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Meet Me in St. Louis

As a way of celebrating the holiday season, the editors at FilmInFocus invited a number of Focus Features employees to pick their favorite festive films. The response was rapid and enthusiastic, and their diverse and entertaining recommendations for the best cinematic ways to kick back at the end of the year can be found below.

Happy Holidays!

Nicole Butte
Vice President of New Media, Focus Features

Samantha Taylor Pickett
Director of Production Development, Focus Features

Michael Pruss
Creative Executive, Focus Features

RJ Millard
Publicity Consultant, Focus Features

James Schamus
Screenwriter and Chief Executive Officer, Focus Features

Jason Simos
Publicity Consultant, Focus Features

Felipe Tewes
Coordinator, Office of CEO, Focus Features

Dylan Wilcox
Director of Acquisitions, Focus Features

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The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Nicole Butte
Vice President of New Media, Focus Features

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (original animated version)

My all time favorite. I was obsessed with the book when I was a child. My mother would read it to me, and I would re-read it over and over. I just loved it. I would always anticipate when they would play it on TV – I would glue myself in front of the TV. My favorite scenes were the dog (I LOVED THE DOG – especially when the Grinch ties reindeer antlers on him), when you see the Grinch's heart grow larger, and when he sits at the head of the table and carves the roast beef. Oh... and the music, I just love the "na-nooo nah-nooo" of the WHO's singing down in WHOVILLE. :)

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

OK, cheesy I know.... but who doesn't love the National Lampoon's series watching another dysfunctional family fall apart. Although not as good as the first (with Wally World), I always laugh when the cat gets electrocuted in the tree. The Griswolds are classic.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

I just love this one because of the classic one liners. "You're going the wrong way!!!!!" "Those aren't pillows!" It's actually a very touching and sad story when you watch it through, with some very funny scenes.

The Family Stone / The Holiday

I don't know why – they both just have all the good, cheesy ingredients for a chick flick during the Holidays. Love, drama, laughter, family, a few tears – good for an easy film in front of the fire with the person you love.

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A Charlie Brown Christmas

Samantha Taylor Pickett
Director of Production Development, Focus Features

I work at Focus Features, so admittedly I am obsessed with movies. As a child growing up with two film loving parents in suburban New Jersey, there was no shortage of great movies that influenced me creatively over the years. However, when I was challenged with the question "What is your favorite Christmas movie?", I immediately thought of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I know, I know. . . A Charlie Brown Christmas is technically a TV movie, but it holds a special place in my heart and deserves recognition as a seminal Christmas movie in my life (and in the lives of many over the last forty-three years since it was originally broadcast). Just hearing Vince Guaraldi's version of “O Tannenbaum,” I am immediately transported back to 1980 when I have my first memory of watching A Charlie Brown Christmas: I was four years old and simply watching Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, Lucy and their pals dance around to Guaraldi's jazzy score was enough to get me in the Christmas spirit. I would often dance around my parents' house in my Wonder Woman "underoos" singing the Christmas carols that Charlie Brown and his friends sang (cue up “Hark the Herald Angels,” please!).

As a lover of both film and music, A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of my first memories of the perfect integration of the two mediums. As much as I love the story of Charlie Brown dealing with the commercialism of Christmas while learning about the true meaning of the holiday, the movie would not have had the same impact without the wonderful and quite sensitive score composed by Guaraldi and performed by his trio. Whenever any of Guaraldi's music from the movie is played, it is not uncommon to witness a familiar nostalgic smile wash over the faces of those that have been inducted into the world of A Charlie Brown Christmas. There is something about the world that Charles M. Schultz and Vince Guaraldi have created that make A Charlie Brown Christmas the perfect Christmas experience that transcends time.

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The Shop Around the Corner

Michael Pruss
Creative Executive, Focus Features

Though it inspired the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan film You've Got Mail, this 1940 film is undoubtedly in a class of its own, arguably one of the greatest romantic comedies in film history. Impeccably crafted by the great German director Ernst Lubitsch – the term "The Lubitsch Touch" is reference to the director's sophisticated wit and style – it's the perfect anecdote for that post-Christmas dinner lethargy; you don't have to put that much in but you'll certainly get a lot out...

Taking place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in pre-war Budapest, Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are the oblivious couple on a crash-course toward love one Christmas Eve. Playing two antagonistic colleagues in the store, sparks of one sort are soon flying between them – they find one another somewhat repugnant in person – yet a second, anonymous connection (via a lonely-hearts advert), ignites sparks of another sort. What will happen when they
discover the real people behind the pens?

The Shop Around the Corner is a template for truly great romantic comedy, perfectly blending its sentiment with cleverness and humor in a plot that has as many complications as its two lead characters. Indeed, much of the fun comes in watching screenwriter Samson Raphaelson neatly tangle and untangle his leads without ever tying himself or the audience in a knot. The back-and-forth between Stewart and Sullavan is a joy to watch; only two actors of their caliber – and on-screen chemistry – could make bickering beautiful and love-letters lamentable.

With an almost Shakespearean preciseness, Lubitsch looks beyond the surface of ordinary characters and circumstances and revels in the appearance/reality dichotomy of his lead-lovers; the substance and doubts beneath the vain posturing, the false heart behind the smiling face, the poetic soul behind the prosaic demeanor. The film's perfectly-pitched conclusion will leave even the most hardened of cynics with a smile on their face. As Lubitsch himself said: "Nobody should try
to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside."

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The Nightmare Before Christmas

RJ Millard
Publicity Consultant, Focus Features

My favorite holiday movie would have to be The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's a dark little fable about the importance of the holidays, finding your place in the world and has a great soundtrack and beautiful craftsmanship.

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The Apartment

James Schamus
Screenwriter and Chief Executive Officer, Focus Features

Somewhere between the inevitable It's a Wonderful Life and the creepily campy Ernest Saves Christmas there is a perfect holiday movie for the whole family – one that will keep both the smirk on your teenager's face and the tears flowing from your in-laws' eyes. That movie is Billy Wilder's 1960 masterpiece, The Apartment. Not a classic Christmas movie, you say? Look again.

The action takes place primarily from Christmas Eve to New Year's Eve, with moments that sum up to perfection the Christmas spirit according to Wilder: the despicable Sheldrake (played with greedy zest by Fred MacMurray), handing his downtrodden mistress, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), her present, a crisp $100 bill; the prolonged Christmas Eve-to-Christmas Day sequence, in which Buddy Baxter (Jack Lemmon, above) finds her, overdosed on sleeping pills, at his apartment and, with the help of his next-door neighbor, force-feeds her coffee and slaps her repeatedly to keep her from collapse; and, most memorably, Sheldrake on the phone in his White Plains house, his children playing with their new toys around the Christmas tree in the background as he heartlessly hears the news of his mistress's suicide attempt. When Fran finally dumps Sheldrake and races back to Buddy's apartment on New Year's Eve, she hears, just as she reaches the door, the loud retort of a suicide shot – only to discover that the sound was Buddy, alone, popping open a magnum of Champagne.

For anyone who has ever been tempted by either the gun or the bottle at the prospect of the enforced joy of the holidays, Wilder's movie is the perfect tonic. In the end Ms. MacLaine, cutting a deck of cards, delivers the movie's final line in both wry acceptance of Buddy's babbling protestations of love and as sage advice to the rest of us enduring the mandatory festivities of the season: "Shut up and deal."

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A Pink Christmas

Jason Simos
Publicity Consultant, Focus Features

Since many of the classic holiday movies are from a generation ago, a lot of my favorites are in fact television specials – from back when people gathered to watch television and these programs truly were special. Aside from the Rankin/Bass stop-motion classics that pretty much everyone knows by heart (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, and The Year Without a Santa Claus being the top three) and the indelible A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, there is also A Pink Christmas. First broadcast on ABC in December 1978, and freely adapted from O. Henry's short story "The Cop and the Anthem," the holiday-set tale starring the Pink Panther is, given what's been going on in 2008 with the economy, timely once again in addition to being timeless. While it's surprisingly affecting, it's also – as expected with the Panther - hilarious. A Pink Christmas was finally issued on DVD late last year, tandemed with two non-holiday-themed Pink Panther specials, and is well worth a look.

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Hannah and Her Sisters

Felipe Tewes
Coordinator, Office of CEO, Focus Features

Leave it to Woody Allen to share a reluctant celebration of coming together in the holiday season that honors, not ignores, the self-inflicted turbulence that fills the year in between. In Hannah and Her Sisters, we are thrown into the neurotic world of an extended family over the course of three Thanksgiving celebrations. During the quick progression of the years in between, Lee (Barbara Hershey) begins an affair with her sister Hannah's (Mia Farrow) husband (Michael Caine), while Hannah's younger, insecurity-laden sister (Dianne Wiest) accuses her of being too "self-sufficient" and resents her for her support and generosity (all the while asking to borrow money). When the holiday seasons approach, however, something strange happens in Hannah’s family, as in many of ours. The holiday dinners and parties here are not drama-free zones – everyone is acutely aware of the complications so masterfully assembled during the rest of the year. But for once every year, neuroses take a back seat to tradition.

As Hannah's parents perform show tunes at the piano, with no mention of her alcoholism or of his occasional vitriol, the sisters cook together, and the adopted and surrogate children are simply giddy, instead of a reminder of Mickey's (Woody Allen) infertility that sank his marriage to Hannah. By the time the third holiday season comes around, in spite of their transient selfishness, Hannah and her two sisters place each others’ interests before their own. Hannah gives her implicit blessing for Holly to find happiness with her own ex-husband (Allen). Lee drops her affair with Hannah's current husband and finds a relationship elsewhere. And perhaps most impressively, Mickey appeases his hypochondria, however briefly, for a celebration of his new family.

Allen’s neuroses have never buzzed as intensely as in the characters in Hannah. However, if they so exist, these neuroses form the common thread of this and of most families. And, at the very least once a year, come the holidays, that common bond proves to be stronger than the insecurities and misguided desires that threatened to destroy it in the twelve months in between.

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Meet Me In St. Louis

Dylan Wilcox
Director of Acquisitions, Focus Features

Everyone remembers Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien, but people often forget the melancholy, somber tone of the scene. The little girl is upset the family is moving, and the song is sung right before she slaughters the snowmen outside. The scene is about family, nostalgia, and the fear of growing up and moving on. It's a beautiful moment in a beautiful movie, one that truly understands the joyous yet complex emotions the holidays can bring.