The Christmas Angel

I'm a sucker for Christmas movies (the good ones). This is a simple story, but it grabbed me. I grew up quite poor and Christmas wasn't always the greatest time of the year. We faced problems with money and living conditions. Of course, nothing to compare to this family. With a very ill wife, the father sends his daughter out to the churchyard to beg. The people are mean spirited and push her away. When she goes to the bakers, she is thrown out. The only person who is willing to help her is a poor man who cleans the streets. She nearly dies until there is a kind of divine intervention. Yes it's simplistic but effective. The version I watched also had a really interesting piece of music superimposed. It was so haunting.

Détresse et charité (1905)

*** (out of 4)

aka The Christmas Angel

This isn't a completely successful film but you can't help but see the influence it had on future Christmas tales. The story is pretty simple as a mother lays dying and things get even worse for her when the family can't afford coal to keep the house warm. The husband sends their daughter out to beg for change but she ends up falling into the snow from weakness and dying but then an angel appears. While watching this thing I couldn't help but notice countless things that would appear in future Christmas movies and this includes the ending, which reminded me of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Who knows if Capra or anyone else associated with the story or film had seen this but it's an interesting thing to compare. Another thing that caught my attention was the actual way the story was told because it's over-dramatic moments and the demand that the story prove the greatness of Christ and the way the ending comes reminded me of the type of film that D.W. Griffith would start making a couple years later. If you showed someone this film who was familiar with early cinema and then asked them to guess who made it I'd say the majority would name Griffith. At just around eight-minutes, the film does a nice job getting its message across and what really impressed me were the terrific sets. This is also another example of the director using narration to the explain what was going on in the film.

This Christmas play from early cinema magician Georges Méliès is a far more polished offering than was an earlier Christmas film of his, "The Christmas Dream" (Le rêve de Noël) (1900). Whereas that 1900 film lacked a cohesive narrative and was more of just a series of Christmas images, this 1904 film has a firm, even clichéd, melodramatic plot. In its seven tableaux, a girl's parents, apparently, send her out into the cold, snowy winter to beg to help pay their creditor and help with the mother's illness. The child's attempts at collecting alms are thwarted by "professional" beggars and a storefront offers no relief, either. Eventually, nearing death, the kid is rescued by a generous wealthy couple who shower the poor family with gifts. A superimposed Christmas angel examines the scene.

"The Christmas Angel" is nothing exceptional, but at least it has a structure and a simple, if vapid, moral in the short runtime of nine to ten minutes. It's a mostly polished production for its time, with some good artificial snow and decent stage designs, including the home with snow coming in through the roof and a cutout missing wall for the storefront to allow for a lot of street-scene actions simultaneously. In one scene, a stop substitution was used to place painted simulated diegetic light on the set. On the other hand, it's a heavily theatrical and primitive melodrama, and both dissolves and direct cuts were used incongruously as scene transitions.