3 Godfathers (1948)
John Ford and John Wayne don’t exactly scream Christmas cheer, but that’s exactly what we get with 3 Godfathers, based on the short story by Peter B. Kyne. 3 Godfathers takes the Biblical story of the three wisemen and sets it in the Old West, with Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz, and Harry Carey Jr. as a trio of rustlers who take care of an orphaned infant. Ford and Wayne always make movie magic together, and the playfulness of the story lightens their sometimes mythic approach.
Ikiru (1952)
Like 3 Godfathers, Ikiru doesn’t explicitly mention Christmas. Furthermore, it doesn’t even draw inspiration from a Christmas story. Instead, this gentle drama from the legendary Akira Kurosawa stars Takashi Shimura as a government beaucrat Kanji Watanabe, who learns that he’s dying of cancer. With his limited time left, Watanabe devotes himself to getting the city to construct a playground for children, hoping to leave some sort of legacy. Ikiru lacks jingle bells and tinsel, but when Watanabe sits on a swing and the snow begins to fall, you’ll see why the movie is sometimes called the Japanese It’s a Wonderful Life.
Stalag 17 (1953)
Many great filmmakers get mentioned on this list, but only one has the honor of having two movies make the cut. The war film Stalag 17 comes from writer and director Billy Wilder, and stars William Holden and Don Taylor as American airmen held in a German camp overseen by a crafty warden (Otto Preminger). Lest the idea of Christmas and a World War bring to mind the Christmas truce, be assured that Wilder has no such optimism here. Stalag 17 deals with the Americans turning on one another as they search for an informant in their midst, playing more like The Thing than any episode of Hogan’s Heroes.
We’re No Angels (1955)
Humphrey Bogart finally makes the list in We’re No Angels, not as a private detective, but as (essentially) one of the Three Stooges. Bogart stars alongside Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov in this farce about escaped prisoners in colonial French Guiana. Initially intending to lie low, the trio soon finds themselves helping the struggling townspeople, finding their better natures in the process. The idea of criminals, two of whom are murderers, brightening the lives of colonizers is pretty icky if you think about it, but director Michael Curtiz and the three stars things light, especially as Christmas decorations begin to appear around its island setting.
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
The majority of Douglas Sirk’s triumphant melodrama All That Heaven Allows does not, in fact, take place during Christmas. But some key scenes certainly do involve the holiday, and the glorious technocolor and Frank Skinner’s swooning score makes the whole thing feel of the season, as does its romantic plot. Jane Wyman plays Cary Scott, a New England blue-blood widow who thought love was behind her when she meets Ron Kirby, a charismatic but blue-collar and much younger groundskeeper played by Rock Hudson. The two defy social standards and embrace their love, which makes All That Heaven Allows sound like a Hallmark movie, but none of those match the lushness of this classic.
Desk Set (1957)
The truest successor to Powell and Loy’s Nick and Nora Charles came in the form of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, the power couple of ’50s screwball comedy. In the Desk Set, directed by Walter Lang and written by Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron, Tracy plays an inventor who creates a computer to do research more efficiently than any human. That claim is put to the test when he tries to install the machine in a library run by a researcher played by Hepburn. As the two try to prove each other wrong, they start to fall in love—which is exactly the type of plot that Phoebe and Henry Ephron’s daughter Nora would perfect later, in movies such as When Harry Met Sally… and You’ve Got Mail.
