‘A festive tour de force’: Guardian writers on their favorite underrated Christmas movies | Film

It Happened on Fifth Avenue

Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger

Tokyo Godfathers

I’m not big on anime, but I recently watched Satoshi Kon’s 2003 tragicomedy Tokyo Godfathers and found it so fun, sad and thoughtful. It’s inspired by the John Wayne western, Three Godfathers, and we’re in good hands with director Kon (who died at age 46 and who both Guillermo del Toro and Darren Aronofsky have cited as an influence). On Christmas Eve in snowy Tokyo, a trio of homeless people – a middle-aged alcoholic, a transgender woman and a teenage runaway – find an abandoned baby girl under a mound of trash and decide to look for her parents. As hijinks ensue, the three of them are a delicious blend of pain and sass (“I’m eating for two,” Hana, the trans woman, tells a soup kitchen server, patting her belly and requesting an extra helping), and the movie doubles down on the best part of most holiday flicks: the magic – and significance – of coincidence. Throughout our eccentric heroes’ journey, the dots don’t just connect, they ram into each other, and we’re left wondering just how free-wheeling serendipity can get; here it leads to yakuza bosses, Latino immigrants, an angel, a shooting, a missing cat. It’s a dark and rollicking time in this world, and when paired with the cool-toned, cinematic animation style, it doesn’t feel saccharine to appreciate the idea of a Christmas miracle. Tammy Tarng

Meet John Doe

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life rightly gets all the attention this time of year, but I love this lesser-known pick from the director’s oeuvre. Like the story of George Bailey, Meet John Doe revolves around a “forgotten man” – played by Gary Cooper, who may be the most handsome bum you’ll ever see on film. A plucky reporter (Barbara Stanwyck), gets fired after her publication is eaten up by a wealthy owner who has no clue how to run a newsroom (sound familiar?). As her final kiss-off, she writes a fake letter supposedly penned by a man who plans to jump off of a building on Christmas Eve to protest society’s ills. The public loves it, and our girl reporter has to find a man who can play her John Doe. Cooper’s Doe becomes a national hero, inspiring everyone to “be a better neighbor,” and the paper’s publisher tries to exploit all this goodwill for his own political ambitions. Heady at times, but uplifting in the end – and a brutal skewering of the ultra-rich that still rings true. Alaina Demopoulos

• Meet John Doe is available on Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex, YouTube TV and Hoopla in the US and Amazon Prime, Tubi and Plex in the UK and Australia

The Silent Partner

Horror films set during the festive period aren’t quite the protest-causing outliers they once were, if anything there’s now too many of them. So while we might be a little exhausted with the sight of Santa slicing and dicing, we’re less accustomed to him stealing and plotting, the subgenre of Christmas thriller still strangely underpopulated. It’s one of many reasons why little-seen 1978 gem The Silent Partner is such a novel surprise, its criminal Santa played by a wonderfully vile Christopher Plummer whose plan to rob a bank during its busiest period is disrupted by Elliott Gould’s odd, opportunistic teller. It’s a stylish, nasty and entirely unpredictable yarn (written by a young Curtis Hanson, who later returned to Hitchcockian territory on multiple occasions), pitting two different varieties of amoral oddball against each other, both testing their limits and each other’s. It was barely seen on release (Roger Ebert called it a “miracle” that no one saw coming) and has faded in the years since but if you prefer your Christmas films on the chillier side, this deserves to become a new tradition. Benjamin Lee

Almost Christmas

If you like your Christmases messy, Almost Christmas is a hoot. The cast alone – Danny Glover, Mo’Nique, JB Smoove – rivals any holiday tree for stars, and writer-director David E Talbert gives them plenty of latitude to clown around with his dysfunctional family reunion setup. Glover’s character isn’t much more than Sgt Murtaugh aged up another 15 years, a widower who on some level wishes his beloved wife were still around to deal with their wayward adult children. Five days under the same roof makes private problems harder to hide and puts a strain on family bonds – and the prospect of another funeral is slammed on the table when Smoove’s side chick (Keri Hilson) turns up at Christmas dinner and his wife (Kimberly Elise) pulls out a shotgun and starts firing off rounds. Of course it all works out in the end – especially for Mo’Nique, who was still on Hollywood time out after hitting out at Oprah, Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels. Which is to say: this is one holiday mess you can enjoy without squabbling over who’s cleaning up afterward. Andrew Lawrence

Go

Though I was mildly obsessed with this 1999 movie – a sort of young-adult riff on Pulp Fiction’s crime-y interconnectedness – as a teenager, I hadn’t revisited it in many years out of fear that it would not stand the test of time. By some measures, that apprehension was proven right when I finally rewatched it recently. Doug Liman’s film can be noxious, a caustic parade of datedly edgy humor. But there are nonetheless many things to savor in this Christmastime caper: a cool Sarah Polley back when she used to act; 90s pinup Scott Wolff looking great as a semi-closeted soap star; and perhaps most impressive of all, a slinking Timothy Olyphant as a dangerous but not sadistic local drug dealer. He lopes off with the movie in each of his captivating scenes, shirtless with a Santa hat on. Richard Lawson

