Each year, even before the holiday is in full swing, the cavalcade of classic Christmas-themed movies begins and continues unabated through December 25. It’s such an American tradition that most people may not notice that some of these classic films are only loosely linked to the holiday.
Consider Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” starring Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart and Frank Morgan. It’s the perfectly told tale of two lovelorn employees of Matuschek and Company, a leather-goods store in pre-World War II Budapest. The characters played by Sullavan and Stewart, who can’t bear each other at work, are anonymous pen-pals who have been exchanging love letters. They decide to meet in person – just as the Christmas shopping season begins to heat up.
In Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” the character played by Stewart suffers years of business and personal setbacks. After an employee at his Bailey Building and Loan loses $8,000 – about $111,000 in today’s dollars – thereby putting the enterprise at risk, Stewart snaps. His solution to his woes: suicide on Christmas Eve.
And then there’s Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”
Bear with me here.
“Psycho” opens with a shot of the sunny Phoenix, Arizona, skyline over which appear titles in block letters: “Friday, December the Eleventh” and “Two Forty-Three P.M.” Later that day, as Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane drives out of town with $40,000 she’s stolen – more than $334,000 today – she passes beneath Christmas decorations strung above a main street. The next night, she is killed while showering, the murder weapon a knife not unlike the kind used for disassembling a bird on a holiday table.
Unlike Lubitsch and Capra, Hitchcock doesn’t build toward a Christmas coda. In fact, everyone in the story seems oblivious that it’s drawing near. Given that the joyless Bates Motel, cite of Crane’s murder, is in a desolate area and its proprietor insane, it may not be unusual that there are no Christmas decorations in the office or in the guest rooms. But a week later on December 19, when Marion’s sister Lila visits the hardware store owned by the victim’s boyfriend Sam Loomis, there isn’t a Christmas decoration in sight or so much as a wreath on sale. That evening, Crane and Loomis stop by the cozy home of the town sheriff and his amiable wife – no Christmas decorations. The following morning, the increasingly frantic amateur detectives intercept the sheriff after Sunday services. There’s no reference to the holiday at the Fairvale Church, though Christmas is now only five days away.
Crane’s killer, Norman Bates, squeezes in one more murder before he’s arrested. Though a wall calendar at the police station says it’s the 17th, it’s at least December 20. The station too is void of any holiday displays. “Psycho” ends without ever again acknowledging Christmas.
Christmas isn’t really essential to the premise of any of the three great films. Lubitsch employs it in the third act of “The Shop Around the Corner.” Morgan’s Matuschek wants a big uptick in holiday sales – for his loyal employees, it means year-end bonuses. After Sullavan’s Klara Novak and Stewart’s Alfred Kralik unite in love comes the film’s warm-hearted finale: Under snow flurries, Matuschek invites a lowly errand boy to a sumptuous meal. The story could have been set during any consumer-minded holiday.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” also doesn’t need Christmas to deliver its message. As revealed in a long flashback, Stewart’s George Bailey displays Christian compassion to the town’s neediest throughout his life. Tears are jerked when, suicide averted, members of his community gather at his home to salute him with an infusion of cash and a rousing “Auld Lang Syne.” Rightfully so, the town loves him. But they loved him in summer too.
Though “Psycho” is rich with foreshadowing winks to the audience – murder aside, Norman’s hobby is a taxidermy, preferably birds (remember, he’s killed a woman named Crane from Phoenix); Loomis’ hardware store, absent Christmas decorations, features displays of knives and insect killer – Hitchcock wasn’t making disparaging allusions to Christmas. Shooting for “Psycho” began in December 1959 and a second-unit crew inadvertently captured images of the Christmas decorations hung above the Phoenix street. Hitchcock added the date to explain their presence. “(He) hoped some wiseacre wouldn’t notice why there were no other references to the holiday anywhere else in the picture,” said Robert Clatworthy, one of the film’s art directors.
Hitchcock filmed “Psycho” through the week leading to Christmas – the scene in which Marion Crane’s body is wrapped in the shower curtain and dragged away was shot on December 23 – and it opened on June 16, 1960, which argues against it as a Christmas movie. Of course it isn’t, but an attempted cover-up by Hitchcock of a gaffe made by his crew puts viewers in the holiday season, if not the holiday mood.
