People typically assume Christmas Eve traditions, like most holiday traditions, originate within the family. I inherited my favorite Christmas Eve tradition, however, from neither kith nor kin. I learned what to do on the night before Christmas from none other than Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne.
For years and years, TCM included the 1945 film “Christmas in Connecticut” as part of its Christmas Eve lineup. The movie, which stars Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine writer who celebrates homemaking despite her ignorance of cooking and domesticity in general, cannot compare with other classics of the season. For starters, Stanwyck gave a deeper, richer performance in another Christmas-themed film, the Preston Sturges-scripted “Remember the Night” (1940). And director Peter Godfrey will never be mistaken for Frank Capra, the maker of that most favored of holiday films, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946).
But none of this stopped me from integrating “Christmas in Connecticut” into my own Christmas Eve routine. After all, the film came recommended by Robert Osborne, who, from the founding of TCM in 1994 until not long before his death in 2017, served as the cable channel’s urbane yet easygoing host. And this film was among his favorites.
If I’m being honest with myself, I must concede that I probably enjoyed Osborne’s enthusiasm for “Christmas in Connecticut” as much as the film itself. Indeed, TCM, which this year is commemorating its 25th anniversary, always traded on the chummy approachability of Osborne and the hosts that succeeded him, especially Ben Mankiewicz: If they seem to like this film or that film, we want to like it, too.
Any cable channel could simply dump a bunch of old movies on the air, and many do. TCM, on the other hand, had the wisdom to create a culture around old movies. Its hosts come across as friendly companions. Its programming is reassuringly predictable, with a rotating set of iconic actors and actresses feted as “stars of the month,” an annual “31 Days of Oscar” marathon spotlighting Oscar winners and also-rans, and a chunk of time set aside each Sunday night for a treasure from the silent era.
Even TCM’s graphics and video packages are thrillingly on point. In its early years, the channel’s voice-over artist introduced the evening’s lineup in a tough-guy staccato that called to mind a combination of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. And I remember, in particular, an animated introduction that ran before some films: As Chet Baker sang “Look for the Silver Lining,” Edward Hopper-influenced images, such as a young lady running a brush through her hair beside a window, and a middle-aged man in a trench coat walking out of a brownstone, flashed across the screen. The animation had nothing to do with movies specifically, but it evoked a simpler time and slower pace of life, the very things TCM is in the business of selling.
TCM teaches the pleasure of withdrawing from the sound and fury of contemporary Hollywood. The channel airs its share of art house or foreign language films, not to mention the occasional “underground” offering, but its bread and butter are films such as the husband-and-wife-as-sleuths comedy “The Thin Man” (1934) or the grand wartime drama “Mrs. Miniver” (1942) or the Hitchcock suspense classic “North by Northwest” (1959). These films differ from each other, but each reflects a world in which people appear more graceful, well adjusted, and certainly better dressed.
Since Osborne’s death, the network lost a step. There’s a real cognitive dissonance when modern-feeling films play alongside gems from the Golden Age. The graphics have gotten sleeker and less homey. And, apart from Mankiewicz, the current group of hosts, including Alicia Malone and Dave Karger, seem to have been hired to bridge an unbridgeable generation gap.
At its best, though, TCM still invites viewers to become happy counterrevolutionaries in their own homes. Through the simple act of switching on the television, we can pretend that the poise of Fred Astaire and the manliness of John Wayne remain relevant. In the 1970s, when director Peter Bogdanovich honorably resurrected the classic Hollywood tradition in such films as “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972) and “Paper Moon” (1973), the great critic Manny Farber wrote of the impulse to live in the cinematic past, referring to the director symbolically: “‘Now that we’ve run off those Sixties punks … who tried to crumb up the genre movie,’ a Bogdanovich director says to the world, ‘we can really have some fun, wear some fancy summer linens, and screen “Young Mr. Lincoln” every night in our own bedroom.’”
TCM, in bringing the likes of “Young Mr. Lincoln” to millions of viewers, democratizes this impulse. We too can escape the latest political scandal or national catastrophe and share some time with Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln. And we also curl up on Christmas Eve and watch Stanwyck cook and Dennis Morgan sing.
Peter Tonguette has written about the arts for the Wall Street Journal, Humanities, and the New Criterion. He is the editor of the book Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews.
