dispatch to the accompaniment of Sinatra singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.
The best Boxing Day: There are, sadly, no Christmas scenes in Sylvester Stallone’s Afghan adventure Rambo III, nor in the other insightful masterpiece on the region, Carry On Up the Khyber. But you can see Sly in “Baby, It’s A Cold War Outside” mode in Rocky IV (1985), in which the camp champ – after the usual don’t-do-it speech from Mrs Rocky - flies to the Soviet Union to take on a steroid-pumped robotic super-Slav … on Christmas Day! Sly prays in the toilet before going out, just to underline the devout-Christian-vs-Godless-commie message. Now, of course, the line would be liberal pluralism vs fascist theocracy, but perhaps Sly will do that in the forthcoming Rambo IV .
The best Oliver Stone Christmas song never filmed: Fun fact: The official signal for the scramble to evacuate the US Embassy in Saigon a quarter-century ago was the playing of Bing’s “White Christmas” – and (aside from TV fare like Year Of The Cat) no one’s ever put it in a Vietnam movie.
BTTT
I still vote for Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis,
with the snowmen, her song, the Christmas dance, etc.
Add one: most poignant moment,
the kid crying in jail alone on Christmas eve in The Mudlark.
steyn ping
LOL!
I thought the juxtaposition of Christmas with the action in Die Hard was pretty strong.
Oh, a great scene!
You mean the best line from Die Hard isn't "Yippee Kai-yay..."?
bump
The original song was so depressing, Garland refused to sing it. It was rewritten to what we hear today.
"We'll try to muddle through somehow"
Steyn is a brilliant political commentator, but I am also a reader of the magazine "New Criterion" where he regularly appears as a brilliant theater and arts critic. I am constantly amazed at how much he knows and how brilliantly (oh, did I already mention that?) he weaves it together.
"The second best “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”: You can’t beat Judy Garland introducing the song in Meet Me in St Louis, but there’s an ironic reprise in Carl Foreman’s The Victors (1963)"
The firing squad scene in this movie truly is some good, bleak, black-humor cinema (although I recall they used the Sinatra recording of the song). BTW, am I the only one on earth who thinks Judy Garland was creepy and overrated?
No, I think that Garland in her later years looked rather zombie-like. She did a few songs very well but most of it struck me as over-sylized to the point of parody (especially in her later years).
The best Christmas with Vietnam theme was "Christmas-in-Cambodia" (1968), which never actually happened .
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