‘On The Third Day of Christmas, My True Love Sent To Me…Home Alone (1990)’
For a while, this was the ultimate NEW Christmas classic. From the sleigh-bell-tastic score (one of John Williams’s most under-appreciated) to the fake snow deployed by the tonne to cake the driveways of suburban Chicago, this is how Hollywood does a big family Christmas movie, and it was infectious (and popular too, by 1991, it was the third highest grossing movie of all time).
Home Alone’s status as a Holiday classic is bittersweet for a lot of film lovers, since its gargantuan success meant that it was the diving-off point when John Hughes (who wrote and produced this) stopped making generation-defining teen movies and started down the kid-comedy road that would lead to the puke-gargling hell of Curly Sue, from which Hughes’s reputation struggled to recover.
The intense sentimentality of Home Alone has actually mellowed over time and its inner warmth is what has helped it stay on top of so many people’s Christmas classic list. That, and the fabulous Looney Tunes ending where Macaulay Culkin fends off a pair of idiotic burglars with ingenious home-made devices. Comedies often date quickly, but even now there are still few things in life quite as funny as Daniel Stern’s scream when Culkin places a tarantula on his face.
