Can any movie really replace It's A Wonderful Life as our national holiday institution? We consider the options.

Let's face it: After your 56th viewing of It's a Wonderful Life, the holiday magic isn't as strong as it used to be.

There was a time when Frank Capra's ode to self-sacrifice and community support was a little-known oddity, an old Christmas movie with a quirky plot that didn't do so well when it first came out in 1946. Over the years it gained a cult following, shown on UHF and in college film courses. Then came cable and VHS—and It's a Wonderful Life became inescapable, a national institution, our official Christmas movie...relentlessly played over and over and over. The inspiring tale of how George Bailey overcomes his death wish (how many holiday movies have one of those?) teeters now on the edge of cliché. Its sentiments have been co-opted and marketed, reduced to collector plates and Target action figures, becoming as familiar as old Saint Nick himself.

But can any other movie take its place? Maybe it's time we took a look at our options; perhaps there are other holiday movies we ought to be cherishing a little bit more. We asked our team of ever-vigilant writers to propose their candidates for a new official Christmas movie.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

In 1965, things were supposedly a lot more innocent, more genuine, simpler. Putting lie to that notion is Charles M. Schultz's A Charlie Brown Christmas, produced that year, which is more sophisticated than most of the holiday treacle that gets dripped on us these days. It presents what must be the first child cartoon character who is hopelessly neurotic, full of self-doubt, loneliness, and quiet desperation: Charlie Brown. A neurotic 8-year-old in 1965?! No '90s "family values" TV network would allow such a thing to happen today, but there he is—bald, chubby, awkward, with that nerdy zig-zag T-shirt. For a similarly, uh, challenged gradeschooler, he was an inspiration. Here was a kid who knew the blues, too, and wasn't afraid to talk to himself about them. In this CBS special, directed by Bill Melendez, he is a seeker. Aided by his blanket-wielding, thumb-sucking Zen buddy Linus, he tries to find the perfect Christmas tree. What he encounters is a world of commercialism run rampant, where the spirit of Christmas has been lost to tinsel and flash. Nevertheless, despite the mocking of his peers, he chooses a natural tree that is much more appropriate than the more popular metal monstrosities—small and spindly, it deserves a second chance just as Charlie does himself. And once it gets that chance, it blossoms anew, helping rid the Peanuts crew of its disillusionment—and our own jadedness over the holiday message.

—Coury Turczyn

Holiday Inn

Quick: who introduced the concept of cool to the movies? The first lean, hungry cat who never did anything that wasn't his style? Who always got what he wanted without seeming to care? It wasn't Dean Martin. It wasn't Marlon Brando. It wasn't even Frank Sinatra.

It was Bing Crosby. In the late '30s and early '40s, Bing Crosby invented cinema cool. Bing was cool before cool was cool.

Scored by Irving Berlin, Holiday Inn is among the swingin'est Christmas movies ever made. A nightclub singer drops out to live on a remote farm (beating the hippies there by a quarter-century). Meanwhile, best friend Fred Astaire steals Bing's girlfriend. Unbeaten but bored, Bing opens his own nightclub out on his farm. He doesn't feel like dealing with the city anymore, so he invites the city to his place.

Whoever founded the motel chain of the same name—after this movie came out—had better taste in movies than in draperies. Actually, the inn in Holiday Inn is everything that Holiday Inn is not. Bing's rural palace is miles from any highway exit, but elegant and unpredictable, with live music and dancing every night it's open—which is only on holidays—and Bing and Fred are apparently licensed to perform only Irving Berlin holiday tunes.

Some of it's dated. On Lincoln's Birthday, Bing thinks it a droll idea for his waiters to dress up in blackface, to get everybody in the mood for his own blackface routine, a Cab Calloway-style number about Lincoln ("In 1860 he became the 16th presi-dent / Now he's in the Hall of Fame—a most respected gent!"). To be fair, there are some authentic black people in this movie; one gets more consequential lines than most '40s movies made room for.

