By Robert Bellissimo
I’ve always loved Christmas. When I was a child, I would wake my parents up really early because I was so excited about opening gifts. I loved seeing my family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We usually went to my Grandmother’s or Aunt’s house on Christmas Eve where my extended family would gather and either my Uncle or Godfather dressed up as Santa Claus and gave all of the kids Christmas presents. On the way home, I would look up at the sky and try to spot Santa Claus. During the holidays, like most families, we watched Christmas movies, like “Home Alone” and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”. I actually found it harder to go back to school after the Christmas holidays than the summer vacation.
I still love Christmas but, when I became a father, I started to see the other side of the holiday. The challenge of making my son’s Christmas special every year was daunting. I started to understand why adults would say “already?” when they started to hear Christmas tunes on the radio in late November. Today, we have many people struggling economically and the choice may be to either pay their rent or buy Christmas presents for their kids. We also have people who are alone or who lost a loved one recently, which can make seeing others celebrating Christmas with family hard to bear.
Are there movies that show the more melancholy side of Christmas? “It’s A Wonderful Life” (which is one of my favourite movies) does, as well as the Canadian masterpiece, “Mon Oncle Antoine (1971)” and “Remember The Night (1939)”with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, which I just saw last year for the first time.
One film that has left a real impression on me, which also shows the melancholy side of the holidays, is “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945)”, which has one of the most devastating Christmas day scenes that I’ve ever seen on film. I get choked up just thinking about Johnny Dolan (brilliantly played by James Dunn) going to look for work in Brooklyn, New York on Christmas night after finding out that his wife is pregnant with their third child. The family is already poor and a third child will make things much harder for them. His wife, Katie Dolan (also brilliantly played by Dorothy McGuire) has decided that they will have to take their daughter, Francie Nolan (unforgettably played by Peggy Ann Garner) out of school, so that she can work and help pay the bills. Johnny knows how much going to school means to his daughter and protests Katie’s decision, but she puts her foot down on the matter.
Directed by Elia Kazan (his first feature film), the story follows the Nolan family, an Irish immigrant family struggling in Brooklyn, New York. Johnny, who is a singing waiter, has always been a dreamer. He has big dreams of becoming a well-known singer in Manhattan, but it hasn’t panned out. His daughter Francie is a lot like him. She has a strong imagination and wants to become a writer. As the snow continues to come down on Christmas night, Johnny goes into Francie’s bedroom. The two are very close. They adore one another and, since they are alike in a lot of ways, they have a deep connection. Francie tells Johnny about her dreams of becoming a writer and that her teacher told her that it’s wonderful that Francie has a rich imagination. However, if she wants to be a writer she should write about what she knows and mix it with what she can imagine, otherwise her imagination are just pipe dreams. The film cuts to a close-up of Johnny as she says this and you can see that he realizes he has nothing but pipe dreams. Deep down inside, he has always known he hasn’t been getting anywhere, which has led him to becoming an alcoholic, but he has held on to his dreams, despite the fact that his reality may be telling him to quit at them.
The contrast between Francie, whose future dreams are ahead of her, and Johnny’s, whose dreams are well behind him, is devastating. All the more so because Francie isn’t aware of her father’s feelings. Like most kids, she is too young to see her parents problems yet, although I think she has an inkling about them.
As Francie goes to sleep, Johnny heads out to look for work in the dead of night on Christmas Day. It’s snowing and, in the background, we hear people singing Christmas carols but, for Johnny, there is nothing to celebrate. He feels like a complete failure who has let his family down, whose dreams haven’t come true and he has to face that. His only option now is to try to get steady work so his daughter doesn’t have to drop out of school.
I’m sure every parent has moments of looking at their children sleeping peacefully, and thinks, “I’ve let them down, what am I going to do”? Those thoughts probably hit the hardest around the holidays.
As devastating as many scenes are in the film, there is a lot that is poetic and beautiful about it. Johnny may have his shortcomings and faces a great deal of pain every day, but he is always in a good mood. He loves seeing his wife and kids. He is always singing as he arrives home. He’s positive and he knows how to simply enjoy the moment. We often spend so much time in our heads. We are thinking about something that has either happened or something that may or may not be happening in the future and we miss out on the moment of simply seeing a loved one, enjoying the weather, sipping a fresh cup of coffee and so on. The film shows how to live life. We will always have problems, big and small, but does that mean we can’t find happiness every day?
Johnny’s wife Dorothy has become hardened by life. She is sick of being poor and sick of Johnny’s dreams. She makes most of their income as a cleaning woman and has understandably lost any joy in living. Katie and Johnny love each other deeply. Before they were married, she loved his dreams and active imagination, but she now despises that about him. She never pushes him to get a job, which may be because she doesn’t think he can or will, or has given up on trying. When Francie shows an interest in books and Shakespeare, Katie comments about that being a good thing because she can use all of that “to get a job”. Her mother reminds Katie that reading books and stories is not about getting a job, but about exploring art and expanding one’s heart. She reminds Katie that she has forgotten this. This a wise mother.
After Johnny tragically dies of pneumonia while looking for work during the holidays, Katie begins to reflect on the mistakes she made. She sees at his funeral how much people in their community loved Johnny and she wonders how he left such a strong impression on them. After nearly dying during childbirth, she more or less confesses to Francie that she became too hard and could no longer see all of the amazing qualities Johnny had.
Fortunately, she survives and towards the end of the film you begin to see her attitude changing. She’s more optimistic, generous and accepts the local policeman’s offer of marriage. Officer McShane (Lloyd Nolan) is a good man, also a widower, who not only respects Francie and her children, but also can help them financially since he has a good job.
I don’t mean to suggest that the film is saying that a better economic situation will solve all of their problems, but it will help. The last scene shows Francie and her brother Neeley (played by Ted Donaldson, who brings a sense of humour to the film) on top of the roof of their tenement. Francie comments that their new baby sister won’t have the hardships they did and Neeley says, “she’ll never have the fun either”, since Francie and Neeley early in the film found street smart ways of getting things they needed, which brought a lot of fun to their lives. It just goes to show you that even hard times has their upsides.
The future may seem dark for many but, if it helps, remember a great line Francie has in the novel “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” by Betty Smith, which the film is based on , “People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains – a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone – just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness”.
You can find more of Robert’s work at Robert Bellissimo at the Movies on YouTube.
