A Seriously Groovy Movie Christmas: Festive Cinema of the 1960s and 70s (2024)
Paperback
470 pages Extremis Publishing Published October 2024 ISBN-10: 1739484576 ISBN-13: 978-1-7394845-7-6 Book Details: The 1960s and 70s formed the wilderness years of the Christmas movie. Sandwiched between the genre’s post-war golden age and its commercial revival in the 1980s, these decades have come to be regarded as the Bermuda Triangle of festive cinema — where many features have become lost in the mists of Christmas past and have subsequently been forgotten by later generations. Far from a creative backwater, however, this period would bear witness to some of the most fascinating, unconventional and experimental Christmas movies ever to reach the big screen, with features such as The Apartment, The Lion in Winter and Black Christmas all subverting expectations of the holiday season to produce compelling narratives and memorable themes through wildly different artistic approaches. From the author of The Golden Age of Christmas Movies, A Righteously Awesome Eighties Christmas and A Totally Bodacious Nineties Christmas, this book considers the festive cinema of the sixties and seventies in detail, taking a look at the movies that came to define this unpredictable period in recent history while also reflecting on those features that broke the mould in entirely different ways — including Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, The Magic Christmas Tree and (perhaps most infamously of all) Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. When these tempestuous decades carried the torch for Christmas films, the features on offer may rarely have been traditional, but even today they remain captivating, intriguing and very difficult to ignore for those who are willing to revisit them. Features: This book discusses twelve Christmas films from the 1960s and 1970s, including The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Nicholas Webster, 1964), The Magic Christmas Tree (Richard C. Parish, 1964), The Christmas that Almost Wasn't (Rossano Brazzi, 1966), The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968), Scrooge (Ronald Neame, 1970), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (Curtis Harrington, 1971), Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (R. Winer, 1972), Silent Night, Bloody Night (Theodore Gershuny, 1972), Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) and The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978). An appendix is included which details some of the other festive cinema of this period, along with a filmography, bibliography and index. The Inside Story: I was delighted that my twentieth book to reach publication would also be the concluding volume in my series on the history of Christmas cinema in the twentieth century. Over the years, I had considered everything from the inception of Christmas movies as a genre in the post-war years through to their commercial boom years in the eighties and nineties, but this book would give me the opportunity to explore a totally different era of festive film-making - the sixties and seventies, a time when the movies of the holiday season took a temporary back-seat in popular culture. This would prove to be a unique period in the history of Christmas cinema, and one which produced a hugely varied range of films - some outstanding, some vaguely surreal, and some which would in all likelihood never have seen the light of day at any other time. No other era of festive movies has produced such a marked contrast between films such as the terrifically tense contemporary thriller The Silent Partner and whimsical fantasy like The Christmas that Almost Wasn't. It was to see uncompromising horror features including Black Christmas and Silent Night, Bloody Night appearing alongside appealing family musicals like Scrooge and historical dramas such as The Lion in Winter. However, the period has become especially infamous for its range of low-budget cult curiosities including The Magic Christmas Tree, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians - all films which have achieved notoriety for entirely the wrong reasons. With so many intriguing and experimental films emerging throughout these culturally significant decades, it was a fascinating process to chart the evolution of the genre from the traditional themes established in its golden age heyday through to the challenging and often eccentric features which transformed the Christmas movie into a much more adaptable and versatile category of film. The results were rarely predictable, and the various titles under discussion often defied easy categorisation, but it was certainly a journey which brought home to me just how multifaceted and resilient a genre Christmas cinema can be. |