10 great British Christmas films

British filmmakers have been producing Christmas pictures for more than 125 years, dating back to G.A. Smith’s Santa Claus in 1898. In 1901 came R.W. Paul’s Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), the first of over 400 worldwide screen adaptations of A Christmas Carol, starring Daniel Smith as Charles Dickens’s miser. Sadly, only a three-minute fragment of this survives, but the spooky superimpositions set a trend for festive chillers that has continued with titles as varied as The Legend of Hell House (1973), Don’t Open till Christmas (1984) and Wind Chill (2007).

There are Yuletide vignettes in the classic horror anthologies Dead of Night (1945) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), while Terence Davies created memorably unsettling Christmas scenes in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). Indeed, a number of significant British features have included festive segments, among them Things to Come (1936), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Morvern Callar (2002) and All of Us Strangers (2023).

Others have holiday settings that aren’t central to the action, such as The Lion in Winter (1968), Twelfth Night (1996) and The Eternal Daughter (2022). Social realist outings like Hector (2015) are relatively scarce, but there are countless cosy romcoms, including Love Actually (2003), which is currently on the naughty list, along with the sad but seedy sexploitation saga Escort Girls (1974). For causing seasonal offence, however, nothing can top Ken Russell’s final short, A Kitten for Hitler (2007).

This year, Richard Curtis’s That Christmas is hoping to become an animated favourite to rank alongside the likes of The Candlemaker (1957), The Snowman (1982) and Arthur Christmas (2011). Do seek out Nadolig Plentyn Yng Nghymru (2008), a Welsh-language version of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. But we also hope you find something here to brighten your holiday.

Director: Brian Desmond Hurst

There have been various excellent screen manifestations of Charles Dickens’s story about a miser who becomes the embodiment of Christmas spirit after three spectral visitations. Starring Seymour Hicks, the 1935 film Scrooge broke the mold by having a female ghost, played by Marie Ney. But it’s Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 version that has become the classic, and that’s largely due to the performance of Alistair Sim, whose bereftness at the loss of his beloved sister sets him on the path to callous avarice, albeit abetted by Mr Jorkin, a character who was invented by screenwriter Noel Langley, who also boosted the part of cleaning-woman Mrs Dilber for Kathleen Harrison. 

Built at Nettlefold Studios, the sets capture the chasm between the classes, as do the character-defining costumes. The double-exposed hauntings may not inspire dread, although the influence of expressionism is evident in C.M. Pennington-Richards’ cinematography. But this is Sim’s show, and he revisited Ebenezer in the Oscar-winning 1971 animation, A Christmas Carol.

Director: George More O’Ferrall

In this Chekhovian chamber drama, based on a 1950 West End hit by playwright Wynyard Browne derived from his own experiences, the children of a Norfolk parson gather at a snowy vicarage for Christmas. Fashionista Margaret (Margaret Leighton) and soldier Michael (Denholm Elliott) are reluctant visitors to Wyndenham, as they have lost their faith and grown apart from sister Jenny (Celia Johnson), who has rejected the marriage proposal of a local engineer (John Gregson) to care for their father. However, the Reverend Martin Gregory (Ralph Richardson) isn’t the dog-collared martinet they envisage and empathises with problems that anticipate those that would shock sensibilities during Britain’s social-realist new wave.

Indeed, despite the cut-glass accents of a cast who unusually rehearsed on the sets before shooting in sequence, there’s something enduringly relevant about such themes as the breakdown of communication, the anguish of alienation, the demise of deference, and the vagaries of family life.

Director: John Guillermin

Department stores have often cropped up in festive features, but there’s little comfort or joy in this sophisticated soap opera from emerging director John Guillermin. He keeps his camera moving to convey the bustle at Bunting and Hobbs, while also deftly shifting tone to follow the fortunes of five women who work on various counters. 

The storyline centring on Yvonne (Josephine Griffin) was considered scandalous for its time, as she discovers she’s pregnant by a man from a wealthy family. Even more shockingly, would-be film star Suzy (Vera Day) is assaulted by a chauffeur posing as a director. Despite reflecting the changing attitudes and aspirations of a country finally emerging from post-war austerity, screenwriter Talbot Rothwell would skirt such realist inclinations in his 20 Carry On films, and he sees the lighter side of the romantic tussle between Joan Rice and John Gregson, who even has a vintage car, as in the previous year’s Genevieve.

When it came to feminism, pioneering British filmmaker Wendy Toye reckoned that “doing something and getting on with it and not being a crashing bore about things is probably better than getting on a platform and making some big speech”. She ably proved her point with this delightful satire on courtship rituals, in which she plays Miss Tilly, an Edwardian woman who is bombarded by her earnest ‘true love’ (David O’Brien) with gifts inspired by the song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’. Chaos ensues, as the set designed by cartoonist Ronald Searle is overrun by what Time magazine called a “pyramiding progression of flora, fauna and assorted humans”. 

Toye and Searle had collaborated on the stage play Wild Thyme (1955), and would reunite on the Butter Board-sponsored A.A. Milne adaptation The King’s Breakfast (1963). But it was this Eastmancolour debunking of romance, nostalgia and festive cheer that earned them an Oscar nomination for best live-action short.

