Holiday movies of the 1940s are among my favorites.
Hollywood was quick to become part of the war effort, and what better way to use movies than for propaganda purposes. The finest studio talents were creating all sorts of shorts and features to convey to the public what they should be thinking and feeling about the world situation. Some films were teaching tools, showing how soldiers should behave, showing the public how to accept separation of families, telling the public that rationing was to be taken seriously.
Each Christmas season during those years, Hollywood studios released stories that demonstrated the importance of positive values, you know—American values. They showed innocent but sincere, sexless romances ending in happy marriages with children. Mixing comedy with romance, and occasionally with heartfelt drama, these films stressed the importance of unity, honesty, pride in community, and a generosity of spirit.
One of my all-time favorite films is the comedy-drama The Shop Around the Corner, 1940, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Samson Raphaelson, and starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The story centers on a developing correspondence between two people who are unidentified to one another. Most of the film takes place in a stylish leathergoods store in Budapest.
Maybe I’m prejudiced because I grew up in a similar retail environment – not in Hungary but in downtown Amsterdam NY. Still, this film captures the holiday spirit more than any other for me. As the snow falls outside the large, decorated store windows, I am transported back to my childhood when commercial Main Streets in upstate New York really were exciting backdrops for holiday enjoyment.
The holiday films of the war years are phenomenal entertainments. The comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner about a snippy radio celebrity who overstays his welcome in a smalltown at Christmas, the Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire—later remade as White Christmas with Crosby and Danny Kaye, the family drama Since You Went Away in which the father has gone to war, and The Bells of St Mary’s with Crosby as a priest with a heart of gold holds together his flock.
By the last half of the forties, Americans had had their lives ripped apart. Children had been raised without fathers. Young women had remained unmarried. Businesses were disrupted. Post-war, Hollywood continued to relate positive American values at holiday time. The Bishop’s Wife, Holiday Affair, Christmas in Connecticut, and It Happened on Fifth Avenue are a few examples.
The films stressed overcoming strife-- seeking love, marriage, babies. In 1946, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life filled big screens. While not a hit in theaters, this film dominated the holiday movies which aired on TV during the second half of the Twentieth Century. It’s one of the greatest movies ever.
Thanks to TV and later home video, these holiday films have remained favorites. All these films stress kindness, consideration for others. How will they fare during the next four years with retribution and isolationism as buzzwords for Americanism? And by the way… according to the new standard in DC, the war hero in Christmas in Connecticut would no longer be considered a war hero. After all, his ship was sunk by the Germans, and he was rescued only after sailing adrift on a raft for three weeks.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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