The Treatment host Elvis Mitchell says he gets a little obsessed about Christmas movies this time of the year. But what counts as such a genre? Mitchell muses that a Christmas movie can be anything from the 1964 family-comedy Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, to the Shane Black-penned 1987 action film Lethal Weapon, to Marvel’s 2013 Iron Man 3.
In this edition of The Treat, Mitchell goes into the deeper cuts of favorite Christmas movies and the songs that define them. One of his favorite pieces of music comes from the 1974 thriller, The Odessa File. It’s the song “Christmas Dream,” written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and performed by Perry Como.
The other Christmas movie that Mitchell goes back to again and again, is the 1984 Scottish film Comfort and Joy by writer-director Bill Forsyth. He finds himself particularly drawn to Mark Knopfler’s moody and evocative score.
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
One of my favorite Christmas songs, just because it's so evocative, comes from a movie called The Odessa File in which Jon Voight is a journalist battling neo-Nazis in early 1960s Germany. The song is “Christmas Dream.” I remember seeing Voight driving into the city and the song is playing.
“Remember. Does no one remember?” We can hear the impatience and this sort of hint of anger. That's an abrasion, an irritation, and unusual for a Perry Como song, I thought. But that's something that [has stayed] with me because it's a Christmas memory: [a] movie I saw on Christmas Day with a Christmas song in it.
[Comfort and Joy] is virtually impossible to find in North America, but the story is about, for me, what Christmas is. The film follows radio DJ, Alan Bird, played by Bill Patterson, who you may know as the dad of Phoebe-Waller Bridge in Fleabag. Whenever I see him, I'm thrilled because I'm reminded of Comfort and Joy.
He's a morning DJ, whose life goes into freefall when his girlfriend just leaves him at the beginning of the movie, and we're kind of waiting to see if she's going to come back. But these adventures happen and he tries to throw himself into this job he has, which is about bringing light and delight into people's homes, but he can't do it because he keeps going back to “Maddie, Maddie,” his ex-girlfriend, who he's obsessed about. So he decides he's going to give his life purpose by becoming a reporter in addition to being a morning-radio personality, and he starts reporting on these ice cream crimes in Scotland. I'm not making any of this up…
The movie ends with sacrifice, with him doing something for kind of the greater good, but it's also a small moment. I think what I really cherish about this movie is, it reminds me in so many ways of Christmas movies I like, which are about people getting over their irritants, be it Christmas in July, which is one of my other favorite Christmas movies, or The Shop Around the Corner, which is about a bunch of not-very-nice people figuring out a way to get through the holidays.
The crowning note, if you will, the cherry, the whipped cream atop the sundae of Comfort and Joy is a beautiful score by Mark Knopfler who also worked with Bill Forsyth on Local Hero. But this score is not bells ringing and lots of trumpet. It's melancholy guitar and saxophone — sometimes sped up — and ending on this lovely melancholic grace note.