I’m not watching as much as usual this year for various reasons but I’m doing my best. For starters, one that I’ve never seen before and probably never will again, CAROL FOR ANOTHER CHRISTMAS (1964).
This TV special should have been a classic. We have Joseph Mankiewicz directing, Rod Serling writing, Sterling Hayden as the Scrooge figure, Mr. Grudge, and Ben Gazzara, Steve Lawrence, Robert Shaw, Peter Sellers, Pat Hingle and Eva Marie Saint in the cast (Peter Fonda makes a nanosecond appearance as Hayden’s dead son Marley Grudge).
The movie opens with Grudge and his idealist nephew Fred (Gazzara) in a heated argument over Grudge blocking an international exchange where one of our scientists goes to the Soviet bloc and one of their scientists works here. Fred believes only by reaching across borders can we avoid another nuclear war; Marley’s death (in Korea, I’m guessing) has convinced Grudge that isolationism backed up by the threat of nuclear weapons is our best hope for peace. The actors, talented as they are, can’t overcome that they’re not characters, they’re spokespeople for a clash of philosophies.
Then the fantasy kicks in. Steve Lawrence as Christmas Past reminds Grudge of the huge body count from all the wars of the past. Christmas Present (Hingle) forces Grudge to contemplate the children left impoverished, desperate and sick by warfare; a sneering Future (Shaw) shows mad Peter Sellers ruling over a mad but inevitable post-apocalyptic dystopia (“When the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the fate of man could have been predicted by a cut-rate [Roma]!”).
Part of the problem, I think, is that Past and Future don’t relate to Grudge at all. Rather than showing us Grudge’s past — the usual approach for these things — Past just makes poetic speeches about the dead. Future likewise doesn’t show a horrible fate for Grudge, just a horrible future in general; having his butler (Percy Rodriguez) face death doesn’t change that. In the end it’s just a pretentious mess. “Nothing on this earth can force me to eat while starving people watch me!”
Despite the title, MIDWINTER OF THE SPIRT (2015) doesn’t take place at Christmas as I’d assumed. Not that would improve things much: this story of a vicar turned apprentice exorcist (“Your job is to protect people from the intrusion into their lives of entities half the professed Christians in this country don’t believe in.”) coming up against a Satanist and the wreckage left in his wake has no supernatural element so any common copper could have tackled this one just as well. Proof even British TV doesn’t bat 100 percent. “I am not taking a crippled gazelle to the watering hole.”
Circumstances forced me to use WHITE CHRISTMAS (1950) as something of a talking lamp — a shame, since while the plot hardly requires close attention, the dance numbers certainly deserve it. Still good entertainment, though, as Bing Crosby becomes Rosemary Clooney’s white knight, a general learns he’s not a forgotten man and snow finally falls on Vermont. “When I figure out what that means, I’ll come up with a crushing reply.”
While down in Florida I caught FROSTY THE SNOWMAN with my sister and Cindy; I agree with Cindy that this story of a wizard and a snowman struggling for control of a magic hat is one that works better when you’re young (not something I say of all Christmas specials). Given that it’s a Rankin-Bass production, I wonder why they didn’t do it stop-motion like so many other specials? “I hate to lose and run, but I have to get to writing.”
#SFWApro
