Christmas Past (Paul Killiam Shows, Kino Lorber, compilation of silent-themed shorts, 1901-1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 22) when my husband Charles and I got home from a quite beautiful and haunting Christmas service at St. Paul’s – a performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols for a boys’ choir (though the church put it on with adult and teenage women) and harp – plus an hour-long “Lessons and Carols” service (I’ve posted about this on https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/12/st-pauls-cathedral-offers-lessons-and.html), I put on Turner Classic Movies for more entries in their six-day marathon of Christmas-themed films: the movie Remember the Night (the first of four films co-starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray – the others were Double Indemnity, which Ben Mankiewicz started introducing instead as a not-very-funny “joke,” The Moonlighter and There’s Always Tomorrow; I have an earlier moviemagg review at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/remember-night-paramount-1939.html) and a fascinating compilation of nine Christmas-themed silent shorts assembled by Paul Killiam and Kino Lorber called A Christmas Past. The shorts ranged in length from five minutes to nearly half an hour, and the production dates ranged from 1901 to 1925 – though Killiam and the Kino Lorber people did not show them in the order in which they were made, more’s the pity, since showing them in chronological order would have given audiences a fascinating glimpse in the evolution of film from its relatively crude early days to the fully accomplished silent cinema of 1925. The show at least opened with the earliest film on it, A Holiday Pageant at Home (1901), a really crude production with just one set and an immobile camera that just gave us the action from one point of view. It’s a simple story about a husband, a wife and their four children – three boys and a girl – and in the pageant two of the kids play hold-up men while the other two play their victims.

The next film up, A Winter Straw Ride (1906), was a lot more fun. It featured a group of people taking two hay wagons outfitted with sleigh-style runners. They get pelted with snowballs from some of the local kids, one of the wagons overturns (showing the real meaning of those cryptic lines from “Jingle Bells,” “We got into a drifted bank and then we got up sot”), and in the film’s most entertaining sequence some of the snow surface itself starts collapsing like a crumbling glacier. The people on the wagons decide they’ll have a lot more fun sliding down the snow than continuing on the sleigh, and Charles wondered how the women were handling the slides. I pointed out that women wore so many undergarments in those days that their asses were pretty well insulated, but Charles still wondered how they kept all those petticoats and whatnot in place. The third film in sequence was A Trap for Santa Claus (1909), one of Biograph’s one-reelers directed by the very young D. W. Griffith at the start of his career. It wasn’t that advanced technically – he was still learning – but it had a politically progressive slant to it as it told the story of Arthur (future Griffith star Henry B. Walthall) and Helen (Marion Leonard) Rogers. When Arthur loses his job and can’t find another one, he spends his time at the local saloon and tries to drown his troubles in drink (anticipating Griffith’s last film, a dated temperance melodrama called The Struggle, from 1931). The Rogers’ children (Gladys Egan and John Tansey) set up a trap for Santa Claus, who in their home has to come in through the window since they have no chimney, only the person they catch is Arthur, who was trying to break into his former home to burglarize it. Fortunately, Arthur at the end is seemingly repentant and ready to give up all thoughts of crime or suicide (when he left he wrote a note to his wife literally saying she’d be better off without him) and resume his place as the head of the household.

The fourth film in the compilation was an Edison production that, if anything, was even more politically progressive than Griffith’s film: A Christmas Accident (1912), directed by Harold M. Shaw from a script by Annie Eliot Trumbull and Bannister Merwin. It tells the story of two families, a well-off one called Gilton and a not-so-well-off one called Bilton, and the titular Christmas accident occurs when a handsome roast-beef dinner intended for Mr. Gilton (William Wadsworth) gets delivered to Mr. Bilton (Augustus Phillips) by mistake. Needless to say, the Biltons eagerly accept their bounty and devour the meal. When Mrs. Bilton (Ida Williams) tells their children that Santa Claus is too poor to be able to give them a turkey this year, she reads them The Night Before Christmas and when Mr. Gilton shows up at their door, the kids mistake him for Santa Claus. Eventually the Gilton and Bilton families become friends. After that we got another Edison one-reeler, The Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus, twelfth and last in a series of what were supposed to be mystery thrillers featuring a detective character named Octavius (Barry O’Moore). This film features a burglar dressed as Santa Claus and two other faux Santas, including Octavian in disguise – and the scene in which the burglar “Santa” starts ripping off a family’s Christmas presents eerily anticipates How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The next film was the latest in sequence (1925) and the longest (half an hour); it was simply called Santa Claus and was essentially an offshoot of The Night Before Christmas. It was written and directed by Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Kleinschmidt, and it boasts in its initial credits that it was filmed in Alaska. Though the interiors could have been shot anywhere, the film contains some spectacular sequences of Alaskan landscapes, and while some of them could have been cribbed from somebody or other’s documentaries, there are scenes in which Santa Claus appears against the spectacular icy backdrops of real Alaskan exteriors in ways that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to “fake” in 1925. The basic plot of this film is that the children have been waiting up all night for Santa, and when he finally shows up they ask him to explain what he does with himself the other 364 days of the year. It turns out he runs a toy workshop, monitors the children of the world with a giant telescope so he can tell who’s being naughty and who’s being nice (in one marvelous sequence he spots an obnoxious kid literally ripping off a blind man, and he crosses him off the list of children getting presents), and in his spare time hangs out with the Easter Bunny and Jack Frost.

Following that we got to see an Edison one-reeler of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1910) – which, surprisingly, was not the first but the third film adaptation of it. It was directed by J. Searle Dawley with two uncredited assistants, Charles Kent and Ashley Miller (who I’m guessing wrote the script because no writers other than Dickens are credited), and it’s an interesting adaptation in that they managed to crowd most of the high points of the story in 15 minutes. It’s also interesting that the actor who played Bob Cratchit, Charles Ogle, was also the Frankenstein monster in Edison’s one-reeler of that story – and to show the monster’s creation they made a dummy of Ogle, set it on fire, then reversed the film so the monster appeared to emerge from a burst of flame. The special effects in the 1910 A Christmas Carol are just as amazing, if not more so: Marley’s Ghost and the Three Spirits, along with the flashback visions they show Scrooge (Marc McDermott), appear as superimpositions. In 1910 there was only one way to do that: to rewind the exposed but undeveloped film in the camera and shoot the new action right over the old. It must have taken a lot of careful positioning of both actors and camera to make it come out as director Dawley intended, probably using surveyors’ instruments the way Buster Keaton famously did in his films 10 to 15 years later. The last movie on the program was an out-and-out adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem The Night Before Christmas, made in 1905 and taking most of its titles from Moore. Obviously the compilers of A Christmas Past sequenced their film the way they did to get the two Big Stories, A Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas, last, but this rather static and glum version of Moore’s famous poem ends the collection on a rather sour note and it’s too bad we don’t get a more exciting movie to end the collection. Still, A Christmas Past is an estimable compilation and well worth seeing at least once.