Magic Christmas Tree
(1964, U.S.) black and white/color 57 minutes
With: Chris Kroesen (Mark), Valerie Hobbs (Old Woman/Witch), Robert "Big Buck" Maffei (Santa Claus?), Darlene Lohnes (Mother)
Plot Outline: Three boys walk home after school on Halloween. On the way home, one boy, Mark, visits a creepy old woman. The old woman asks Mark to help her get her cat, Lucifer, out of a tree. Mark climbs the tree, but falls and passes out.
When Mark wakes up, he discovers that the old woman is really a Witch! The Witch gives Mark a magic ring, and tells him to plant the seeds within and a magic tree will grow! Back at home, Mark performs the magic spell the Witch taught him, and sure enough, a magic evergreen tree grows overnight in the back yard!
Mark's dad tries to cut down the tree, to no avail. Later, on Thanksgiving, the Magic Tree comes to life, and grants Mark three wishes.
The greedy boy first wishes for one hour of absolute power, which he promptly abuses.
Mark's second wish is to have Santa Claus all to himself! When Mark sees the unhappiness his selfishness causes, however, he uses his third wish to return Santa Claus to the children of the world.
On Christmas Day, