film

10 Great British Christmas films

by

Highlights from more than 125 years of homegrown Christmas movies, from Cash on Demand to Brazil.

By David Parkinson

British filmmakers have been producing Christmas pictures for more than 125 years, dating back to G.A. Smith’s Santa Claus in 1898. In 1901 came R.W. Paul’s Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), the first of over 400 worldwide screen adaptations of A Christmas Carol, starring Daniel Smith as Charles Dickens’s miser. Sadly, only a three-minute fragment of this survives, but the spooky superimpositions set a trend for festive chillers that has continued with titles as varied as The Legend of Hell House (1973), Don’t Open till Christmas (1984) and Wind Chill (2007).

There are Yuletide vignettes in the classic horror anthologies Dead of Night (1945) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), while Terence Davies created memorably unsettling Christmas scenes in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). Indeed, a number of significant British features have included festive segments, among them Things to Come (1936), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Morvern Callar (2002) and All of Us Strangers (2023).

Others have holiday settings that aren’t central to the action, such as The Lion in Winter (1968), Twelfth Night (1996) and The Eternal Daughter (2022). Social realist outings like Hector (2015) are relatively scarce, but there are countless cosy romcoms, including Love Actually (2003), which is currently on the naughty list, along with the sad but seedy sexploitation saga Escort Girls (1974). For causing seasonal offence, however, nothing can top Ken Russell’s final short, A Kitten for Hitler (2007).

This year, Richard Curtis’s That Christmas is hoping to become an animated favourite to rank alongside the likes of The Candlemaker (1957), The Snowman (1982) and Arthur Christmas (2011). Do seek out Nadolig Plentyn Yng Nghymru (2008), a Welsh-language version of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. But we also hope you find something here to brighten your holiday.

Scrooge (1951)

Director: Brian Desmond Hurst

Scrooge (1951)

There have been various excellent screen manifestations of Charles Dickens’s story about a miser who becomes the embodiment of Christmas spirit after three spectral visitations. Starring Seymour Hicks, the 1935 film Scrooge broke the mold by having a female ghost, played by Marie Ney. But it’s Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 version that has become the classic, and that’s largely due to the performance of Alistair Sim, whose bereftness at the loss of his beloved sister sets him on the path to callous avarice, albeit abetted by Mr Jorkin, a character who was invented by screenwriter Noel Langley, who also boosted the part of cleaning-woman Mrs Dilber for Kathleen Harrison.

Built at Nettlefold Studios, the sets capture the chasm between the classes, as do the character-defining costumes. The double-exposed hauntings may not inspire dread, although the influence of expressionism is evident in C.M. Pennington-Richards’ cinematography. But this is Sim’s show, and he revisited Ebenezer in the Oscar-winning 1971 animation, A Christmas Carol.

The Holly and the Ivy (1952)

Director: George More O’Ferrall

The Holly and the Ivy (1952)

In this Chekhovian chamber drama, based on a 1950 West End hit by playwright Wynyard Browne derived from his own experiences, the children of a Norfolk parson gather at a snowy vicarage for Christmas. Fashionista Margaret (Margaret Leighton) and soldier Michael (Denholm Elliott) are reluctant visitors to Wyndenham, as they have lost their faith and grown apart from sister Jenny (Celia Johnson), who has rejected the marriage proposal of a local engineer (John Gregson) to care for their father. However, the Reverend Martin Gregory (Ralph Richardson) isn’t the dog-collared martinet they envisage and empathises with problems that anticipate those that would shock sensibilities during Britain’s social-realist new wave.

Indeed, despite the cut-glass accents of a cast who unusually rehearsed on the sets before shooting in sequence, there’s something enduringly relevant about such themes as the breakdown of communication, the anguish of alienation, the demise of deference, and the vagaries of family life.

The Crowded Day (1954)

Director: John Guillermin

The Crowded Day (1954)

Department stores have often cropped up in festive features, but there’s little comfort or joy in this sophisticated soap opera from emerging director John Guillermin. He keeps his camera moving to convey the bustle at Bunting and Hobbs, while also deftly shifting tone to follow the fortunes of five women who work on various counters.

