Patrick Freyne’s 10 favourite Christmas films – and what they really mean

It’s a Wonderful Life

There’s this guy, a real loser, called George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), and instead of pursuing his own self-interest he’s constantly interfering in the market – saving children from drowning, preventing bereaved chemists from accidentally poisoning people, and running a philanthropic savings-and-loan company to help poor people buy houses instead of allowing nature to take its course. Meanwhile local banker Mr Potter is actually building something (slums), and nobody respects him for it.

Ultimately, Bailey’s woke mindset leads to him facing huge debt, particularly after Mr Potter entrepreneurially steals all his money, but then a trainee angel named Clarence (clearly meant to represent the government) shows him what the town would have been like without him – seems fine: Mr Potter and thus the United States are thriving – and then the community gathers together to collectively bail him out.

At this point one of his friends calls him “the richest man in town”, which is clearly untrue. Mr Potter is the richest man in town, and hearing someone else being given that title must be very hurtful to him. Then George sees the inscription on a book he got from Clarence: “No man is a failure who has friends.” This is total loser talk. What we’re seeing here is communism, plain and simple. Suffice it to say, my remake, Ayn Rand’s It’s a Wonderful Life, will have a different focus from the Frank Capra version.

[ It's a Wonderful Life has been dogging my nightmares since my youth ]

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Not just a seasonal nickname for a colleague (sorry, Carol) but an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Muppet Christmas Carol, in which he invented the Muppets. Michael Caine plays Scrooge, who sees three ghosts who show him salutary visions from his life in the past, the present and the future. After this traumatic event he embraces Christmas gluttony instead of going to hospital for a brain scan.

These Criminal Minds folks look and sound as if they work for Accenture

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Joey Essex was raised by television, his mother a camera, his father a boom microphone

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Jedis were once a seasoning, like salt. We liked the salt, and now Disney is serving us big bowls of salt

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Home Alone

“We need a Christmas hit, John Hughes. Something heartwarming for all the family.”

“Okay: three words.”

Dramatic pause.

“L’il Straw Dogs.”

“What?”

“L’il Straw Dogs. A child is under siege in his home by local thugs, so he assaults them violently, real savage stuff – gorings, burnings, blunt-force trauma.”

“What?”

“This kid is a real son of a bitch, a total animal. You do not want to meet this kid. In his soul there is nothing but darkness.”

“What?”

“It’s about the child within us all.”

[ Home alone? Here's a few scary movies for Christmas ]

The Polar Express

A boy has begun to doubt the existence of Santa. “Wake up, sheeple!” he says, probably. Then Tom Hanks turns up as an emissary of the deep state and takes him to the North Pole on a magic train filled with hollow-eyed children from the uncanny valley in order to introduce him to the real Santa. Once there, Santa takes one look at them and rightly doubts the existence of himself. This was, in fairness, state-of-the-art computer animation at the time. I remember discussions on late-night arts shows about how difficult it was to replicate the texture of human skin that should really have been a warning about the direction society was going in.

[ 25 Christmas movies for the 25th (and other days) ]

The Shop Around the Corner

Ernst Lubitsch’s yarn about two bickering employees of a leather-goods store in Budapest who are, unbeknown to each other, engaged in a romantic correspondence was remade in 1998 as You’ve Got Mail, where the letters were swapped out for newfangled emails. The original was released in 1940, so it contains realistic poverty, infidelity, depression and suicidality, yet it is still really charming and funny and set around Christmas time. It also contains Jimmy Stewart, who is, scientifically, the most Christmassy actor. The remake contains Tom Hanks with correctly textured human skin.

The Snowman

A Snowman attains consciousness and instead of asking existential questions (“Do I have snow organs?” “Do I have bones?”), or expressing anger at his creator for creating him (the boy in the story is unnamed, so I’m going with “Li’l Frankenstein”), he decides to take him on a magical trip to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. Plotwise, it’s quite like The Polar Express except that it’s beautifully animated in Raymond Briggs’s classic colouring-pencil style, so you don’t need to wash your eyes afterwards. At the end of it all Li’l Frankenstein is planted safely in his bed, but when he wakes up the next morning the Snowman has melted. Now he must tearfully reckon with the fact that, though Santa Claus is real, death is too. Instead of “The End” the words “F*** you, kids” come up on screen.

The Sound of Music

A singing nun, a stuffy Austrian count and seven children of varying heights, clearly not confident in the strength of their ideas, escape across the mountains into Switzerland rather than debate some Nazis who are just asking questions and, also, killing people. I have no idea why this is a Christmas film except maybe that the song My Favourite Things sounds a bit like a Christmas list written by an insufferably twee hipster child: “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens.” (Fine, you can go to art school, but when you’re 21 I’m cutting you off.)

[ Movies get my kids together – but The Sound of Music is a step too far ]

The Apartment

In this piece of darkly comic Billy Wilder genius, Jack Lemmon plays a weak-willed flunkey who allows his superiors at work to use his apartment for their extramarital affairs; Shirley McLaine plays the elevator operator who’s having an affair with his boss. Wilder got the idea by thinking of the poor schmuck in Brief Encounter who lent his apartment to the romantic leads. Once again, it’s Christmas, because even philanderers like presents.

Batman Returns

A hereditary millionaire channels his grief over the death of his parents into dressing up in a black rubber suit and beating up poor people – but this time at Christmas. Throw in a Danny Elfman soundtrack, a cat-themed dominatrix and a grotesque little man raised by penguins in the sewer and it’s basically Tim Burton’s nativity. It’s the best Batman film. Personally, I hope Bruce Wayne never goes to counselling.

[ 19 of the best superhero movies of all time ]

The Santa Clause

Let me first tell you that it doesn’t take a sequence of madcap magical events to transform someone into a portly man with a white beard. There are tried-and-tested ways of achieving this look. The film industry is based in California, however, where being old is illegal, and so a series of madcap magical events is what it takes to turn Tim Allen into Santa Claus in this film. The gist of it? After Tim Allen murders Santa Claus (a bold opening gambit for a Christmas film) he is forced to become him. Rest assured, if you don’t have what it takes to kill Santa Claus, I have a series of lifestyle tips that will help you look like him nonetheless.