P.C. Alert #2: There's a playful scene where Astaire is drunk (high is the word they used in '42). He's too adroit to be credible in a slapstick routine unless he's drunk, so he is, in this calculatedly careless dance number that nearly out-Chaplins Chaplin. It's hard to deny that drunk people are sometimes very funny, especially when they're dancing in a tuxedo. Fred's so sloshed he almost walks into a party wearing his white tie and cummerbund but not his coat—a social gaffe that surely drew bigger laughs 55 years ago than it does today.

This was a wartime production, when all movies were strongly encouraged to offer something for the war effort. The Fourth of July routine features an incongruous newsreel about weapons production, with a silent cameo by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

For those pushing 40, it's a great consolation to see a couple of guys doing it right. These days, most 40-ish actors—especially those who made their reputation singing or dancing—are in jail, forgotten, fat, dead, or victims of bizarre plastic surgery. But in '42, Fred and Bing were just getting started. Their hairlines are ebbing, their faces sagging, but they're still at the top of their games—and they both get the girls. They're cool.

A dozen years later, Fred couldn't have been lured into making an ill-advised remake of this movie, named after its most famous song. I suspect if Bing hadn't suffered the 1954 movie White Christmas (never mistake it for Holiday Inn) his reputation as the Daddy of Cool might have survived intact. By the late '60s, he was making orange-juice commercials. Bing's final Christmas special, singing an unnerving duet of "Little Drummer Boy" with David Bowie in the latter's Ziggy Stardust era—35 years after Holiday Inn—is too sad to describe.

—Jack Neely

Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire

"If TV has taught me anything, it's that miracles always happen to poor kids at Christmas. It happened to Tiny Tim, it happened to Charlie Brown, it happened to the Smurfs, and it's going to happen to us!"

So proclaims Bart Simpson in one of my favorite Christmas specials, "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire," from the show's first season.

And, if TV's taught me anything, it's that the Simpsons can make the holidays funny and free of sap—without the obvious desensitization of South Park.

There are many lessons to be gleaned:

If you're going to do something against your parents' wishes, don't get caught.

Even though Marge and Homer forbid Bart to get a tattoo (the only thing he wants for Christmas), he still high-tails it to the "Happy Sailor Tattoo Parlor" to have an homage to his mother inked on his little yellow bicep...only to be left with the word "Moth" when Marge discovers him and drags him away from the chair.

Don't count your chickens before they're hatched... or your Christmas bonus before it's delivered.

Marge immediately takes Bart to have the ill-gained "Moth" removed, and has to pay for the laser treatments with the family's Christmas savings. Her mistake? Assuming Homer's Christmas bonus from the nuclear plant will make up for it. Needless to say, Monty Burns decides not to hand out bonuses that year.

Whatever FICA is, it sucks.

In an effort to make up the lost wages to his family—secretly, as Marge still doesn't know the truth—Homer sets out to earn cash as a mall Santa. At the end of the week Homer's only earned $13 ("$120, less Social Security, less unemployment insurance, less Santa training, less costume purchase, less beard rental, less Christmas club").

Despite what that Phil Collins song says, betting against all odds ain't such a smart move.

In a last-ditch effort to save Christmas, Homer and Bart decide to accompany drunken pal Barney to the dog track...Homer puts his paycheck on a mutt called Santa's Little Helper, figuring that with a name like that, the dog can't lose—never mind the 99-1 odds. The pitiful pup doesn't even make it to the finish line.

It's okay to postpone telling your family the truth until you have a good excuse that'll make them forgive you.

All works out in the end, though...After the fateful race, Santa's Little Helper's owner tells the dog to "scram," and Bart talks Homer into letting the family keep the dog.

And when the family finally learns the truth about the Christmas bonus, they're too in love with the dog ("the best Christmas present ever!") to care.

As Homer says, "But he's a loser! He's pathetic! He's...a Simpson."

And then there's the truth about the Jolly Old Elf...

