A Pocket Full of Holiday Films

First published December 23, 2003

By C. W. Oberleitner

Had enough of Rudolph and Frosty? Tired of caroling ghosts? Life not all that wonderful after fighting the crowds at the mall? C. W. Oberleitner returns today with some "other" holiday film fare to take your mind off your holiday miseries.

Way back this past Thanksgiving in a column titled Thanksgiving Bah Humbug I told you folks about some of the most popular holiday films available either on DVD or VHS. Miracle on 34 Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and the many iterations of Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, AKA Scrooge, all made the list as did brief mentions of the Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye version of White Christmas and Disney’s two Santa Clause films.

A quick apology to all you fans of Bob Clark’s 1983 classic A Christmas Story that didn’t make it to the final draft of the story. Sorry about that. As a bit of a Christmas treat, however, here’s a link: Hollywood.com, to an interview with the now 32 year-old former child star of the film, Peter Billingsley. Little Ralphie Parker is now all grown up and producing films and television programming.

All of the previously mentioned films have one thing in common: the awe, wonder, magic, and mystery of Christmas are principal characters in each story. Around our house they are referred to as Tier One Christmas films. They’re the big guns, so to speak, of the holiday season that put you into the full mood and spirit of Christmas. There are now so many hours of unrelenting Christmas cheer available on cable/satellite and home video that by Christmas Day I, for one, am ready for something a bit lighter in tone but still in keeping with the spirit of the season.

With the exception of Mr. Hill’s expectation of fresh copy every week during the month of December, I am fortunate enough to have off the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Around our house each of these days is treated like a Sunday morning. We sleep late, linger over coffee, and occasionally plop a log in the fireplace and enjoy one of our favorite "lite" holiday classics.

Unlike the big holiday movies these films do not rely on Christmas or the holiday season to drive the story. Each of these films, however, either takes place at Christmas or features a key sequence that takes place during Christmas. Here, in no particular order, are four of them.

What do George Bailey and Dave the Dude have in common? They are both characters brought to life on the screen by director Frank Capra. Today, Frank Capra is probably best remembered for writing and directing the 1946 holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, and several of his earlier works, including 1944’s Arsenic And Old Lace, starring Gary Grant, 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, also starring Stewart, and 1936’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, with Gary Cooper. In fact, Capra produced, directed, and or wrote over 50 films. His very last feature film, released in 1961, was Pocketful of Miracles starring Bette Davis, Glenn Ford, and Hope Lange. This film also introduced budding young starlet Ann-Margret.

Based on the Damon Runyon story Lady For a Day, which Capra first directed as a film by the same name in 1933, Miracles is the story of boozy Apple Annie, played by Davis. Annie has a problem. For years she has sequestered her only child, Louise, in a fine European boarding school. During the course of those years she’s hidden the fact that she lives in squalor, eking out a meager existence peddling apples to the swells on Broadway and Park Avenue.

Louise, now a young woman (played by Ann-Margaret), believes from a series of letters on fine hotel stationary that her mother is a well-to-do dowager and prominent New York socialite. What she doesn’t know is that her entire upkeep has been paid for by her mother’s relentlessly shaking down all the other denizens of Manhattan street life. In true Runyon fashion they have all become Louise’s godparents.

Now Louise is about to get married to a Spanish nobleman’s son, and she, her fiancée, and future father-in-law are coming to New York to visit mom. In a panic, Annie does what most people with a drinking problem do, she starts to over medicate herself with cheap hooch. This, in turn, causes a problem for curiously superstitious "racketeer" Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford). It seems The Dude believes he owes most, if not all, his good fortune and success to the purchase of Annie’s apples. With Annie on a bender, Dave’s in a panic about the outcome of his latest pending venture, an attempt to seal a deal with "big boss" Steve Darcy (Sheldon Leonard) to head up New York operations in Darcy’s new syndicate.

The Dude, with much prodding from girlfriend Queenie Martin (played by Hope Lange), quickly figures the only way to solve his problem is to help Annie solve her problem. The solution may be simple but the execution, as with any good story, is not. It all comes to a genuinely heart warming Runyonesque/Capraesque conclusion at a gala Christmas party.

As previously mentioned Pocketful of Miracles was Capra’s last feature film. Stories abound about how Capra, schooled during the days of the studio system, would frequently butt heads with "method" actor Ford. His original choice for the part of Dave the Dude had been Frank Sinatra and he had wanted Helen Hayes to play the part of Apple Annie. Speaking to a group of film students Capra once said that it was his experience with Ford that drove him to his decision to retire from filmmaking. Whatever may or may not have occurred during its production, Pocketful of Miracles is a very enjoyable way to wile away some winter hours at home with the family.