The storyline centring on Yvonne (Josephine Griffin) was considered scandalous for its time, as she discovers she’s pregnant by a man from a wealthy family. Even more shockingly, would-be film star Suzy (Vera Day) is assaulted by a chauffeur posing as a director. Despite reflecting the changing attitudes and aspirations of a country finally emerging from post-war austerity, screenwriter Talbot Rothwell would skirt such realist inclinations in his 20 Carry On films, and he sees the lighter side of the romantic tussle between Joan Rice and John Gregson, who even has a vintage car, as in the previous year’s Genevieve.

On the Twelfth Day… (1955)

Director: Wendy Toye

On the Twelfth Day… (1955)

When it came to feminism, pioneering British filmmaker Wendy Toye reckoned that “doing something and getting on with it and not being a crashing bore about things is probably better than getting on a platform and making some big speech”. She ably proved her point with this delightful satire on courtship rituals, in which she plays Miss Tilly, an Edwardian woman who is bombarded by her earnest ‘true love’ (David O’Brien) with gifts inspired by the song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’. Chaos ensues, as the set designed by cartoonist Ronald Searle is overrun by what Time magazine called a “pyramiding progression of flora, fauna and assorted humans”.

Toye and Searle had collaborated on the stage play Wild Thyme (1955), and would reunite on the Butter Board-sponsored A.A. Milne adaptation The King’s Breakfast (1963). But it was this Eastmancolour debunking of romance, nostalgia and festive cheer that earned them an Oscar nomination for best live-action short.

Read more

Local Hero: Why the iconic Scottish environmental film was decades ahead of its time

by

Forty years ago, Bill Forsyth’s film Local Hero warned us to consider the consequences of putting short-term gain ahead of the environment, writes Anthony Frajman.

By Anthony Frajman | June 2023

Few films have been as enduring as Local Hero. Released 40 years ago, the landmark Scottish film starring Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster put Scottish cinema on the map, launched the career of a then-unknown Peter Capaldi and showcased the nation’s incredible landscapes to the world.

Yet, the film was also remarkably prophetic. Decades before climate change was a widely discussed issue, Local Hero was one of the first contemporary films to draw attention to our impact on our environment.

Set in the fictional village of Ferness, Local Hero follows US oil executive “Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), who is sent to Scotland by his eccentric billionaire boss Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) to buy the entire town and its surrounding areas to build an oil refinery. As he spends more time with the locals, Mac slowly falls in love with his adopted surroundings, and begins to question his role, its ethics, and his entire worldview.

Eerily relevant in our era, the climate satire shows almost no citizen standing up to the oil conglomerate. There is no environmental protection agency that steps in, no law against the oil company’s intended destruction of the land.

Alamy During his 2000 campaign for the US presidency, Vice President Al Gore told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that Local Hero was his favourite film (Credit: Alamy)
During his 2000 campaign for the US presidency, Vice President Al Gore told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that Local Hero was his favourite film (Credit: Alamy)

The film began with Chariots of Fire and The Mission producer, David Puttnam, whose films have been nominated for 26 Oscars. Puttnam had read an article in The Observer about a Scottish man’s battle against an oil giant, and was determined to make a film that addressed the unethical behaviour of oil firms and their toxic impact on natural landscapes.

Puttnam, who had been an environmentalist since the 1970s, and was president of the Council of Protection of Rural England, saw the potential for a film that directly addressed environmental issues. “I was really interested in the idea that a local accountant could sue a major, major international oil company and win on environmental grounds. I thought that was great. It was really a David and Goliath story,” Puttnam tells BBC Culture.

Puttnam had seen the debut feature of then largely unknown Scottish director Bill Forsyth, That Sinking Feeling, produced for £5,000, which he helped Forsyth sell to the BBC, and wanted to work with him. Sparked by the article he’d read, Puttnam brought the story to Forsyth, along with a proposal for a film set in Scotland dealing with ecological issues. “We hired two journalists, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, to give us cuttings or any other stories they had about communities being affected by a major oil company or major conglomerate coming in. And we were able to collect quite a lot of bits and pieces, and Bill then built that collage into the screenplay,” Puttnam remembers.

