Christmas Classics

My last two entries in this list of Christmas movie classics are Beyond Christmas (1940) and It's A Wonderful Life (1946).  Beyond is a lovely little (79-minute) film which begins at Christmas when three lonely engineering executives (played by Harry Carey, C. Aubrey Smith, and Charles Winninger) contrive to invite two strangers to dinner.  Their guests are singing cowboy Jimmy (Richard Carlson) and teacher Jean (Jean Parker).  The two promptly fall in love and are befriended by their hosts.  On a trip to Pittsburgh the three executives are killed in a plane crash, but return home as spirits lingering briefly in this world before moving along to their final destination.  When Jean and Jimmy's relationship hits a rough patch, the three ghosts, especially O'Brien (Winninger), try to save the day.  The film gets a bit schmaltzy toward the end, but there's room for schmaltz at Christmas!  Maria Ouspenskaya plays Madame Tanya, a Russian aristocrat driven from her homeland by the Russian Revolution and now working as housekeeper for the three businessmen.  It was Ouspenskaya who brought Stanislavski's "method acting" to the U.S.

And, finally, Christmas is never complete without a screening of It's A Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Steward, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, and Henry Travers.  You know the story — George (Stewart) wants to see the world, but gets stuck in his home town... falls in love with and marries Mary (Reed)... battles nasty banker Mr. Potter (Barrymore)... and has his bacon saved by Angel j.g. Clarence (Travers) who shows him what life would have been like without him.

For what it's worth, Clarence represents just one traditional function of angels — as protectors of individual humans, or "guardian angels."   More often, angels in scripture serve as messengers who declare the divine will, and as agents of divine displeasure.  They often appear as mere humans, and are recognized as celestial beings only after their departure.  Or they are overpowering in appearance, which makes it necessary for them to tell those they visit to "Be not afraid."  But then, being visited by an angel is sometimes very bad news (witness Sodom and Gomorrah).  And occasionally, if a woman, the person visited ends up pregnant (witness Mary).  So Clarence is a domesticated angel — a kind of pet pomeranian with (in due course) wings.  Well, Frank Capra was no theologian; he was just making a movie.

Last night I set up my Christmas tree, the K-Mart special.  It took hours to fan out the branches and, eventually, to realize that I'd gotten the sequence of branches messed up.  Now the lights are burning nicely, and tonight I'll start getting out the ornaments. •••