Another light comedy favorite in our household is 1966’s The Trouble With Angels, starring Rosalind Russell and Haley Mills. I don’t know why I love this movie, I just do. Must be all of that Catholic schoolboy guilt. During my childhood, I think I experienced every cliché known by man, about nuns.

Angels is an American remake of the 50’s British comedy Belles of St. Trinian’s. To be honest, St. Trinian’s is much funnier if for no other reason than Alastair Sim’s duel portrayals of Headmistress Miss Fritton and her bumbling brother Clarence. You may remember from my previous holiday film story that Sim is widely regarded as having, to date, turned in the all-time best screen performance of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Deftly directed by Hollywood veteran Ida Lupino, Angels follows the battle of wits between misfits Mary Clancy (Mills) and Rachel Devery (played by June Harding), and Rosalind Russell’s equally iron willed Reverend Mother of St. Francis Academy for girls. The story takes place during the course of the girls’ four-year stint at St. Francis Academy. For this reason, several of the films key scenes take place at Christmas time. Under Lupino’s light-handed direction, we learn just enough about the girls’ backgrounds to understand what lies at the root of their rebellion. At the same time, it is Russell’s unparalleled timing and near British flare for understatement that carries the film right into most people’s hearts.

The Trouble With Angels should not have been the success it was. Arriving as it did during the mid 60’s amid such other mediocre fare, as The Singing Nun and The Flying Nun, which I’m not at all unconvinced wasn’t some weird hallucinogenic rip off of Dumbo, Angels’ box office success is most often credited to the strength of the performances of its stars Russell and Mills, and a supporting cast that included Binnie Barnes, Mary Wickes, Marge Redmond, and Gypsy Rose Lee, no less.

While many people remember Rosalind Russell’s portrayal of St. Francis Academy’s stern, yet loving, Reverend Mother, she is probably best known for her portrayal of an all together completely different type of woman, Mame Dennis, Burnside, Woolsey AKA: Auntie Mame.

In 1958, Jack Warner and Rosalind Russell, with the help of screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, brought to the screen their adaptation of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s hugely successful stage adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s best selling novel, Auntie Mame. "Mame is a role Rosalind Russell was born to play" is the most often quoted phrase associated with both the film and the play of the same name.

Russell originated the stage role and forever set the image of Auntie Mame in the minds of millions with her film portrayal of one of life’s most irrepressible forces of nature. The wafer thin story line: An orphan goes to live with his free-spirited aunt. Conflict ensues when the executor of his father's estate objects to the aunt's lifestyle… reveals nothing about the complexity of relationships between the story’s characters. Nor does it even remotely prepare anyone for the wit and humor of the film’s often fast paced dialogue.

Young Patrick: Is the English lady sick Auntie Mame?

Mame: Oh, she’s not English darling. She’s from Pittsburgh.

Young Patrick: She sounded English.

Mame: Well, when you’re from Pittsburgh you have to do something.

Thanks to his late father’s "conservative" investments, young Patrick Dennis never has to worry about his financial future. The same cannot be said for his somewhat unorthodox aunt who, following the stock market crash of 1929, literally goes from riches to being a Christmas season sales clerk at Macy’s. After being unceremoniously fired from her job as a roller skate sales lady, Mame, broke and bowed, returns to her now nearly empty Upper East-Side apartment. There, she and her little family, Patrick, housekeeper Nora Muldoon, and Ito the Japanese houseboy, celebrate an early, impromptu Christmas. Year’s later this scene would inspire composer Jerry Herman to write the song, "We Need a Little Christmas," for the musical version of the story, Mame.

The Dennis family Christmas celebration is cut short when young, handsome, and filthy rich--he’s in oil--Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside tracks her down to apologize for his part in the demise of her career at Macy’s. He ends up taking them all out to dinner and, ultimately, marrying her. Not, however, before she must prove herself to his staid family and dyspeptic mother. In the end, not despite of, but because of, all her unconventional behavior, it is Mame’s love for her orphaned nephew that makes this story the endearing classic it is.

One of our all-time favorite Christmas week films also had its origins on the Broadway stage. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (two of the theatres’ most creative and successful playwrights) in their 1939 masterpiece, The Man Who Came to Dinner, presented a thinly veiled send-up of the life and career of their good friend Alexander Woollcott.

