Jingle Bell Grok: Jimmy Stewart In Drag

Jingle Bell Grok: Jimmy Stewart In Drag

Dec 22

There are a lot of Christmas films out there that are easy to hate for their blatant attempts at mawkish manipulation of their audiences. A good Christmas film will leave us with a warm and fuzzy feeling and the ones that try a bit too hard to do so probably can’t be faulted for at least trying. But there is one holiday film that lurks out there that can’t even claim the pretense of trying to infuse its audience with holiday cheer- the 1977 made-for-television movie It Happened One Christmas.

If you’ve never had the unfortunate opportunity to clap your eyes on this film, and it seems to have vanished from television schedules in more recent years, you are one of the fortunate ones. Imagine the classic It’s A Wonderful Life, but in drag, badly acted and with any semblance of soul and life drained from it by a hideous parasite and you come close to approximating It Happened One Christmas.

The hideous parasite in question is Marlo Thomas, who stars in the film as the female equivalent to Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, Mary Bailey Hatch. Wayne Rogers, with a look in his eyes that betray him questioning his decision to leave MASH, is cast as Thomas’ doting husband, George Hatch. Cloris Leachman rounds out the main cast as Mary’s guardian angel Clara. (Get it!? It’s sort of like Clarence, but not!! Ugh….)

I honestly don’t know what the writers hoped to accomplish by simply switching the genders of the lead characters. Nothing new is gained by having George Bailey suddenly sprout breasts and become Mary Bailey Hatch.

Nothing, that is, except a giant stroking of Thomas’ ego. It really takes some giant, in this case metaphorical, balls to think that one can just step into a role made famous by an acting icon like Jimmy Stewart and believe they can somehow improve on the role. Especially when acting opposite someone like Orson Welles in the Mr. Potter role. And don’t think one can argue that she is just an actress for hire on this project. She executive produced the thing. She knew what she was doing and damn her eyes for it.

Outside of the transgendering of Jimmy Stewart, this film offers no new take on the material. In fact, the script follows the screenplay for It’s A Wonderful Life pretty closely except for the substitution of gender specific pronouns. I would like to think that any remake has the potential to find a new slant on the existing material, for better or worse. Since the original film hadn’t quite become the nearly ever present holiday classic it would be in just a few years’ time, perhaps the writers and Thomas were just trying to pull a fast one.

But doesn’t matter what they thought they were trying to achieve. It Happened One Christmas would remain one of the most odious holiday film offerings in the history of cinema. That is until Ron Howard made a live-action version of the Dr. Seuss’s classic The Grinch Who Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey.

[Note: Like myself and Newsarama’s Mike Lorah, guest blogger Rich Drees is one of less than a dozen media/geek bloggers to come out of Northeastern Pennsylvania, where many people still do not know what blogs is. When he’s not having awkward conversations with Peter David about scripts that David barely remembers writing, Rich runs Film Buff Online , which you should check out.]