To quote Bart, "Oh, please, there's only one fat guy who brings us presents, and his name ain't Santa."

—Shelly Ridenour

March of the Wooden Soldiers

Childhood memories are strange beasts—opaque muddles of half-remembered images and sounds; vague, almost dream-like impressions that seem somehow striking and real despite their lack of clarity. Recollections of my favorite Christmas movie are mired in that same vivid murk, given that I probably haven't seen March of the Wooden Soldiers since I could barely count the years of my life on my fingers.

By some mysterious childhood happenstance, this 1934 Laurel and Hardy classic was always on television whenever my family and I arrived at relatives' homes after another lengthy holiday sojourn. If you held a low-powered handgun to one of the smaller, less vital lobes of my brain today and threatened me with a life of drooling incontinence, I still wouldn't be able to recall exactly what the movie was about. According to my editor's VideoHound Golden Movie Retriever, it relates the "classic Mother Goose tale about the secret life of Christmas toys, with Laurel and Hardy as Santa's helpers..." Whatever.

What I remember about March has more to do with mood and imagery than anything so trivial as plot specifics. The film wove in my hyperactive child's imagination a delightfully strange, impishly mystic Yuletide reality, one that melded seamlessly with the more tangible but no less wondrous realities of favorite relatives and impending holiday treats at grandma's faraway cottage. I recall Laurel and Hardy and their buffoonish pratfalls, waddling through a snowy wonderland of life-sized toys and elfish creatures. And I remember the film's fantastic—and to my childish way of thinking, suspenseful—pivotal sequence, in which the two lovable bumblers loose an army of six-foot toy soldiers who subsequently vanquish some now-faceless villain and save the day.

It goes without saying that I'm grown much older, crankier, and more cynical since I last watched skinny Stan and portly Oliver stumble through Toyland in elfin garb. If I saw March again today, I would probably find their club-footed antics tiresome; the film's fairy-tale winter wonderland would doubtless seem shoddy and plastic, a depressing shell of its ill-remembered glory. In short, the magic would be forever lost.

With that in mind, I'll probably never watch March of the Wooden Soldiers again. In the end, there's probably a good reason why all of those childhood memories are so strangely, wonderfully spectral.

—Mike Gibson

Nobody's Fool

If you were one of the discriminating few who saw this quiet 1994 release on its theatrical outing, you might not remember it as a Christmas film. And it's true that, while the story begins the day before Thanksgiving and ends just before New Year's, the holiday season is more an incidental setting than a focus—it shows up in the background, a Christmas tree here, a string of colored lights there, a sardonic "Merry Christmas" in one key scene. But like It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, Nobody's Fool offers a tale of self-discovery and forgiveness perfectly in keeping with the holiday spirit.

The weathered face on the cover of the video box belongs to Paul Newman, and so does the film. It's a showcase for the septugenarian's still keen talents, one that critics expected was going to net him a second Oscar. (He lost the award to Tom Hanks' unctuous Forrest Gump-ery, which says a lot about what kind of heroes we like in our movies.) Sully, the wayward protagonist of Nobody's Fool, is a flawed man coming to terms with a flawed life. Haunted by memories of his tyrannical father, he long ago walked out on his own family, making a stranger of his son and an enemy of his ex-wife. He rents a room from an elderly widow (Jessica Tandy, in a wonderfully warm final performance), and hobbles around on a bum knee, alternately suing and seeking construction work from his old boss (Bruce Willis, whose enjoyably slimy demeanor is just one of the film's small pleasures). But over the course of one month, Sully begins to confront his past and discovers, to his surprise, that redemption offers itself long after you've stopped seeking it.

