Thanksgiving Movies

Charade (1963)
What's Cooking? (2000)

Just Because They Show It on Thanksgiving Doesn't Mean It's a Turkey

I don't know what inspired my local public television station to show the 1963 movie Charade on Thanksgiving night and I know even less about the reasons why my mother and my youngest brother chose to tune into it. I do know that it proved to be a remarkably good movie that even people who aren't as ardently dedicated to old movies as yours truly can appreciate -- which might explain why my mother and my youngest sibling could not help but watch it all the way through. Some critics have called it the "best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made" and some may argue that it's actually a lot better than some of Hitchcock's lesser films. (For example, Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry could have learned a lot about suspense from this flick.)

On paper, this movie should have been a failure. After all, there was a huge age gap between the two romantic leads and it's not a big coincidence that the male lead -- Cary Grant -- retired from movies two films after this one was released. (In his last movie, Walk, Don't Run, Grant didn't even pretend to be romantically interested in that movie's female lead and in the one before that, he was matched for some odd reason with younger actress Leslie Caron, perhaps in the vain hope of capturing the same chemistry found between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in this flick.) Moreover, Charade itself is a mixture of romance, comedy and suspense that could have easily proved tasteless in the hands of a lesser filmmaker than director Stanley Donen.

And yet it doesn't. I actually found myself laughing at lines of dialogue I never expected to find all that funny and being amused at the actors' reactions as often as their actions. The plot, for those unfamiliar with it, involved a young widow named Regina "Reggie" Lambert whose husband was discovered by the side of a French railroad track at the beginning of the movie. Not only did she have much reason to suspect her husband was murdered, but she soon discovered that he was also suspected of being a crook. One of his last actions involved stripping the apartment that he and Reggie had shared and selling the furnishings without leaving a single clue as to what he did with all the cash he got for them.

Moreover, Mrs. Lambert found herself being pursued by three thugs who were certain she knew where her late husband hid a fortune in stolen loot. Add to that a mysterious CIA agent who claimed to have been investigating her late husband and an equally mysterious person -- played by Cary Grant -- who might or might not be another government agent and poor Mrs. Lambert had her hands full trying to get herself free of a sticky situation.

I could say more but the movie is too good to spoil. Suffice to say that Hepburn and Grant make a great team and even if you don't particularly care for May-October romances like the one in this movie, you will probably still enjoy it. I would like to think that Cary Grant stopped making movies three years afterwards because he knew deep down that he would never top this movie. But I'm sure Grant's autobiography would have you believe something else. C'est la vie!

A Thanksgiving Movie That Actually Isn't a Turkey

I've gotten so used to cringing and rolling my eyes at most of Hollywood's attempts at multicultural storytelling -- Spanglish, for example -- that I found it quite refreshing to come across an American movie with a multiracial cast that is actually quite entertaining. Unfortunately, the film in question -- the 2000 release What's Cooking? -- has the type of title that suggests that it is not a serious movie but some sort of wacky screwball comedy chockful of eccentric stereotypes. To be fair, the movie has more than a few elements -- a unfaithful Latino father, an Asian-American gangsta wannabe, etc. -- that border upon the stereotypical. But it also deals with these elements in such a believable way that I never quite found myself wanting to roll my eyes at the pretentiousness of the film's dialogue like I did with Bulworth and Crash.

The film concerns four different families -- one Jewish, one Vietnamese, one Mexican-American and one African-American -- whose members come together in Los Angeles to celebrate Thanksgiving in their own unique fashion. Each family has their own set of unique problems. Each family, nevertheless, tries to resolve its problems with a minimum of fuss, only to find that it does not necessarily always work out that way. Though various family members are continually crossing paths with members of the other families, it is not until the end that the film points out once and for all just how close to one another these four different families actually are.

It's been implied by one of the reviewers on IMDB that this film's view of L.A.'s racial politics seemed more inspired by wishful thinking than reality. And one could argue that at times the film is a bit too hopeful about its view of human nature. For example, the Vietnamese family is shown raising a fuss about a visit the daughter receives from her white American boyfriend while she is working in the family video store -- yet later on the movie suggests that a visit from a son's Mexican-American girlfriend would meet with a happier reception. In another episode, the son of an African-American political aide is shown throwing paint at his father's employer. But when the same son shows up for Thanksgiving dinner and is seen by one of the father's white co-workers, the co-worker -- who witnessed the paint throwing -- seems remarkably low-key about this revelation.

Yet every time the movie got to the point when I found myself anticipating Paul Haggis-style melodramatics, the movie would surprise me by going in a different direction. Much of the melodrama in the Vietnamese household, for example, had the potential to turn into a bad episode of All-American Girl but then we're given a rather quiet scene between the Americanized daughter and her Vietnamese-speaking grandmother in which the grandmother actually proves more sympathetic to the daughter's problems than one would expect. The melodrama in the African-American household in which the political aide's stressed-out wife is attempting to deal with various family problems while at the same time trying to keep her conservative mother-in-law happy could have very easily turned into the stuff of bad sitcoms -- but the film does not go that route. Ditto the melodramas in the Latino and the Jewish households.

The result is not the type of film that will appeal to every type of moviegoer -- but it is certainly the type of holiday movie that deserves to be remembered for far more than its less-than-memorable title. And you do not even have to be Californian to like it.