A hard sell

While Puttnam had produced the debut films of celebrated British directors Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, and had an eminent reputation as a producer, he struggled for years to get this unlikely Scottish film into production. “I couldn’t get much interest in it. I just found it very, very difficult getting traction,” says Puttnam.

Although he had only been able to secure half the budget for the film, that changed almost immediately when Puttnam won the Oscar for best picture for Chariots of Fire in 1982, on top of the best picture Bafta, bringing home Britain’s first best picture Oscar since 1968, when Oliver! won.

“I won the Bafta for Chariots and extraordinarily, was presented the award by Burt Lancaster. I mean, how that happened, God. But he happened to be presenting the best picture award that year. I walked back to my table and a guy called James Lee stopped me. He said, ‘If you’re still looking for money for Local Hero, you’ve got it’. And we shook hands. I went back to the table with a Bafta and the other half of the money,” Puttnam recalls.

As it happened, Puttnam and Forsyth had their eye on Lancaster to star in the film from get-go. “The first thing that Bill had said to me when he delivered the screenplay was, ‘I’d like Burt Lancaster to play Happer,” says Puttnam. While securing Lancaster was crucial for the film’s international appeal, this proved extremely difficult as the star’s salary took up half of the film’s budget. It took a year of negotiating to get him on board.

Despite considering stars such as Michael Douglas and Henry Winkler for the role of Mac, Forsyth was set on casting Peter Riegert as the oilman who experiences an awakening and succumbs to the charms of the rugged Scottish landscapes. For the key part of Oldsen, the local guide who escorts Mac around Ferness, Forsyth chose Peter Capaldi, a then fresh-faced Scottish actor just out of art school.

Another integral element of the film is the score by Scottish-born Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, who Puttnam suggested to Forsyth. While it is regarded as a key component of the film, underscoring shots of the Scottish coastline and the Northern Lights, it almost never came about.

“I heard his (Dire Straits) album Making Movies. So, I wrote to him, I got a letter from his manager who said, ‘Oh, that’s really, really interesting’. I got Mark and Bill to meet, Bill didn’t like Mark’s music, so it was a very tense meeting. But Bill liked one track, Telegraph Road. So, I managed to have a meeting where the only track we talked about was Telegraph Road. And, in the end, they got to like each other and they got to work together,” says Puttnam.

Ahead of its time

Released to immediate acclaim, the film was a major success in the UK and in the US, going on to be honoured as one of the top 10 films of the year by the National Board of Review in New York and launching the career of future Doctor Who star and multi-Bafta winner Peter Capaldi. Forsyth – who’d garnered praise for his 1981 sleeper hit Gregory’s Girl – won a Bafta for best direction. It was hailed as “a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town” by leading US critic Roger Ebert for The Chicago Sun-Times, while Janet Maslin wrote in a glowing review in The New York Times, “Mr Forsyth has put Scottish comedy on the map”.

While Local Hero remains arguably the finest film to have come out of Scotland, perhaps its most enduring legacy lies in its prescient caution on the environment. Fully aware that going ahead with the oil plant will irrevocably damage their village, the locals of Ferness willingly agree to sell their land, rather than oppose the corporation – bar one holdout, a dogged old man.

Well before it was echoed in the incident of the Scottish farmer who refused to sell his land to Trump when he built his golf course, Forsyth’s film implored audiences to conserve the environment, to stand up and fight for it, and to contemplate how easily it can be destroyed.

In the willingness of the residents to sell their land, Forsyth urged viewers to consider the irreversible repercussions of environmental harm. Looking back on the seminal Scottish film 40 years later, Puttnam says he believes it was prescient and is his favourite of the films he has produced: “It was certainly a good 20 years ahead of its time.”

Source: Local Hero: Why the iconic Scottish environmental film was decades ahead of its time

Remembering Terence Davies, the Greatest British Director

by

The late filmmaker was the supreme cinematic poet of memory, and thus of loss and regret.