Apart from Willis and Tandy, the fine supporting cast includes Dylan Walsh as Sully's alienated son, who both craves and distrusts his father's affection, and Melanie Griffith as Willis' long-suffering but quick-witted wife. The sense of place is strong and specific, with unplowed snowy streets, run-down taverns, and boarded-up shops perfectly capturing the Rust Belt winter. And Newman demonstrates once again the difference between looking good, which he does well, and acting, which he does even better. Hanks may have the Oscar, but he'll never have the soul Newman gives his best performances. If the film's conclusion is a tad pat, a trifle sentimental, well, that only boosts its Christmas qualifications. It's entirely possible that in 50 years or so, Nobody's Fool will sit side by side on the holiday viewing schedule with that other movie about an improbable small-town hero (all right, they might have to edit out Griffith's breasts, which show up in a brief, funny cameo).

—Jesse Fox Mayshark

Naked

When we expect a movie to fill our holidays with tradition and good cheer, we're bound to be a little disappointed at some point, no matter how great the movie. It's A Wonderful Life is indeed a great movie.

If it's become trite and pat, it's because we've made it that way. What was once a vision of human potential has become nostalgia for what we never were. Look around the malls, watch TV, scan your credit card bills and tell me the Mr. Potters of the world didn't bankrupt and humiliate what few George Baileys there ever were.

Rather than follow his example, we watch Bailey wrestle with his demons for two hours and vicariously share his victory over them at the end. Everything gets resolved for us, and we don't have to emulate his commitment to community, family and self-sacrifice.

My remedy for all this—a healthy dose of nihilism. Make Mike Leigh's Naked your perennial Yuletide classic. It's a downright brutal story about a misogynist and all-around jerk named Johnny (played brilliantly by David Thewlis) who wanders around London talking to, antagonizing, and assaulting a variety of people, including a night watchman, two homeless kids, a lonely alcoholic and an introverted waitress.

Unemployed, Johnny spends the rest of his time reading and observing the harsh and rote nature of his city. He is sickened and baffled by what he sees and deals with it by lashing out at whatever's handy. What Johnny really wants is to kill his emotions, as his even more savage, yet refined, alter-ego in the film has done. But Johnny can never quite pull that trick off.

There's nothing upbeat about this film. You won't even enjoy it when Thewlis gets clobbered near the end.

Maybe it's just the sort of thing we need: a picture of the worst in ourselves. I imagine families, after gobbling down large amounts of Christmas ham or turkey, sitting around the tube in abject horror at what they see. If they're lucky, they'll identify with the emptiness on the screen and try to fill it with something meaningful.

—Joe Tarr

But, but...

Maybe it's because I'm hopelessly romantic; maybe it's because I'm hopelessly reactionary. Either way, any attempt at reforming the cultural agenda of the holiday season will be met with icy skepticism from me. And replacing It's A Wonderful Life with—what? a Peter Billingsley movie? a cartoon? a 30-year-old marionette creaker?—is simply heretical. The stellar cast of the movie (Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, Donna Reed, Ward Bond, Frank Faylen, Henry Travers) carried a story initially written as a greeting card to incredible, dizzying heights, piloted by yet another of Stewart's "Aw, shucks" performances (and shouldn't we, in deference to Jimmy Stewart and in honor of his memory, wait until next year to have this debate at all?). But the man who built the airplane was Frank Capra, one of the most democratic of a generation of democratic filmmakers. The complaint about It's A Wonderful Life is that it's too maudlin, too sentimental for our contemporary, sophisticated worldliness, which I consider a bunch of adolescent-angst nonsense. Our brittle sense of ironic detachment and post-modern cynicism distorts the way we perceive any sincerity or genuine faith in the goodness of man, no matter how hard-fought, as sentimentality. Capra's hopefulness wasn't childish or naive; instead it was a forceful push against the very cold-heartedness that wants to replace It's A Wonderful Life with God-knows-what kind of silly 30-minute toy commercial. There's no question that it's been overdone, and the colorized version has tainted its purity, but for crying out loud, how do you not like It's A Wonderful Life? You've got to be pretty creepy not to. Capra's hard-fought and embattled willingness to expect more of us in the shadow of the century's most repugnant political atrocities is—well, if it's sentimental, maybe we should all be a little more sentimental.

—Matthew Everett