Leslie Odom Jr. is married and very much in love with his wife Cynthia Ervio, who was previously married to Orlando Bloom. Bloom illegally travels through time and fixes his former marriage to create a present where he is still married to Ervio and Odom is now married to someone else. I confess to enjoying questionable-on-the-science time travel films, despite their incredible flaws. This one creates a world where pasts, presents, and futures are all subjected to the whims of those willing to make the jumps. Even those not directly affected by the jump feel the pulse from the changes made. Luckily it has an incredible cast who portray the various relationships in believable and endearing ways.    

After a number of years, Barbara Stanwyck, at the request of her teenaged daughter and pretending she is more successful than she is, returns to the family she abandoned for the stage. Her arrival causes upheaval in her family who has continued their lives without her. Her husband has found a new love interest, her oldest daughter wants nothing to do with her, her other daughter wants to join her on the stage, and her son barely remembers her. The power of Stanwyck’s performance outshines the rest of the cast in what is otherwise a rather unmemorable film. What completely ruins the film for me is that every single character is left with an unsatisfying ending at odds with the desires they have expressed throughout the film.

Not having paid for television for awhile, I don’t know if there’s any channels out there that still play this for 24 hours on Christmas Day, but even that level of over-saturation for many years did nothing to deplete the film’s charm. The well-known tale of nine year old Ralphie’s quest for a ‘Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time’ and his various adventures leading up to Christmas day is incredibly relatable to anyone who was ever a kid. There are so many memorable scenes and quotable lines that is firmly placed high on the list of Christmas classics.  

The first filmed version of the Dr. Kildare character, this story centers on an ex-con, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who searches for the young daughter whom she lost track of while she was in jail. Babs is incredible in portraying the desperation of the mother’s predicament, her worthless bank robbing husband dead and the only person who might know the location of her daughter is an unscrupulous gangster. Joel McCrea is likable as Kildare and the two of them play well off each other.

In this relatively new addition to my Christmas collection, Dick Van Dyke is wonderful as the titular butler. Van Dyke and his motley crew of servants are on a quest to keep the elderly Edith Evans from discovering that her household is bankrupt, even as she gives away every dime to any charity that appears on her doorstep. The crew performs many a scam and swindle, even running a fictitious charity, to maintain the ruse, suddenly threatened by the addition of Barbara Feldon into the home. The film is delightful, despite not having much of a Christmas feel. It remains in the Christmas collection solely for the incredible brightly-colored climax, set at the height of Christmas Eve chaos at Gimbels department store.