Director: Quentin Lawrence

Two years after they had played Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in Hammer’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), Peter Cushing and André Morell were reunited for this tense feature reworking of Jacques Gillies’s The Gold Inside, which the returning Quentin Lawrence had directed for ITV’s Theatre 70 show. 

Morell was reprising his role as Colonel Gore Hepburn, the ruthless robber who poses as an urbane insurance investigator. But Cushing took over from Richard Warner as Fordyce, the Scrooge-like bank manager who is clearly unmoved by the sound of a street Santa’s bell two days before Christmas. His mood changes, however, when Gore Hepburn reveals that Fordyce’s hostaged wife and child will suffer unless he co-operates in the theft of £93,000 from his own vault. Largely confined to a single office, the camera captures Fordyce’s growing discomfort, with the moment Cushing sheds tears after a blow to the head reminding viewers how Hammer often wasted his underrated talent.

Christmas has been weaponised by the state in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian junk-punk saga set in a bleak mid-future. All the festive trappings and trimmings are evident, but people enjoy themselves solely to conform with the dictates of a system that has been cobbled together from ideas gleaned from Orwell and Kafka and whose surveillance and regulation have been entrusted to a bureaucracy equipped with Heath Robinsonian contraptions. 

Despite hiding the fact he considers it all humbug, penpusher Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) becomes entangled in the machinery and is informed of his imminent torture by Eugene Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), the Deputy Minister of Information, who is dressed as Santa because he’s off to distribute gifts to some orphans. No wonder Gilliam wanted to call this 1984½, although Federico Fellini isn’t the only cinematic inspiration for a wondrously ambitious retro-futuristic vision whose expressionist and noirish tropes conspire to make Yuletide and all its traditions seem terrifying (and grimly familiar).

You only have to watch Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (2024) to realise the lasting legacy of John Huston’s final film. An Anglo-American-German co-production of a short story that Irish exile James Joyce had written in Italy, it squeezes on to our list as it chronicles an Epiphany party held in what was still the British city of Dublin in 1904. Tony Huston’s Oscar-nominated screenplay cleaves closely to the original text, but its musicality comes from his father’s direction of the miraculous ensemble cast.

The film depicts an evening of family strife, political dispute, drunken faux pas and quiet pride, whether the assembled are reciting Joyce’s prose or singing songs. It’s the rendition of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ that causes Gretta Conroy (Anjelica Huston) to reflect on lost love and adolescent passion, which in turn leads husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) to lament his own inadequacies, as he peers through a hotel window at the snow falling silently “upon all the living and the dead”.  

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Having gathered a bunch of luvvie misfits for a New Year reunion in Peter’s Friends (1992), Kenneth Branagh did much the same thing in this monochrome comedy, albeit with a pre-Christmas setting. Remaining behind the camera for the first time, writer-director Branagh nevertheless conveys his love of Shakespeare by having depressed actor Joe Harper (Michael Maloney) travel to Hope in Derbyshire with an ad hoc company in order to mount a production of Hamlet in an effort to keep the village church out of the clutches of some soulless developers. 

The play is very much the thing, as Joe struggles to wrangle co-stars beset by egotism and foibles. But the spirit of the season also seeps in to enable Joe to realise that the show must go on because it’s a wonderful life after all. The ending is a bit Capracorny, but everyone gets their moment to shine, although nothing surpasses Julia Sawalha’s impeccable pratfall.

Ryan McHenry died from bone cancer at the tragically early age of 27 before he could expand his 2011 short Zombie Musical. But John McPhail does a fine job in directing this blood-spattered bauble, which feels like a mash-up between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Gregory’s Girl (1980). 

Sixth-former Anna Shepherd (Ella Hunt) is so wrapped up in her own troubles that it takes a while for her to realise that the Scottish town of Little Haven has been overrun by the undead victims of a mutating pandemic. Deputy head Arthur Savage (Paul Kaye) insists that the school Christmas talent show will still go ahead, however, and his ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now’ is the pick of a catchy song score by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, who wittily ensure that each number is integrated into the storyline. The ideal digestif after binge-watching the Nativity! trilogy (2009 to 2014).

Future historians of domestic dysfunction could do worse than view a double bill of The Holly and the Ivy and this Ben Wheatley tale set in a rented pile in Dorset. In each case, long-suppressed grudges are aired, although the argot used by the Bursteads would have made the Gregorys blush. That said, Wheatley was persuaded to discard his working title, Colin You Anus. 

The cast is credited for its improvisatorial contribution to a screenplay that makes every eavesdropped word uttered at the New Year’s Eve bash hosted by the far from genial Colin (Neil Maskell) clang with authenticity, particularly after uninivited sibling David (Sam Riley) puts in a belated appearance. It’s easy to sneer, as the hackneyed bones of contention are laid out. Yet, with Laurie Rose’s handheld camera denying anyone a hiding place, this lacerating festive farce confirms that every family across Britain is different in pretty much the same way.