Do They Know It’s A Christmas Film?

Let’s address the primary question first: is Die Hard (1988) a Christmas film? This is a long-standing and heated debate, one I have no intention of entering. Regardless of my answer, half of you will be displeased; and it is, after all, supposed to be the season of goodwill to all men, of sweet little robins perched on snowy boughs and jolly elves crafting handmade wooden toys, which are, of course, what all today’s children truly desire for Christmas.

It’s also the season of homicidal cross-dressers and megalomaniac newspaper proprietors. For if Die Hard qualifies as a Christmas movie, then I’d argue that numerous other unexpected titles fall into the same category, despite an often complete absence of glitter and baubles.

One of these is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), so distinctly un-Christmassy in tone that almost nobody recalls that its story commences in mid-December. Moreover, although the film’s internal timeline isn’t entirely explicit, the murder of Arbogast (Martin Balsam) on the stairs in the Bates house and the subsequent discovery by Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam (John Gavin) of a sinister secret in the fruit cellar must occur very close to Christmas Day itself.

Would Hitchcock’s grim, superbly economical exploitation masterpiece have been even more effective if the mummified remains of Norman Bates’s mother had been adorned with a Santa hat? Possibly not. But the Christmas setting does work, in a peculiar way. So much of Psycho revolves around the inversion of the pleasant and normal: the welcoming host transforming into a serial killer, the trusted employee revealing themselves to be a thief, the mother turning out to be a man, and so forth.

The source novel by Robert Bloch makes no mention of Christmas, but this time of year is appropriate for the film precisely because it’s so inappropriate. You might also consider that the dissonance between the traditional imagery of Christmas and the arid dryness of the Arizona desert is another subtle method by which Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano cultivate the sense that all isn’t right with the world.

In reality, the explanation is more mundane: Psycho‘s production schedule encompassed the holiday season (the legendary shower scene was completed on 23 December), and shots of the city of Phoenix captured by the Second Unit included Christmas decorations, thus the filmmakers had no choice.

Christmas is more central, the associated imagery more conventional, and the holiday’s presence certainly deliberate in an even more revered film—in fact, although only a brief scene actually transpires at Christmas, what transpires there is so significant to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) that it’s surprising it’s not identified as a Christmas film more frequently.

The scene, of course, is the one where the young Charles Foster Kane (Buddy Swan), recently removed from his mother, is presented with a sledge for Christmas by his new guardian Thatcher (George Coulouris). It’s a fine sledge, no doubt, but in the boy’s mind, it’s no substitute for the simple one he had to leave behind at home—the one which ultimately proves to be the key to the mystery of Kane’s dying moments.

Expensive gifts don’t create a happy Christmas, Citizen Kane reminds us, and it’s a lesson that the character (played as an adult by Welles) will learn throughout his life as his business acquisitions and political career fail to satisfy him. Ultimately, it’s love, not the finest sledge money can buy, that he desires.

Christmas played an equally obvious symbolic role a decade later in The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s sole film as director, now revered but a box-office failure at the time. It arrives at the very conclusion of the film, when the children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) are finally liberated from the murderous self-styled “Preacher” Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) who has been pursuing them.

It’s only when Powell has been safely confined to jail that John and Pearl can discover peace at the home of an elderly woman who takes them under her wing (the marvellous Lillian Gish)—and to emphasise the point, we observe them spending Christmas with her. Many parts of the film are partly metaphorical in nature (most famously the children’s voyage down a river, fleeing from Powell), and Christmas, in The Night of the Hunter just as in Citizen Kane, clearly represents family and love. Just as, for Christians, the arrival of Jesus in the world at Christmas signifies a new dawn, for John and Pearl, this first Christmas at their new home is a scene of light after the darkness that dominates most of the film.

Christmas in film is not always so comforting, however. The ice sculpture resembling an angel carved at Christmastime by Edward (Johnny Depp) in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) is, like much of the film, unsettling because it’s so unexpected. Both the carving itself and the Christmas setting contribute to the distinct, albeit unfocused, religious aura surrounding the story of Edward: it would be a stretch to suggest that he himself is definitely an angel or the Second Coming of Christ, but the hint that he might be is there.

At other times, filmmakers utilise Christmas, with all its joyous associations, to create a jarring effect. In both Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies (2002)—a haunting, unusual, and inexplicably overlooked film about the inexplicable—and Curtis Hanson’s 1950s-set police drama L.A. Confidential (2007), Christmas is the last thing you anticipate amid the dread-infused mood of Mothman or the corruption and violence of Confidential. Martin McDonagh’s hitman black comedy In Bruges (2008) is similarly set during the holiday season, and in one of Europe’s most picturesque cities, for comparable reasons.

Even an incongruous Christmas can represent a glimmer of hope, however. In Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), the asylum inmates’ determination to hold a Christmas party highlights their resilience against the institution’s oppressive regime. In Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), there is certainly dissonance in the notion of David Bowie’s character having a “merry” Christmas in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but by the film’s conclusion, the phrase also epitomises the reconciliation that has occurred between captive and captor.

None of these are typically considered Christmas films, of course. But then, oddly enough, neither are those films (surprisingly few of them) that actually address the birth of Christ itself. From La Vie et Passion du Christ (1903)—at 44 minutes, a contender for the distinction of the first-ever feature film in the modern sense—to the four-hour The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), from the wildly irreverent Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) to the rather more respectful The Nativity Story (2006), they appear to be disqualified by the absence of tinsel and carols. (On the small screen, meanwhile, Gian Carlo Menotti’s delightful Amahl and the Night Visitors—written in 1951 as the first opera specifically composed for American television—no longer appears to receive the regular airings it deserves.)

Perhaps that is to be expected, in a world where Christmas has become primarily secular, and the Nativity takes second place to reindeer and snowmen. But this holiday season, do not lose sight of the true meaning of Christmas: do attempt to find time between Die Hard and Love, Actually (2003) to spare a thought for Norman Bates and Charles Foster Kane as well.