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“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” So speaks Zuzu Bailey in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). While we cannot attest to her theological assertion, it might surprise you to know that much of the emotional truth of that film, and its story of an optimistic man finding himself down and out, and existentially stressed in postwar America, is partially drawn from James Stewart’s own life.
“It’s a Wonderful Life has become synonymous with the holidays and with spiritual rebirth and perseverance, all those things that really embodied Jim were infused into this picture and captured for all time,” author Robert Matzen previously told us when discussing Stewart’s World War II service and how it deeply impacted the man, his career, and the first film he made after returning from the skies over Germany. “When he comes back and he’s so much older, he has a dark streak from the war. He has rages, he can’t sleep, he’s got shakes, and he learned to channel it early on in a couple of places. [In It’s Wonderful Life you see it] when he flies off the handle and when he destroys the model he’s got in the living room, and he throws things and he terrorizes his family.”
It’s an element in Stewart that Matzen said the actor’s own daughter recognized at times. Yet just as the film’s George Bailey ultimately decides he wants to live again, Stewart channeled what might have been PTSD into a lifetime of gratitude for the American military and a choice not to exploit it (including when he left MGM after the studio head attempted to make a hagiographic movie starring the actor as himself in WWII). That is perhaps an extreme example, but Hollywood storytellers and filmmakers at large have used their own experiences to infuse Christmas and other holiday movies with real magic. Here are some of the clearest examples.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
John Hughes’ timeless Thanksgiving staple about the indignities, discomforts, and outright hell of holiday travel touches a chord with millions of viewers every year. Most of us can see ourselves in Steve Martin’s squarish advertising exec Neal Page or the gregarious salesman he ends up spending several nights on the road with, Del Griffith (John Candy), as they attempt to get home to Chicago in time for a turkey family dinner. Yet the arduousness of Neal and Del’s week, beginning when their flight between New York City and Chicago is rerouted to Wichita, is based on some very rough memories for Hughes.
“This movie is based on an incident that actually happened to me,” Hughes told the Edmonton Sunday Sun in 1987 (via Vanity Fair). “When I was an advertising copywriter I set out from New York to Chicago on Thanksgiving weekend and after a five-day delay, ended up in Phoenix, Arizona via Wichita, Kansas.” He would later also note during his travels he partnered with an old salesman who’d seen it all. “He knew everything about this kind of situation. I kind of hung out with him. I was so impressed by this guy’s understanding of the situation.”
Hughes ultimately missed that particular Thanksgiving dinner, spending it instead with another salesman out west. Nonetheless, the memorable experience ended up being an easy pitch to Paramount Pictures for a new holiday classic in the late 1980s. – David Crow
A Christmas Story (1983)
Humorist Jean Shepherd did not consider himself a writer ahead of the publication of his semi-autobiographical collection of short stories and pseudo-childhood memoirs, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash (1966). He was a storyteller and raconteur, a veteran of the radio broadcast who managed to come up at a time when radio was still considered a viable career for comedic talent. And it was while listening to his stories of childhood that Hugh Hefner and author Shel Silverstein got the idea that Shepherd should write these down. Eventually, Shepherd agreed but initially only because Silverstein recorded tales Shepherd was already telling on the college campus circuit and transcribed them into what eventually became a book.
Among those dozens of stories that were first published in Playboy magazine and then in the In God We Trust collection were “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder nails the Cleveland Street Kid” and “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art.” If you’ve seen A Christmas Story, you probably know how they influenced the film. However, what got filmmaker Bob Clark interested in making the movie is when he heard Shepherd on the radio recounting a story he never published, “Flick’s Tongue.” It sent him on a journey to read Shepherd’s memoir and combine these three tales into the Yuletide favorite we all know today.
By Shepherd’s own admission the stories are a mixture of fact and fiction, with his childhood surrogate being named Ralph instead of Jean. Ralph lives in the fictional town of Hohman, Indiana, whereas Shepherd grew up in Hammond, Indiana. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable authenticity to the film and its source material that makes it a favorite more than 40 years after its release. We’ll leave you to speculate whether a kid named Flick really licked that pole. – DC
8-Bit Christmas (2021)
While discussing A Christmas Story’s blend of reality and fancy, it is worth noting its most successful imitator, the still winsome-in-its-own-right 8-Bit Christmas. The movie is about a child of the 1980s going to extreme lengths to own a Nintendo Entertainment System during the holiday season of 1987 (or was that 1988?). Director Michael Dowse and producer/screenwriter Kevin Jakubowski’s sweet family film deserves to be seen by more people. And according to Jakubowski, who adapted the film from his own novel of the same name, it was based on his own Nintendo-obsessed childhood.
