There are so many enjoyable holiday movies that it’s hard to know where to aim your remote. Between classic favorites, films whose Christmas segments have made them seasonal fare and an explosion of TV movies, the options are endless. Feel free to challenge my picks, but here’s why my DVD, Netflix and VCR gravitate to these films each December.
Best Santa: Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street, of course. In or out of uniform, he’s so generous, wise and kindly he makes a believer out of everybody, even world-weary moppet Natalie Wood.
Best Scrooge: Nobody’s ever topped Alastair Sim in the 1951 A Christmas Carol – and not only is it a remake but it was the eighteenth if you count TV versions. He looks the part and inhabits it perfectly, right down to his Christmas-morning giddiness. But Bill Murray’s modern Ebenezer, morphing from smarmy TV exec to born-again philanthropist, gets honorable mention.
Best non-Christmas Christmas movie: Little Women, especially the 1933 version but also the 1994 remake, is known as a Christmas film because that’s when the story opens. And because it’s such a feel-good gift of a story.
Best happy ending: As it closes with George’s loved ones rallying around in his darkest hour, It’s a Wonderful Life makes me tear up after countless viewings. Some insist it isn’t truly a Christmas movie, but it opens at the holiday, embarks on an extended flashback (flashing sideways to an alternate world) and concludes on the 25th, so it definitely qualifies.
Best Christmas musical: White Christmas, a comedic song-and-dance extravaganza, edges out Holiday Inn despite the absence of Fred Astaire. The chemistry of Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, combined with a great Irving Berlin score (What Do You Do with a General? notwithstanding) and vibrantly colored VistaVision, makes it fabulous fun.
Best action hero: Bruce Willis made Die Hard’s beleaguered cop John McCain into the guy we’d count on most in a Christmas crisis: funny, brave, resourceful and gruffly romantic. Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay indeed!
Best holiday laugh fest: Two picks. Trading Places is side-splitting. Elderly financiers turn their protégée into a penniless felon, give his home and job to a street punk and gloat over the fallout. Gun-toting Santa Dan Aykroyd crashes their party and nearly chokes clueless Eddie Murphy before the duo turns the tables. A Christmas Story, Jean Shepard’s nostalgia fest, is a perfect blend of warmth and hilarity. It abounds with laughs, from the frozen tongue episode to Ralphie’s traumatic Santa encounter, and sweet family moments.
Best Christmas villain: Who else but the Grinch? He was a mean one, but how we love seeing his heart triple in size after the Whoville gang shows him what Christmas is all about.
Best workplace comedy: Scrooge aside, nobody was a worse office buzz kill than Desk Set’s Spencer Tracy, whose 1957 behemoth computer threatens to replace Katharine Hepburn’s research team amid the company’s holiday revels. Luckily, love and common sense triumphed.
Best Christmas tree: Charlie Brown’s tiny, pitiful evergreen, before and after the Peanuts kids give it a makeover to cheer their disheartened pal, is the hands-down winner.
Best Christmas noir: Gritty yet brimming with Hollywood glam, L. A. Confidential’s tale of ‘50s crime and police corruption—based on a real-life 1951 “Bloody Christmas” incident—can’t be beat in this genre.
Best romantic comedy: Love, Actually’s eight English couples and Sandra Bullock’s courtship by two brothers and their loopy clan in While You Were Sleeping are close. But I’d go with The Holiday, which follows home swappers from LA and Surrey fleeing faithless guys to find festivity, surrogate families and true love across the ocean.