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Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 4.12 “With Love, The Claus”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

Merry Christmas!

Episode 4.12 “With Love, The Claus”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on December 23rd, 1987)

Jonathan and Mark find themselves working for a lawyer named Paul Burke (John Calvin).  It’s the Christmas season and they help Paul out by taking his son to Newman’s Department Store.  The kid wants to talk to Santa.  What the kid doesn’t know is that there are several Santas at Newman’s.  They work in shifts and they’re pretty cynical.  However, the newest Santa (Bill Erwin) takes his job very seriously because …. he is Santa!

So, why is Santa working at a department store instead of getting things ready up at the North Pole?  This episode never really explains.  Instead, we get Santa taking offense when he’s asked to help the store sell it’s latest toy.

Santa says that there’s no way he’s going to push machine guns.  He’s about peace and love!  His boss, Mr. Grinchley (Robert Casper), threatens to fire him.  Santa doesn’t react well to that.

Santa ends up unemployed and with nowhere to live.  Jonathan arranges for Paul to represent Santa in a lawsuit that Santa has filed against Newman’s Department Store.  The lead counsel for Newman’s just happens to Paul’s ex-wife, Donna (Wendie Malick).

You can probably guess where all this is going, right?  Santa eventually ends up in jail after the chairman of Newman’s files a lawsuit against him.  Santa says that he can’t stay in jail because Christmas Eve is approaching.  Maybe Santa should have thought about that earlier.

This episode owed a lot to one of my favorite Christmas movies, Miracle on 34th Street.  Of course, Miracle on 34th Street featured Edmund Gwenn, who gave a delightful performance as Santa.  This episode features Bill Erwin, who basically plays Santa as being a half-crazed grump who won’t stop complaining.  Seriously, this episode may feature the most unlikable Santa Claus this side of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.  I don’t know why Michael Landon directed Erwin to play Santa as if Santa was plotting to kill all of his enemies but it definitely wasn’t the right approach.

Seriously, Santa is really self-righteous in this episode.

I hate to criticize a Christmas episode and, as always, I’m sure that Michael Landon had the best and the sincerest of intentions.  But this episode just didn’t work for me.  Santa was too much of a jerk.

Holiday Film Review: It Happened One Christmas (dir by Donald Wyre)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1977 made-for-TV movie, It Happened One Christmas, opens in Heaven.  We hear the voice of Joseph (Charles Grodin), one of the top angels.  Joseph has noticed that, in the town of Bedford Falls, a lot of people seem to be praying and all of their prayers concern one person.  They are all worried about Mary Bailey Hatch (Marlo Thomas).

He requests that an angel be sent down to Earth to help Mary with her problems.  Unfortunately, the only angel available is Clara (Cloris Leachman) and Clara, despite her optimistic outlook and upbeat personality, is not considered to be a particularly smart angel.  She hasn’t even gotten her wings yet!  However, Joseph promises her that, should she convince Mary Hatch not to toss away her life on Christmas Eve, Clara will get her wings.

But first, Joseph shows Clara all of the important events in Mary’s life.  Clara watches as young Mary saves the life of her brother, Harry.  A few weeks later, Mary manages to keep Dr. Gower from accidentally poisoning a patient.  Though Mary dreams of leaving Bedford Falls and pursuing a career as a writer, she instead ends up taking over her late father’s old Building and Loan company.  With the help of her husband, George (Wayne Rogers), she helps hundreds of people move into affordable housing.  She is also one of the few people in town willing to stand up to Old Man Potter (Orson Welles)….

What was that?

Yeah, I know.  Just hold on.  I’m getting to that.

Anyway, everything is going great in Mary’s life until her irresponsible Uncle Willie (Barney Martin) accidentally loses a deposit on Christmas Eve.  Facing embezzlement charges and having yelled at her family, Mary considers jumping off a bridge.  Fortunately, Clara is there to show her what her life would be like if she had never been born….

Excuse me?  Did you say that this sounds familiar?

Yes, It Happened One Christmas is a remake of It’s A Wonderful Life.  The main difference is that the genders are swapped.  Jimmy Stewart’s role is played by Marlo Thomas.  Wayne Rogers plays the Donna Reed role.  This leads to a few changes in the story.  For instance, Mary still yells at ZuZu’s teacher but she doesn’t get sucker punched as a result.  Whereas the original Mr. Potter treated George Bailey with outright hostility, the remake’s Mr. Potter tends to use a tone of condescending concern when talking to Mary.  Since George Hatch doesn’t lose his hearing in one ear, he’s able to serve in World War II and he returns on crutches.  In the world where Mary was never born, George still never marries but, instead of working at the library, he becomes a boorish auto mechanic.  Violet is no longer an important character and Mary never tries to blame her visions of Pottersville on “bad liquor.”  These are cosmetic differences but, otherwise, it’s pretty much the exact same story.

