What is a classic Christmas movie? It took “It’s a Wonderful Life” a couple of decades after its TV debut to achieve this status in the late 1970s, when it showed for years on a dozen channels until a clarification of its copyright status turned into an NBC holiday franchise.
Robert Osborne’s Christmas Eve marathon on Turner Classic Movies opens with an obvious choice, “The Bishop’s Wife” (1947), starring Cary Grant an angel who helps out the titular cleric (David Niven) and spouse (Loretta Young). This, incidentally, is the film that Grant decided to do instead of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” shot around the same time but rushed into theaters a year earlier.
Leo McCarey’s “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” are absent from TCM this year, but Osborne is offering in their place a far better McCarey movie never previously known as a holiday classic. “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1987) opens with a Christmas celebration at which an elderly couple (Beulah Bondi of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Victor Moore) announce to their selfish kids their suburban cottage is being foreclosed. The couple is separated except for one glorious last day together in one of Hollywood’s greatest, if least known, tearjerkers.
TCM previously positioned Mitchell Leisen’s “Remember the Night” (1940) as a Christmas classic. In their first teaming four years before “Double Indemnity,” Barbara Stanwyck plays a shoplifter who a soft-hearted assistant DA (Fred MacMurray) decides to take home for the holidays. Screenwriter Preston Sturges complained about Leisen’s direction, but if it you ask me it’s almost as good as Sturges’ own films as a director.