The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (1965)

The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (1965)

Here's one instance where the author of the book can't whine about how his precious work of art has been bastardized by the film industry into a commercial bit of tripe not befitting the work of genius that his powerful novel about The Chrsitmas That Almost Wasn't was. You see, Paul Tripp, the author of said powerful novel also starred in the movie, wrote the screenplay and is credited with coming up with the lyrics to the copious songs that littered this movie like giant piles of reindeer crabapples. (Did you think songs that rhymed "sorry" and "jolly" wrote themselves?)

So where did Tripp go wrong? What was it that tripped him up? What happened was that Paul went and broke one of the basic tenants of filmmaking, nay, of life itself - he had his movie made by a bunch of Italians! And just to make sure that his movie would sink faster than a sleigh loaded up with a fat Italian actor with a fake beard, he hired the star of Frankenstein's Castle Of Freaks to not only play the villain, but also to direct!

There were many reasons why this movie made me shudder and pray that The Christmas That Almost Wasn't would somehow turn into The Christmas That I Was Really Wasted and Forgot Everthing That Happened, but the first among them had to be the opening theme song, a little ditty that explained the concept of the movie and was quite catchy in a creepy and completely undesirable manner. Compounding the pain was that it was sung over some of that old time cut and paste Monty Python-style animation I loath. (If I can do it at home with some magic markers and construction paper, I don't want to see it in a movie.)

After a couple of minutes of this guy singing while cardboard cut outs jumped over roofs, the movie finally began in earnest, and that was really the only thing this movie did that was in earnest since everything else about it would have been categorized as quite bland except that everything was so damn squalid. I don't mind squalid if I'm watching a movie about an undercover cop turned junkie or a movie about life after an atomic war, but I don't think I'm out of line when I demand that my Christmas movies be bright and cheery.

At the very least, Santa's workshop should be that way. I understand if some poor kid's town is under the thumb of a burgermeister who hates Christmas or something and things are a little grey, but at least Santa is always a beacon of hope who romps around with brightly attired midgets and shiny wooden toys. This movie though, had Santa looking like he lived in a flop house with his wife, seven elves, and their foreman.

Seven elves? You got it! I counted the little bastards! That's not enough dwarves to run a Taco Bell during the slow shifts, let alone staff Santa's village! And they were nasty looking, too. The dirtiest little carnival refugees you've ever seen. They were dirty and had bad teeth and there wasn't one of the lot that I would've turned my back on because even though they were all smiles whenever the big guy was around, you could tell they were seething and just waiting for the right moment use a blackjack on the foreman and have their way with Mrs. Claus.

Mrs. Claus? I'm glad you brought her up. As scuzzy as these dwarves were, Mrs. Claus wasn't exactly no Tanya Roberts either. This woman had the biggest ass I think I've ever seen in a movie and I began to wonder if they didn't used to have more than seven dwarves, but that these were just the ones she hadn't sat on or hadn't gotten lost in the folds of her stomach.

I was glad that Paul Tripp played a guy named Mr. Whipple because whenever Santa and Mrs. Claus were around him, I kept hoping that he would remind Santa not to squeeze the Charmin. Alas, he never did, but we did get to see Mrs. Claus in action at the end of the movie when she accompanied Mr. Whipple and Santa to deliver presents. How she got her big caboose down that chimney I'll never know but can you imagine having to go up it right after her? Whoa, smells like a reindeer died in here!

Okay, Sam Whipple is a lawyer in an unnamed town and for some reason his only case seems to be the case of "the lawyer who puts up the town's Christmas decorations while singing forgettable songs about how much he loves Christmas." Clearly this is a dog of a case and he would be wise to get a client other than himself. As luck would have it, he does get a new client in the form of Santa Claus himself.

This would be one of your less impressive Santas, looking vaguely like a drunken transient in department store garb and whining incessantly about the problems he's having with his new landlord. He explains that the Eskimos had given him a piece of the North Pole to run his shop out of, but then they went and sold it out from under him to a guy named Phineas T. Prune. Guess what a guy named Prune thinks about Christmas? He hates it! Can you believe it? And further more, he doesn't like kids and in fact, he himself denies that he ever was a child.

While Prune has some fairly amusing (though a bit predictable) delusions, the reason any of this matters to us is that he's gone and raised the rent on Santa and is demanding payment in full by midnight on Christmas Eve or come Christmas Day, Santa and his big bootied wife are going to find the North Pole Sheriff dumping all their crap on the front lawn (or front tundra in this case).

Santa has come to Sam for help because Sam was the only kid that ever sent Santa a thank you years ago and promised to help Santa if he ever needed it. Umm, Santa, that's the kind of thing people say just to be polite. Besides you can't hold anyone to a contract they made as a kid. Maybe a little less time scouring your old fan mail and little more time studying that lease you signed with your Eskimo buddies, Tubby.

Since Whipple is a lawyer, he does what any good attorney would do in this case. He tells his client that he better go out and get a job and start making that money to pay the rent! Now that's the kind of legal strategy you would expect from a guy that had to work Santa in between stringing up lights and hanging wreaths around downtown. By the way, this is pretty much the entire movie: Santa needs money for rent, so Santa and Sam go and get jobs to make the money for the rent. Who knew that all those Rankin-Bass cartoons took all the really good "we've got to save Christmas from the crabby guy" plots?

So what sort of jobs do these two get? Seasonal work. That sort of thing. Sam becomes a janitor and Santa becomes a department store Santa. Errr. Let me get this straight. You're a lawyer, but you take a job as a janitor to make some money? Well, at least Santa should be a natural at his new gig, right? Not quite. See, he gets nervous around little kids. No, really, it all makes sense. He's never been around kids except when they were sleeping. At some point, shouldn't someone have taken Paul Tripp aside and made sure that Paul Tripp was just his porn name and not his real name? You know - to save his family the eternal embarrassment of being in any way associated with this film.

So now we have to watch Sam coach Santa on how to be Santa. Unfortunately, it involves some more singing and Santa reveals that in addition to being an emotionally closed off clod that he also can't carry a tune. Or at least the guy that dubbed Santa's voice can't carry a tune. I try to be fair in these things you know.

Christmas is saved after an even more embarrassing scheme is cooked up by Sam after Prune ruins their sweet set up at the department store by buying it out and framing them for breaking a bunch of toys. The new plan involves guilting all the little kids in town to chip in and pay Santa's rent for him. Gawd, Mrs. Claus is going to be so proud!

Following that humiliating development, Prune gets reformed after the elf foreman discovers a letter he lost from Prune as a kid asking for a sailboat. More songs ensue and things come to a close with Prune running around town in his nightgown chasing kids in an effort to demonstrate his new found love of Christmas and/or young boys.

Everything about this movie was really scurvy from the dirty, emaciated actors (except for the bloated Mrs. Claus) to the grungy house that Santa lived in. It didn't look any better than the dirty and dusty place that Prune lived in (which was supposed to be that way because of his dour attitude). Bad songs and worse special effects (you only get to see the reindeer flying through the air in one scene, but it was way more than enough) combined with the mundane landlord-tenant dispute story make this a most unappealing holiday offering.

I've read that there are people out there that love this thing, but they probably only love it because they saw at some impressionable time in their youth like I did with one of my favorite movies, Humanoids From The Deep. Anybody coming into this for the first time today, child or adult, isn't likely to do much more than cringe during the yawn-inducing yuletide goings on. Once again the Italians demonstrate their mastery of the unbearably bad movie, no matter the genre. For fans of big bootied mature Italian women and skanky dwarves only.