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

Somewhere between seasonal pillars like The Shop Around the Corner and It’s A Wonderful Life, Preston Sturges dropped his more outrageous wartime Christmas movie, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, which forgoes sentimentality in favour of cheeky bawdiness. Critics at the time were tickled over how the movie about an unplanned pregnancy, arising from a drunken night, got past the censors at the Hays office, what with Betty Hutton’s daft Trudy Kockenlocker struggling to remember who knocked her up. Luckily, she’s got Eddie Bracken’s Norval Jones simping over her to the point that he’s willing to step up as the father. It isn’t immediately apparent that this is a Christmas movie, since it takes approximately nine months before the plot climaxes on the holidays, at which point we realize Sturges essentially refashioned the nativity story. It’s the sort of playfulness we expect from Sturges, whose satires skewered rom-com tropes only to reinforce them with joy and cheer. In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, he does the same for Christmas. Radheyan Simonpillai

Better Off Dead

As obscure Christmas movies go, they don’t get much more obscure than this 1985 teen comedy starring John Cusack in his all-smirking, super-knowing prime. Cusack’s Lane Myers has just been dumped at the start of the holidays by his girlfriend for the high-school skiing hunk – who goes by the unbelievably brilliant school bully name of Roy Stalin – and Lane’s big pitch to get her back is … to ski down a mountain. This being the 80s, the whole movie is basically a trigger warning. Lane spends much of the running time trying to kill himself in increasingly “hilarious” ways (hence the title); he papers his room in Alan Partridge level stalker photographs of his ex; and there’s some slightly dubious-taste Asian-comedy-side characters – though unlike John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles, they are surreally funny (two Japanese drag-racing brothers who learned their English from Howard Cosell’s Wide World of Sports) rather than actively racist. Where this film scores highest is some amazing teen-movie dialogue from writer-director Savage Steve Holland; Lane’s girlfriend lets him down by saying: “I really think it’s in my best interests if I went out with someone more popular”; and Lane’s stoner sidekick Charles De Mar (played by Curtis Armstrong, later to achieve immortality in the Revenge of the Nerds series) is constantly on the search for drugs in their dead-end ski-resort town, drops to his knees on said mountain and cries ecstatically: “This is pure snow … it’s everywhere … do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is?” This being the 80s, actual seasonal cheer is pretty incidental, but it is there occasionally; just avert your eyes from the New Year’s party inspired by a mail-order volume called How to Pick Up Trashy Women. Again … the 80s. You literally couldn’t make a film like this now. Andrew Pulver

Hell’s Heroes

Hell’s Heroes, which could be subtitled three bad men and a baby, is an adaptation of a short story you may know from 1948’s Three Godfathers, starring John Wayne, or the Japanese animation Tokyo Godfathers from 2003. This 1929 western fable, made on the cusp of the sound revolution by William Wyler, is a parched, filthy desert story of redemption, based on Peter B Kyne’s Three Godfathers, already adapted for the screen three times. A trio of incorrigible outlaws, Bob, Barbwire and Wild Bill, flee a bank job across the desert, where they find a woman in labour. The birth kills her, but not before she makes them promise to take care of her baby … Will Hell’s Heroes warm the cockles of your heart at Yuletide? Not as much as you will sweat in sympathy with our sweltering, guilty protagonists. But the final scene with Charles Bickford’s Bob entering the church of New Jerusalem, is an emotional, and festive, tour de force. Pamela Hutchinson

Some of My Best Friends Are…

While Some of My Best Friends Are …. certainly has its weak points as a film, the real appeal to this cinematic time capsule is the opportunity to get a glimpse of a gay bar before Pride was a thing, as well as the rare chance to see Candy Darling starring in a feature film not directed by Andy Warhol (she easily steals the show). An ensemble performance that’s much longer on atmosphere and camp than on plot and nuance, Some of My Best Friends Are … takes viewers inside a post-Stonewall gay bar on Christmas Eve, and manages to recruit far more acting talent than one might expect. We’re still close enough to the bad old days that the establishment prominently sports a sign declaring that two men may not dance together unless in the presence of a lady, although there’s plenty of flamboyance and pride mixed in with self-repression and internalized hate. “Perfume Queen” Candy sticks out as othered and ostracized even within this relatively safe space, and the scene of “trans panic” that leads to her being beaten bloody is still shocking today, not to mention far too condoned by the mainstream culture. Watch it and imagine just what could have been if Candy had managed to live long enough to have an acting career equal to her beauty and screen presence. Veronica Esposito

Christmas, Again

Have yourself an indie little Christmas in Charles Poekel’s low-key slice-of-life about a somber Christmas tree salesman in Brooklyn who’s nursing a broken heart while managing a seasonal business on the thinnest of profit margins. Though the aptly named Noel (Kentucker Audley) doesn’t exactly radiate holiday cheer, there’s an insistent warmth and soul to Christmas, Again that flickers like the colored lights he’s wrapped carefully around his 24/7 pop-up stand. Shooting in a textured 16mm, Poekel gets the details of Noel’s vocation right – the care and maintenance of the stock, the different varietals from upstate (including the “Obama tree”), the onerous deal to pay for any trees he can’t sell – while sketching his relationship with a young woman (Hannah Gross) he finds passed out on a park bench. Though Poekel is allergic to traditional holiday sentiment, he extends enough good will toward his hero that the film feels like a cup of spiced apple cider against a bracing winter cold. Scott Tobias

• Christmas, Again is available on Mubi, Kanopy and to rent digitally in the US and in cinemas now in the UK