films

10 Great British Christmas films

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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.

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Writings On The Warhol: An Interview With Mary Woronov

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By Wayne Burrows | First published 2011

This interview took place in the Cafe at Lux Cinema on Hoxton Square in early October 2000. No complete transcript of the tape was made at the time, mainly due to the conversation being – I seem to remember – somewhat meandering: Woronov seemed far happier talking about pretty much anything but herself, the very subject we were, of course, meeting to discuss. Places, exhibitions, her asking me questions (rather than vice versa) and lots of other sidelines had a tendency to take over instead. With hindsight maybe that less focused conversation might have told its own story and been interesting in itself but in the event only the parts directly relevant to the article were taken from the tape, which is long since lost or erased. The piece itself first appeared in The Big Issue in the North (Oct 23 – 29, 2000). The text here is an unabridged version, substantially longer than the article as finally published. Still, it was probably (just about) forgiveable at the time to think the long discussions of my bandaged finger and places to go in London could be left safely untranscribed. It’s only 11 years later that I’m less sure.

Mary Woronov (early career)

Mary Woronov on Chelsea Girls (in Warhol Films at the Gershwin Hotel)

From Hanoi Hannah in Andy Warhol’s split-screen underground classic Chelsea Girls (1966) to the monstrous principal, Miss Togar, in the Ramones vehicle Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) Mary Woronov’s film roles would probably lead you to expect their creator might be a somewhat intimidating woman. Add in the murderous farce of Paul Bartel’s pitch black capitalism-as-cannibalism comedy Eating Raoul (1982) and Woronov’s role as a ruthless hit-woman in Gregg Araki’s New Queer Cinema benchmark The Living End (1992) and you could easily be forgiven for feeling a touch nervous about meeting the lady face to face.

After all, as cult and underground acting careers go, Woronov’s has covered the ground and then some. From Warhol to Roger Corman, Hollywood Boulevard to Night of the Comet, pretty much the nearest she got to the mainstream was a Seventies turn as a sadistic warden in an episode of Charlie’s Angels that saw her hosing down the crime-fighting trio in a prison yard. So it’s all the more surprising that when I reach the Lux Café, Woronov appears almost immediately, with no affectations, tall and imposing in a dark summer dress but very visibly relaxed. She settles into a chair while smiling a lot and holds forth far more amiably than I’d dared hope.

Because, let’s face it, you really don’t expect nothing-left-to-prove affability and benign attentiveness from a woman whose own amphetamine-fuelled memoir – Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Serpent’s Tail) – makes a blackly comic set-piece out of her own, maybe or possibly not entirely fictional, attempted murder of a minor Warhol hanger-on named Vera Cruz on a New York subway track, among many other hair-raising incidents and encounters. So, she’s mellowed, it seems?

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Marshall Brickman obituary

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Screenwriter, musician and director who won an Oscar, with Woody Allen, for the screenplay of Annie Hall

By Michael Carlson

Marshall Brickman, who has died aged 85, was a successful musician, writer and film director, but will be remembered best for his collaborations with Woody Allen on three of Allen’s best movies: Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). The pair won an Oscar for the original screenplay of Annie Hall, which also took the awards for best picture, best director for Allen and best actress for Diane Keaton.

Allen skipped the awards ceremony, and when Brickman accepted the best writer statuette, he said: “Half of this little piece of tin, if not much more, belongs to Woody, who is probably the greatest collaborator anyone could ever wish for. He does a lot of brilliant work. He takes our script and makes it into what you saw. He picks up my lunch check for about five months, and today he refuses to come out of his apartment.”

That apartment was in New York, which played a huge part in those films. Like Allen, Brickman grew up in Brooklyn, though he was born in Rio de Janeiro, where his father, Abram, a refugee from Poland, and his New York-born mother Pauline (nee Wolin) were leftists, who in 1943 returned to America and settled in Flatbush, where Abram ran an import-export business. They exposed Marshall to the Greenwich Village scene of politics and music; he learned to play folk music on the banjo and guitar.

After high school at Brooklyn Tech, he went to the University of Wisconsin, intending to study medicine, but graduated in science and music, influenced by his room-mate and fellow New Yorker Eric Weissberg, who was also a banjo virtuoso.

The city was the fermenting cauldron for the arts in postwar America. Weissberg joined a folk group, the Tarriers, an integrated quartet who had a big hit with Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song (Day-O). When Bob Carey left, Weissberg tabbed Brickman as his replacement. The Tarriers were playing at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village when Allen, a budding standup, opened for them.

Brickman at first thought his jokey intros to the group’s songs might lead him to a comedy career, and he got a job writing for Candid Camera, sharing an office with Joan Rivers. He began writing jokes for Rivers and Allen, but kept a foot in the music world by recording an album with Weissberg, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (1963), for which he also wrote jokey liner notes. He then joined John and Michelle Phillips in the New Journeymen, but soon left. Denny Doherty replaced him, and with the addition of Cass Elliot they became the Mamas and Papas.

More importantly, Brickman joined Jack Rollins, who represented Allen, and another joke-writer, Dick Cavett, who got him a gig with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. He became Carson’s head writer, mostly because the other writers wanted to avoid responsibility for the “five spots”, the sketches Carson performed in addition to the monologue. When Cavett left to host his own talkshow, Brickman went with him. But in 1972, the record he had made with Weissberg was used as the soundtrack to John Boorman’s film Deliverance (although the famous Dueling Banjos was added by Weissberg and Steve Mandell).

The royalties gave Brickman the chance to relax and join Allen in day-long sessions that, although they never actually wrote scenes together, produced the script for Sleeper.

