The lingering illness and death of his beloved wife has left young Appalachian farmer Grins Jenkins a melancholy shell of his ebullient former self. As Christmas approaches, Jenkins can find no discernable reason for going on with his own life. But Grins’ four spunky and resourceful children not about to let their father wither and die of a broken heart. Based on a novel by Collin Wilcox Patton and Gary Carden, and filmed on location in Alberta,
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Mickey Rooney plays Mike Halligan, a retired cop from Manhattan living in California with his family who decides to show his grandson, who has never seen snow before, what a real white Christmas in New York is like. But he dies from a sudden heart attack in which Halligan makes a deal with the Archangel of Heaven to return to Earth for a week until Christmas and show his grandson the seasonal glories of New York City.
This film brings to life a famous Norman Rockwell painting. Samuel Cavanaugh, a Scrooge like character, revisits the frozen pond each year to relive the happier moments in his life. Michael Grant is an unhappy young boy attempting to skate with his dad’s oversized skates, who was missing in action in Korea. Their paths cross several times as our story unfolds.
This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass–the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, Stingiest stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq.
A lonely orphan wishes he was closer to his grandfather, but it’s only when he meets Santa Claus that he makes an important discovery about family.
Laurent is a poster designer who is about to begin rehearsals for his first stage play, a musical comedy. To celebrate this auspicious event, he holds a party at his apartment, to which his best friends are all invited. News that the lead actress in Laurent’s play has been run over by a bus laden with Dutch tourists puts a damper on the evening, but Laurent wastes no time looking for a replacement, not knowing that his girlfriend Valérie covets the part. As Valérie’s dreams of stardom are crushed she realises that her relationship with Laurent is over – or so she thinks. Either way, the evening will prove decisive for them both.
Ever-bumbling Nino is an illegal Italian immigrant working in a Swiss hotel. Waiting on the wealthy, he feels as if he’s carved out his own place in paradise. When he loses his job after being arrested for urinating in public, Nino is desperate to stay in the country. He goes into hiding, ends up living in a chicken shack and eventually decides to dye his hair blonde and pass himself off as a German. However, Nino grows to have doubts about hiding his heritage and identity.
Director Helmut Kautner retells William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in the context of postwar Germany. John H. Claudius returns from Harvard to find his mother married to his uncle after the death of his father, Paul. His father, an industrialist, owned a steel plant that is bustling due to Germany’s postwar boom. Although John’s father is said to have been killed in an air raid, John is convinced his mother and uncle plotted the death together.