“The story came from wanting a Nintendo, and all my friends really wanting it, in ’87, ’88,” the writer told the Gamer Looks at 40 podcast. This included how he and other friends worshipped the one rich kid in the neighborhood who got an NES before any of them and used it to get classmates to curry favor in hopes of coming to his house to play the video game console. “I remember riding bikes to his house and hoping I got there soon enough to be one of the four or five kids his parents would let inside to play it,” Jakubowski recalled.
While we are not sure if any dogs were harmed by karate-kicking children mad about the Nintendo Power Glove, the ability to heighten childhood memories about the most dreamed-of Christmas gift speaks to why yarns like 8-Bit Christmas and A Christmas Story will always be endearing. – DC
Joyeux Noel (2005)
Holiday movies love Christmas miracles, unearned plot developments that we’re supposed to excuse because of the magic of the season. The 2005 French film Joyeux Noel, written and directed by Christian Carion, has perhaps the most unlikely miracle of all. But here’s the thing: it actually happened. Joyeux Noel depicts the 1914 Christmas Truce when the soldiers on the Western Front agreed to cease fire to celebrate Christmas together.
Carion uses an ensemble cast to show the fight from multiple perspectives, devoting time to a Danish singer played by Diane Kruger, a German private played by Benno Fürmann, and Gary Lewis as a Scottish priest bearing witness. But the focus is ultimately on the humanity of all involved. That choice transcends the limitations of borders or political leaders’ wish to change lines on a map. It speaks to an empathetic truthfulness which might explain why both German and French officers forbade this happening ever again, as well as why the message still resonates today. – Joe George
Unaccompanied Minors (2006)
Anyone throwing on the 2006 comedy Unaccompanied Minors might assume they’re watching a broad kid-friendly distraction, a harmless but uninteresting Home Alone style comedy meant to entertain everyone stuck together on Christmas. The second feature film from Paul Feig, still just a few years off from creating Freaks and Geeks, Unaccompanied Minors stars Lewis Black, Wilmer Valderrama, Paget Brewster, and a bunch of child actors (including Tyler James Williams!) as airline employees trying to keep track of kids stuck in an airport.
However, the movie has more respectable middle-brow origins. Not only did a similar, if not as overtly goofy, event occur in real life, but the story debuted on NPR’s This American Life. In a 2001 episode of the show, a storyteller shared “In the Event of an Emergency, Put Your Sister in an Upright Position,” which recounted the experience she and her little sister shared spending Christmas Eve in the unaccompanied minors room in O’Hare Airport in 1988. It’s easy to see why Feig and his writers Jacob Meszaros and Mya Stark went bigger with their script, and the movie does have some fun performances from respected comic actors. But one wishes Unaccompanied Minors would have retained some of the pathos of the original story. – JG
Operation Christmas Drop (2020)
We admit that the Netflix Christmas movie has become synonymous with its disposability. They’re movies which trade in romantic comedy clichés and interchangeable narratives. But believe it or not, Operation Christmas Drop is a cut above. Yes, it is still a formulaic love story where a no-nonsense congressional assistant (Kat Graham) is tasked with the thankless (and politically questionable) job of going to Guam and shutting down the U.S. Air Force’s actual “Christmas Drop” operation which is deployed across Micronesia every Dec. 25. Fortunately, Graham’s technocrat is convinced to see the error of her ways by a dreamy Air Force captain (Alexander Ludwig). It’s typical Netflix schmaltz, but this one has heart, perhaps because it is thinly veiled PR for the Air Force’s most cheerful policy. Effective PR, at that.
Since 1952 the Air Force has deployed “Operation Christmas Drop” as a training exercise where military planes airdrop food, supplies, and even toys across Pacific islands every December. The tradition has amounted to the longest-running U.S. Defense Department mission in full-operation, as well as the longest-running humanitarian airlift in the world. Ahem, here’s to hoping it stays that way despite what a South African oligarch or his orange vessel might think. – DC
The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)
What better place to end than with a highly fictionalized account of how Charles Dickens wrote the quintessential Christmas story. In fact, as the title might suggest it leans into the somewhat overstated, but not entirely unfounded, notion that Charles Dickens more or less redefined our modern image of Christmas when his A Christmas Carol novella was first published in 1843.
In the film, Dan Stevens stars as a young and restless Dickens, who battles with imaginary approximations of the minor tragedies he sees out in the world, such as a rich old man whose funeral is sparsely attended. The dead man becomes Charles’ own ghost, personified here by Christopher Plummer. Eventually, the film’s Charles turns his finances around and inspires an empire to begin celebrating the passé Christmas holiday in earnest with his story.
The reality is a little more complex, with the real Dickens becoming the most influential artist taking part in a cultural revival of Christmas tradition in the Victorian era world, from merry old England to Germany and its Christmas trees, to the New World where Washington Irving was writing some of the first modern Christmas stories a full 20 years before A Christmas Carol. Nonetheless, there is a reason we still use the phrase “a Dickensian Christmas,” and The Man Who Invented Christmas gives it a glowy new sheen. – DC
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