The Night Before Christmas

Twixt shots of Santa feeding the reindeer and polishing off one last puppet for the poppets, scenes of a family in the parlor celebrating Christmas Eve, children having a pillow fight, and some cute miniature work of the sleigh carrying gifts traveling over snow, we get verses of Clement Clark More's "A Visit From Saint Nicholas."

It's just the thing to watch during Christmastide in my apartment in Chelsea in Manhattan, where Moore wrote the poem so many years ago, helping to establish our modern idea of Old St. Nick. It captures the spirit of the poem perfectly. As another classic of the season urges, G*d bless us, every one.

'Twas THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...

The wonderful old poem by Clement C. Moore comes to life in this little silent film. Looking like a Victorian Christmas card, it has all the charm of a bygone era. The special effects, especially the scenic diorama used for St. Nicholas' ride, are quite effective.

Al Kryszak provided the score for the video compilation A Christmas Past, in which this film appears.

This early holiday-themed feature is enjoyable to watch, and it is also a good example of Edwin S. Porter's style in filming special effect or fantasy movies. The story, loosely based on the theme of the poem "The Night Before Christmas", is old-fashioned in a good way that works pretty well. It's also one of the earlier movies to feature the use of cross-cutting or parallel editing.

The story alternates between two story lines, with 'Santa Claus' getting everything ready for his December 24 deliveries, while at the same time the children from a large family are having difficulty falling asleep due to their excitement. The 'Santa' portions flesh out the standard legend with Porter's characteristic style, and the family sequences are easy to identify with, for just about anyone who remembers being a child.

As director and cinematographer, Porter takes his usual approach with this kind of material. Rather than striving to make the settings and visual effects seem as lifelike as possible, he instead aims to make them interesting and pleasing to look at in their own right. It works well here, and the images seem to fit in well with the story. It's short (less than ten minutes), yet the length seems just about right, and it makes for an entertaining little movie.

Night Before Christmas, The (1905)

*** (out of 4)

I believe this was the first version of the famous poem and wouldn't you know it would come from Edison Studios and the forgotten Edwin S. Porter. The movie pretty much shows a group of kids getting ready for bed as Santa gets his reindeers ready for the night's work. While the special effects are obviously fake you can't help but fall victim to the film's charm, which is shining very brightly from start to finish. The movie does a wonderful job of coming off like a fairy tale and this is especially true during all the scenes with Santa. The highlight of the film is a sequence where Santa takes off with his deers and rides over various mountains before going through the air. Again, it's obvious how this scene was shot but that doesn't take away from any of its charm or magic. I don't think the film has lost any of its magic but you can't help but wonder how great this thing would have been in 1905.

Okay, all of you that CAN'T or WON'T look at an early silent film without immediately dismissing or laughing at it can stop reading this review. The likelihood you would even try watching this film or stick with it is absurdly low, so this review is more for lovers of historically important cinema. For 1905, this is an incredible picture in so many ways. The sets for the time were extremely expensive and complex. The special effects, though surely out of date, also took a lot of imagination and planning. So for a 1905 production, this film screams 'quality' from start to finish.

The movie is the poem THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas and as the lines are written out on inter-title cards, the action takes place on the screen. Because of this, the film is short and relatively simple, but compared to the other films of the era, the movie is still very engaging today and worth seeing from an historical and curiosity standpoint. About the only negative, and you can't blame the film's producers, is that the version I watched online had a soundtrack from a much later sound cartoon in the public domain. It just didn't match the film and I had to turn the volume down since it was so annoying.