Woollcott, a regular member of the Algonquin Round Table, a gathering of intellectuals and wits at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, was every bit as brilliant and insufferable as his theatrical counterpart, Sheridan Whiteside. Fellow Round Table member Dorothy Parker once said of Woollcott:

"He has seven or eight hundred intimate friends, with whom he converses only in terms of atrocious insult."

In the play and the film Maggie Cutler, Whiteside’s personal secretary tells her boss:

"You know, Sheridan, you have one great advantage over everyone else in the world. You've never had to meet Sheridan Whiteside."

Woollcott was so pleased with himself and his reputation and that of his alter ego that he even performed the part of Sheridan Whiteside on a nation-wide tour of the play.

Jack Warner, once again, brought Kaufman and Hart’s play to the screen in 1942. After seeing The Man Who Came to Dinner on stage in New York, Bette Davis, then under contract to Warner Brothers, insisted on playing the part of Whiteside’s secretary and confidant Maggie Cutler. She had hoped to play the part opposite John Barrymore as Whiteside. At the time production was scheduled to begin, however, Barrymore’s health, after years of heavy drinking, was giving out and he had an ever-increasing difficulty memorizing lines.

While Davis was away from the studio, recuperating from a dog bite to the nose, Warner Brothers dumped Barrymore and brought in Monty Woolley to play the part of the irascible Whiteside. At that time, Woolley was best known for creating the role of Sheridan Whiteside in the New York stage production of the play. Upon her return to the studio Davis was furious to discover the switch. Throughout production of the film, she let it be known she was not at all satisfied with the way things were going. But, as one Hollywood wag once put it, "For Bette that was pretty much par for the course."

By no stretch of the imagination could The Man Who Came to Dinner be called a Christmas story, although the story itself takes place during the days leading up to and including Christmas. In mid December, world famous critic at large, celebrity radio host, and lecturer Sheridan Whiteside travels to Mesalia Ohio where he is to return a favor by having dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest W. Stanley. He is reluctant to do so,

"I simply will not sit down to dinner with Midwestern barbarians. I think too highly of my digestive system."

On his way up the icy steps of the Stanley home, Whiteside slips and falls. The local doctor is summoned and insists that the great man spend the next several weeks recuperating right where he is, the ground floor rooms of the Stanley home. Mayhem, of course, ensues. The rather waspish Mr. Stanley is horrified as a menagerie of penguins, cockroaches, convicted criminals, and choirboys is paraded through his living room. All of that, however, is only the backdrop for the real story.

While keeping her boss company during his confinement, Maggie meets and falls in love with local newspaperman Bert Jefferson. Whiteside, fearful of loosing the one person in his life he truly cannot do without, concocts a plan to nip Maggie’s romance in the bud and keep her dutifully in his service. This simple plangoes horribly awry. It requires the combined assistance of the Noel Coward-esque Beverly Garland and Harpo Marx stand-in "Banjo" to prevent Whiteside from making a terrible mistake.

As with virtually everything written by Kaufman and Hart, the dialog in The Man Who Came to Dinner is nothing short of brilliant. Sheridan Whiteside to Nurse Preen who has just rebuked him for eating chocolate:

"My Great Aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be 102, and when she had been dead three days, she looked better than you do now."

Nurse Preen to Whiteside on her decision to leave his service:

I became a nurse because all my life, ever since I was a little girl, I was filled with the idea of serving a suffering humanity. After one month with you, Mr. Whiteside, I am going to work in a munitions factory. From now on, anything I can do to help exterminate the human race will fill me with the greatest of pleasure. If Florence Nightingale had ever nursed YOU, Mr. Whiteside, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross!

These are our family’s recommendations for added family film fun during the holidays. From everyone at our house and the folks here at JimHillMedia we wish you and your families all the peace, joy, love, and happiness of the season. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Seasons Greetings, and, best wishes for the coming year to you all.

C’ya real soon!

Addendum

Just as this story was being put to bed word came that Emmy award winner and Oscar nominated actress Hope Lange had passed away. Ms.Lange, who played Queenie Martin in Frank Capra’s Pocketful Of Miracles, received her Oscar nomination for her supporting role in the 1957 film Peyton Place. She received two Emmys for her portrayal of Carolyn Muir in the television series The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. She was 70. She is survived by her husband Charles Hollerith, her son, actor Christopher Murray; her daughter, Patricia Murray and two grandchildren.

C’ya real soon!