by Janice L. Newman

TV Christmas

The holidays are here! In other times and places, people gather or huddle around a bright, crackling fire, drinking hot cider and pressing close to keep out winter’s chill. In the Traveler’s house, here in Southern California in the year of 1965, we gather around a bright, staticky TV screen, watching movies and sipping Ovaltine as the Santa Ana winds bluster outside our windows.

And that is how we came to see a pair of Christmas-themed features on our small screen in the first half of December.

Devil or Angel

The first of our ad hoc double feature was The Bishop’s Wife, which my mom saw in the theater back in 1947, but which I’d skipped, thinking the movie might have an overly-religious tone. By the time I learned otherwise, the holidays were over and the movie was long gone. So when I saw in the TV Guide that it would be airing this season, I made sure to write it down on our family calendar.

The movie turned out to be surprising. Henry Brougham, an Episcopalian Bishop (David Niven), has become so obsessed with raising money to build a new cathedral that it’s left him out of touch with the things that really matter. He prays for guidance, and receives an answer in the form of one ‘Dudley’ (Cary Grant), who claims he was sent to help him. Rather than helping him coax the rich and powerful to open their purses, though, Dudley seems to spend most of his time with the Bishop’s wife (Loretta Young), taking her out to lunch, going skating with her, and making her smile even as her husband grows more and more frustrated and jealous.

It doesn’t sound much like a Christmas movie, does it? A story that revolves around an unhappy marriage, with a husband who thinks he’s being cuckolded (in a strictly emotional sense) by an angel doesn’t sound like family fare, let alone holiday material.

Yet, it was refreshing to have a holiday story that wasn’t cloying or heavy-handedly religious. Despite the title and the inescapable religious themes, Dudley comes across as something not quite like the traditional idea of an ‘angel’. He’s inarguably supernatural, but whether he’s actually angelic is questionable: at one point he suggests that he’s an alien from another planet, at another Henry tells him that he thinks he’s a demon, not an angel. It wouldn’t have been difficult to give the story a science fiction spin, making Dudley a man with telekinetic/telepathic powers and a delusion.

Not only that, but there is a startling element to Dudley’s character that suggests that angels – or whatever Dudley is – aren’t so far from humans as we might like to pretend.

While I don’t know that I would make this a staple of my holiday watching year after year, the bittersweet tale was both interesting and thought-provoking, though perhaps not in the way the author intended. It’s not perfect. The bishop is unlikeable enough and his wife’s character is flat enough to make their inevitable reconciliation not particularly satisfying. But Grant’s performance as Dudley is so compelling that it raises the story from mundanity to something worth watching. I give the movie three out of five stars.

Good Grief

The second program was a brand new one, though it was based on something that most people will likely be familiar with: the ‘Peanuts’ comic strip. A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered on December 9th, and we were there, gathered around the television to watch it.

If The Bishop’s Wife was surprising and refreshing, A Charlie Brown Christmas was distressing and disappointing. Perhaps I should have expected it; after all, the comic strip often features the characters treating each other with sarcasm, irritation, and even outright disgust.

Most of the ‘story’ was made up of a series of these strips, but animated. The anger and exasperation from the comic was carried onto the screen, with lines like, "Boy, are you stupid, Charlie Brown!," going from merely unpleasant to stomach-churning when voiced by what sounded like actual children.

The message of the short film – that Christmas is becoming over-commercialized and in order to get back the joy we’ve lost we need to remember the ‘true meaning’ of the holiday – was delivered with such a heavy hand that I felt bruised afterward. The self-righteous religiosity I’d skipped The Bishop’s Wife to avoid all seems to have ended up in this movie instead. And despite how mean the characters are throughout the story, the ending was cloying enough that I wanted to brush my teeth as the credits rolled.

However, the show did have three redeeming things that kept it from being unmitigatedly awful.

The first was Snoopy. The cheerful canine brightened the screen every moment he was on it. His antics ranged from decorating his dog house to try to win a neighborhood prize, to dancing on Schroeder’s piano, to hilariously imitating Lucy. Even his unrestrained joy was dampened by the other characters’ angry reactions to him, though.

The second was the music. One of the pieces was a particularly catchy, almost contrapuntal song played on the piano. With its quick tempo and memorable repeating throughline, I still have it stuck in my head! The rest of the music was pretty good, too. They clearly hired talented composers and musicians, and it showed.

The third is a little hard to describe. In the beginning of the story, Charlie Brown expresses something I think all adults have felt in their lives at one point or another: a feeling of being sad at Christmas, of not feeling how he’s ‘supposed’ to feel:

…I'm getting presents, and I'm sending Christmas cards, and decorating all the trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

It’s a powerful sentiment. If it had been treated with a lighter touch, it could have made for a moving story: one that acknowledged the fact that the holidays can be a difficult and painful time for many of us, and in doing so, helped people recognize that their feelings were normal and they weren’t alone.

Of course, setting the tone for the entire show, Linus reacts to Charlie Brown’s feelings by yelling at him:

Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy's right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest!

"Just take a Miltown, stupid."

Like The Bishop’s Wife, A Charlie Brown Christmas doesn’t fit my idea of a Christmas movie. I’m not planning on circling it in the TV guide to re-watch if it airs again. But if they release one, I might just pick up the single of that catchy tune.

Two stars: one for Snoopy, and one for the music.

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