Turner Classic Movies in Dec.

Of course there are a number of movies in Dec. that are about Christmas; I'll mention the ones I have seen and liked but please feel free to indulge yourself in others if you care to do so.  I do realize that some people do not like Christmas and avoid it to the extent one can in this day and age.

Dec. 3 there is Fritz Lang's  Man Hunt (1941), beautifully adapted from Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, with a particularly moving performance by Joan Bennett.

On Dec. 5 there are two dark films about Hollywood:  Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, both from 1950 and both about the marginalization of scriptwriters.

On the 8th are Don Siegel's Gun Runners (1958) and Samuel Fuller's Crimson Kimono (1959).  The first is the third version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and best in the action scenes; the latter is indicative of Fuller's interest in Asia and best in the emotional scenes.

Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past is on Dec. 9th.  It is one of the very best of films noir.

On the 10th are several films by Claude Chabrol, a French director of bourgeois tragedy, strongly influenced by Hitchcock (about whom he and Eric Rohmer wrote a book) and Lang.  My favorite in this group is La  Ceremonie (1995), more or less from a Ruth Rendell novel.

Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1941) is showing on Dec. 11; Judy Garland sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

On Dec. 12 is Lubitsch's richly funny and poignant Heaven Can Wait and on the 13th is Charles David's Lady on the Train (1945), with a lovely performance by the largely-forgotten Deanna Durbin. On the 14th is Ingmar Bergman's intense Summer with Monika and on the 15th Chaplin's beautiful The Circus (1928).

On the 18th is Remember the Night, written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitch Leisen; it's a dark and amusing film about the holidays.

On the 19th is Lubitsch's brilliant The Shop Around the Corner, with a holiday motif, and Frank Borzage's moving and downbeat The Mortal Storm (1940), about the rise of Nazism.

On the 20th is John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) and two by Eric Rohmer:  My Night at Maud's (1969, which I stood in line for, in the rain, at the 68th St Playhouse when it came out) and La Collectionneuse (1967).

There are several Hitchcocks being shown in Dec., of which I like Under Capricorn (1949) the best, for its mobile camera and gorgeous color.  It's showing on Dec. 22.

On the 25th is John Ford's Three Godfathers, an allegory about the three wise men and an unusual Ford Western that was not filmed in Monument Valley.  Also on the 25 is Chaplin's The Kid (1921, with Jackie Coogan), his first feature.

On the 26th is Mark Sandrich's Shall We Dance (1937), my favorite of the Astaire-Rogers films. The Music is by George and Ira Gershwin and the dancing is lovely.

Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957) is on Dec. 27 and on the 30th are two of Minnelli's dream-like melodramas:  Two Weeks in Another Town(1962) and Some Came Running(1958).