By Richard Brody

There’s a special pain to the news of the death of the British filmmaker Terence Davies on Saturday at the age of seventy-seven: his career, filled with some of the greatest movies of the past forty years, has always seemed just to be getting started, and, to the end, he kept the exuberant bearing of youth. He was past forty when he made his first feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988)—one of the most original of all début features—and he only made eight more, not because he worked slowly but because the money was slow in coming. Although Davies was among the most accomplished of filmmakers, he remained a perpetual beginner, always on the verge of breaking out but never quite getting there. He reached old age with too few films made—a grievous loss to the history of cinema—but with the ardor, the urgency, and the curiosity of youth unabated. He never made a “late” film; no work of his suggests a detached philosophical overview or a foot in the beyond. The paradoxes and complexities of his character run through his output and his life—and they were also very much on the surface, on public display.

I had the honor and the pleasure of meeting Davies on several occasions (including onstage, in 2016, at The New Yorker Festival). In person, he was hearty and vigorous, wryly and effervescently humorous, a trait that spilled over into his cinematic taste: he expressed unflagging enthusiasm for classic Hollywood musicals at every chance he got, whether in front of an audience at moma, about a decade ago, or in his ballot for the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. Yet his own films were marked by a keen sense of ambient tragedy and often scarred by the horrors of war. The American experience of the Second World War shapes “The Neon Bible,” and the British experience of it shapes “The Deep Blue Sea.” (A scene of Londoners seeking shelter in an Underground station during a German bombing raid is one of his most spectacular creations.) The Civil War is an important part of his Emily Dickinson bio-pic “A Quiet Passion,” and the First World War is decisive in “Sunset Song.” It is also the very heart of his last film, “Benediction,” a bio-pic about the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Read more

Review: Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”: I couldn’t bare the misery anymore

by

By Adam Bloodworth

As one of Britain’s greatest living film-makers, Mike Leigh launched the careers of British acting royalty, including Gary Oldman, Alison Steadman and Tim Roth. But goodness gracious me, he’s a right old misery guts. To mark the release of his new film Hard Truths, Vulture even wrote a listicle ranking his films by how miserable they are.

Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning work asks questions about power structures and how they relate to the working classes, in films like 1983’s Meantime and 2002’s All or Nothing. In those and much else, he manages to capture the feelings of the time. But Hard Truths, Leigh’s first feature film since British historical drama Peterloo in 2018, is so comprehensively gloomily and oppressively negative that it often becomes a painful viewing experience. It is the filmic equivalent of spending hours with a family member who just won’t stop moaning and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It’s a shame, because Leigh has spent over half a century showing he clearly truly understands the lives of his subjects. Hard Truths follows one working class black family living in London, particularly matriarch Pansy who is struggling with PTSD and cannot find a single positive thing to say. If it feels slightly uncomfortable that an 81-year-old white man is writing a cohort of young black female characters, Leigh reassures with a funny and moving script that properly fleshes out these people.

Another examination of misery and trauma, but it’s too much

It’s not Pansy actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s fault that her performance exasperates. She is an engrossing actor, but for one hour and forty minutes, the character is moaning about absolutely everything. She delivers laboured barbs at her depressive son Moses, commendably realised by Tuwaine Barrett, and her long-suffering sister, given addictively zesty energy by Michele Austin. But there isn’t enough time to enjoy these characters before it returns to Pansy’s criticisms. I suppose Leigh’s writing is true to life; these people do exist, but there are other ways to get at the character’s own mental cage than this literal examination of her hour-to-hour existence.

It’s often funny too, Leigh has a knack for writing a damning insult, although, yep, the comedy is often diffused too quickly by the inevitable moaning that returns every other minute. I actually turned away from the screen at one point, unable to bear the sight nor sound of it anymore.

Leigh brightly captures suburban London, bathing ordinary houses handsomely in shards of morning light. Neighbourhood corner shops look attractive; these people may have small flats but Leigh’s version of the capital isn’t a bad place to be. He is a master at capturing a personality with a close-up; more often than not we feel inches away from Pansy, Leigh’s intimate direction lingering a little longer than you’d think to luxuriate in character.

It’s a gleaming filmic product, but the hard truth is it’s a shame it’s so hard to watch.

Source: Hard Truths by Mike Leigh, London Film Festival review: I couldn’t bare the misery anymore