It’s that time of year again: time for us to round up crime movies which also happen to be set during the Christmas season. These aren’t movies like Die Hard or Bad Santa, whose Christmas backdrop is a famous, obvious, or even essential aspect of their identities; these are the movies you don’t always remember have yuletide backdrops. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of last year, I added ten more. This year, we’re at it again: behold, in all their glory, another ten crime movies you might not remember take place at Christmas.
The Bourne Identity (2002)
Yes, The Bourne Identity is set at Christmastime! It is a wintry, European-set action movie about a man who wakes up following a mysterious trauma to realize he has total amnesia as well as intense, precise combat reflexes and is determined to find out who he really is and why he can do all the things he can. For a while the movie seems to take place in temporally-ambiguous wintertime, but when our hero, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), heads to the French countryside and stays for a few nights in a beautiful rustic farmhouse right out of an Anthropologie catalogue, we learn from the plethora of Christmas decorations that the events of the film have taken place during the holidays.
Fitzwilly (1967)
National treasure Dick Van Dyke stars in this Christmastime farce (with a score by John Williams), about a faithful, brilliant butler determined to keep his destitute, elderly employer living at the same level of luxury she has enjoyed for her whole life. So he and the other members of the staff steal stuff to furnish her lifestyle—none more high-stakes than burglarizing Gimbels department Store on Christmas Eve.
Mortal Thoughts (1991)
This early 90s thriller stars Demi Moore, with a wreath of hair (not like the Ghost haircut disaster just a year before), as a New Jersey hairdresser suspected of two murders—her husband John Pankow and her friend Glenne Headley’s abusive husband Bruce Willis. As she sits in the interrogation room, she tells her side of the story. But the detective doing the interrogation, Harvey Keitel, isn’t sure that her tale holds up.
Cover Up (1949)
In this noir classic, an insurance investigator heads to a small town during the Christmas season to investigate the apparent suicide of a wealthy man. But when he arrives there, he begins to suspect that the man has been murdered, not in the least because it turns out that he was reviled by nearly all of his fellow residents. And no one, not even the sheriff William Bendix, wants to help him investigate. The tagline is “it takes more than a kiss to cover up a killing!” As I always like to say around this time of year.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
This loopy (but faithful to the novel) James Bond film starring George Lazenby (the only time he ever played 007) and Diana Rigg sends our agent to the Swiss Alps at Christmastime to hunt down a tycoon named Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) who has been completing mysterious research involving brainwashing lots of beautiful women, all as part of a plot to hold the world ransom. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll make all plant and animal life infertile. Cheers.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
This spy movie with a very noir title, starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson, is actually a bit like The Bourne Identity, what with Geena Davis having washed ashore in a small town with no memory of who she is. Years later, on Christmas Eve, a car accident reawakens a part of her memory that apparently involves badass fighting techniques, because all of a sudden she can kill men with her bare hands and she has absolutely no idea how.
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Ah, yes, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, the sad, sad story about a mechanical man with lots of love to give who unsuccessfully attempts to assimilate into human society, has its sad, sad climax set at Christmas. Edward (Jonny Depp) is a timid and sweet Frankenstein’s Monster kind of guy, whose metal body was never completed (due to the death of his kindly mad-scientist creator (an elderly, mellifluously-voiced-as-ever Vincent Price). Taken in by a Suburban family (Diane Wiest, Alan Arkin), the long metal shards he has instead of fingers beguile the neighborhood (he can make topiaries and cut dog fur like you’ve never seen), but they soon turn against him. Evidently, the worst of this happens on Christmas Eve. It is a crime movie if you watch it until the end.
Christmas Holiday (1944)
With this entry, I’m not really saying that you’d forget Christmas Holiday takes place at Christmas, so much as acknowledging that you might have never heard of it. It’s a Gene Kelly *non-musical* about a femme-fatale-ish nightclub singer/possible prostitute who tells a down-and-out detective the sad story of her love affair with a man ultimately arrested for murder. It also bears the incredible and universally relatable tagline “Love… was her crime. Love… is her punishment.”
Cash on Demand (1961)
This British neo-noir B-movie produced by Hammer films stars Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) as a crochety bank manager who confronts an impostor insurance investigator (André Morell), attempting to pull a bank job on Christmas Eve. Peter Cushing is kind of a Scrooge figure until he has to make sure that the world’s most debonair thief doesn’t make off with all the money. Then he starts to care. About everything.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
This gorgeously-animated midcentury Disney movie set in England begins in the summertime but takes place in frosty December, as two dalmatian dogs name Pongo and Perdita (one of whom is voiced by Rod Taylor) trek from London to the countryside in search of their fifteen stolen puppies. The pups have been taken by the sinister Cruella de Vil, who wants to turn them into fur coats. Their humans (Roger and Anita, and their maid Nanny) are despondent and baffled by the disappearance of the puppies and then their beloved dogs, hope that they will somehow return, listlessly decorating their house for the most depressing Christmas ever, while they wait.