To be honest, it probably sounds more interesting than it actually is.  It’s not that It Happened One Christmas is a poorly made or a badly acted film.  It’s fine, really!  But it’s not It’s A Wonderful Life.  Marlo Thomas plays her role with a lot of energy but she’s still no Jimmy Stewart.  Stewart, who was still dealing with his own World War II experiences, played up the haunting sadness behind George’s mild-mannered facade and that’s something that Thomas never accomplishes.  If Stewart’s George seems like he’s been beaten down by one lost dream after another, Marlo Thomas’s Mary just seems like she’s having a really bad night.  By that same token, Wayne Rogers is likable a the love of Mary’s life but he’s no Donna Reed.  Even the great Orson Welles can’t escape the shadow of Lionel Barrymore.  Barrymore’s Mr. Potter was a pure misanthrope who was at his happiest mocking the dead and approving men for the draft.  Oddly, Orson Welles brings an almost avuncular style to Mr. Potter.  One gets the feeling that Welles simply couldn’t resist winking at the audience and assuring them that he was still the bigger-than-life showman that they had grown up with.

So, you may be wondering ….. why remake It’s A Wonderful Life in the first place?  I was wondering about that so I did a little research and thanks to an obscure web site called Wikipedia (not many people have heard of it), I discovered that It Happened One Christmas was actually made before It’s A Wonderful Life started to regularly air during the holidays.  At the time it was made, it was aactually remake of a classic film that was no longer regularly watched.  Frank Capra angrily denounced It Happened One Christmas as being “plagarism” but, in 1977, it was enough of ratings success that it was re-aired in both 1978 and 1979.  But, by that time, It’s A Wonderful Life had started to regularly air during the holiday season and was being rediscovered by audiences young and old.  As a result, the okay remake was soon overshadowed by the vastly superior original.

And really, that’s the way it should be.  It Happened One Christmas isn’t a bad movie but it just no replacement for Capra’s Wonderful film.

Horror On TV: Kolchak: The Night Stalker 1.20 “The Sentry” (dir by Seymour Robbie)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight on Kolchak….

There’s something on the loose underneath Chicago!  Could it be a …. killer lizard!?  Kolchak’s on the story!

Sadly, all good things must come to an end and this was the final episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  Darren McGavin, of course, would later go on to epitomize the ideal middle American father when he played The Old Man in A Christmas Story.

This finale originally aired on March 28th, 1975.

I hope you have enjoyed this October’s trip down Kolchak Lane!

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (dir by Norman Jewison)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

russians_are_coming

Earlier tonight, I watched a 1966 film called The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.  

It’s a cheerful comedy about what happens when the captain (played by Theodore Bikel) of a Russian submarine decides that he wants to take a look at the United States.  Though he was only planning to look at America through a periscope, he accidentally runs the submarine into a sandbar sitting near Gloucester Island, which itself sits off the coast of Massachusetts.  The captain sends a nine man landing party, led by Lt. Yuri Rozanov (a youngish Alan Arkin, making his film debut and receiving an Oscar nomination for his efforts), to the island.  Their orders are simple.  Yuri and his men are too either borrow or steal a boat that can be used to push the submarine off the sandbar.  If they run into any locals, they are to claim to be Norwegian fisherman.

Needless to say, things that don’t quite go as planned.  The first Americans that Yuri and his men meet are the family of Walt Whitaker (Carl Reiner), a vacationing playwright.  Walt’s youngest son immediately identifies the Norwegian fisherman as being “Russians with submachine guns.”  When Walt laughingly asks Yuri if he’s a “Russian with a submachine gun,” Yuri produces a submachine gun and promptly takes Walt, his wife (Eva Marie Saint), and his children hostage.

Yuri may be a Russian.  He may officially be an enemy of America.  But he’s actually a pretty nice guy.  All he wants to do is find a boat, keep his men safe, and leave the island with as little drama as possible.  However, the inhabitants of the island have other plans.  As rumors spread that the Russians have landed, the eccentric and largely elderly population of Gloucester Island prepares for war.  Even as Police Chief Mattocks (Brian Keith) and his bumbling assistant, Norman Jonas (Jonathan Winters), attempt to keep everyone calm, Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford) is organizing a militia and trying to contact the U.S. Air Force.

Meanwhile, Walt’s babysitter, Allison (Andrea Dromm) finds herself falling in love with one of the Russians, the gentle Alexei Kolchin (John Phillip Law).

As I said at the start of this review, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is a cheerful comedy, one with a rather gentle political subtext, suggesting that the majority of international conflicts could be avoided if people got to know each other as people as opposed to judging them based on nationality or ideology.  There’s a rather old-fashioned liberalism to it that probably seemed quite daring in 1966 but which feels rather quaint today.  Sometimes, the comedy gets a bit broad and there were a few times that I found myself surprised that the film didn’t come with a laugh track.  But overall, this is a well-acted and likable little movie.

As I watched The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (and, as someone who is contractually obligated to use a certain number of words per review, allow me to say how much I enjoyed the length of that title), I found myself considering that the film would have seemed dated in 2013 but, with all the talk of Russian hacking in the election and everything else, it now feels a little bit more relevant.  Not a day goes by when I don’t see someone on twitter announcing that the Russians are coming.  Of course, if the film were released today, its optimistic ending would probably be denounced as an unacceptable compromise.  Peaceful co-existence is no longer as trendy as it once was.

Another interesting thing to note about The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming: though the film was written by William Rose (who also wrote another example of mild 1960s feelgood liberalism, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner), it was based on a novel by Nathaniel Benchley.  Benchley was the father of Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws.  It’s easy to see the eccentrics of Gloucester Island as distant cousins of the inhabitants of Amity Island.

As previously stated, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was nominated for best picture but it lost to the far more weighty A Man For All Seasons.