The fact that these were Allen’s films provided a structure for Brickman’s writing. “Jokes are easy,” he said. “Humour comes to me so easily I’m suspicious of it. I secrete jokes like the pancreas secretes … whatever it is the pancreas secretes.” Like Allen, and Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, Brickman preferred New York to Hollywood; not least because he was invited to a party at Sharon Tate’s house the night of the Manson murders, but had another engagement that night in Santa Monica.

Brickman was lead writer on The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975), which introduced the Swedish Chef. After Manhattan, he moved on to write and direct three films, all of which were edited by his wife, Nina Feinberg, whom he married in 1973.

In Simon (1980), a psychology professor, played by Alan Arkin, is brainwashed in an experiment by bored scientists into believing he comes from outer space. Brickman wrote his most Allen-like film, Lovesick (1983) for Peter Sellers, but after Sellers’s death Dudley Moore starred as the psychiatrist in love with a patient, Elizabeth McGovern; Alec Guinness plays the ghost of Sigmund Freud. In The Manhattan Project (1986), about a high-school student who builds his own atomic bomb, John Lithgow stars alongside actors who became stalwarts in TV – Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City), Jill Eikenberry (LA Law) and John Mahoney (Frasier).

“I pick projects where I don’t mind having lunch with the people,” Brickman quipped, and in the 90s he wrote two adapted screenplays for the director Mark Rydell. For The Boys (1991) is a wartime variant of The Sunshine Boys, in which Bette Midler and estranged spouse James Caan reunite to entertain soldiers in the Korean war. The resemblance of the character (if not the story line) to the entertainer Martha Raye was noticed by many; her lawsuit against the film failed.

Intersection (1994) remade Claude Sautet’s 1970 Les Chose de la Vie, but Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich failed to raise it from melodrama. In 1993 Brickman reunited with Allen, now immersed in scandal around his adopted family with Mia Farrow, to write Manhattan Murder Mystery, which began life as a false start to the Annie Hall script; Diane Keaton replaced Farrow as the star.

Brickman’s final directing came in a 2001 TV movie version of Christopher Durang’s play Sister Mary Explains It All, which starred Keaton as the teaching nun in a sort of American take on Miss Brodie. He then shifted gears, writing the book for the musical Jersey Boys, about the Four Seasons vocal group; it opened on Broadway in 2005, won four Tony awards and ran for 12 years; Brickman also wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film. His Tarriers career helped him understand the quartet’s dynamics, while his musical ability helped his words match the harmonies of the music. He followed up with the book to the Addams Family musical in 2010.

Brickman is survived by Nina and their two daughters, Sophie and Jessica.

 Marshall Jacob Brickman, musician, writer and film director, born 25 August 1939; died 29 November 2024

Source: Marshall Brickman obituary | Movies | The Guardian

Hopes For Paradise: Terence Davies and The Long Day Closes

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By Rich Woodall | First Published May 22, 2022

Years ago, my Dad was trying to explain to me how it felt to see Lawrence of Arabia in the cinema back in the 1960s. Remembering those vast horizons, the steepled banks of sand and the sunrise turning the whole sky to rust he told me, “It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen.” What appeared on that screen was something completely out of scale with his own existence – not just a strange landscape, but an entirely alien perspective. Nobody anywhere had ever seen a desert the way David Lean and Freddie Young showed it to them in 1962, infinite in width and depth and yet also somehow captured within a screen on a wall in Hull, Wolverhampton or Liverpool.

This was the early days of the television boom. Most households had one, but it was two channels broadcast in bleary monochrome. The cinema was still where you went to get your images, a radical elsewhere that let you in on an experience utterly removed from the texture of your everyday life. Today, of course, the value of images has been subject to explosive hyperinflation. We all gorge on a constant stream of high-def footage. The cinema can still affect us with its scale and volume, but it takes effort to think of it as anything other than a jumbo-sized smartphone screen. When I think about my Dad’s experience of Lawrence of Arabia, I try to imagine living in a society where moving images were so scarce and precious. The only film I’ve ever seen that gives me a sense of what this might have felt like is Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, which turns 30 this year.

Like Davies’ other early films, The Long Day Closes is a quasi-memoir inspired by the director’s growing up in 1950s Liverpool. The story revolves around Bud, a shy and fragile 12-year-old living on an urban terrace with his mother and three older siblings. This home is a space of tenderness and care, embedded in a close-knit community, although Bud is tortured by his inability to fully participate in the spiritual, romantic and social worlds that revolve around him. As Davies has said of himself, Bud is one of life’s spectators, a daydreamer and a voyeur.

No surprise, then, that Bud is most himself at the movies. In one especially lovely shot, the camera tracks along the front row of a cinema balcony, finally reaching Bud, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hands, a look of pure bliss on his face. But this isn’t so much a film about being at the pictures as wanting to be at the pictures. For most of the film, we follow Bud as he goes (reluctantly) to school and church or kicks around at home, and slowly we see how those couple of hours a week he spends at the cinema are rewiring his brain, reshaping his desires and altering the way he sees the world around him.

This is mostly expressed through exquisite shot composition and camerawork – hallmarks of Davies’ body of work. Sometimes we see through Bud’s eyes, and sometimes we watch him while he watches others, but again and again we’re with him as he stares out windows, through open doors and down empty hallways, searching for frames to organise his everyday experience the way he’s seen it on the screen. Early in the film, as he looks out of an upstairs window, Bud’s eye falls on a shirtless bricklayer, and he feels the first stirring of an urge he doesn’t yet have a name for. There’s something about the spatial logic of the shot that doesn’t quite add up. It feels like the brickie should be at ground level, but he’s filmed head on in the centre of the shot, as he’d appear if Bud were looking straight at him. It’s as if in his mind’s eye Bud is framing the man as he would if he were shooting a movie, transforming him momentarily into a matinee idol. Cinema gives Bud the language he needs to explore desires which every other sphere of his life forces him to repress.

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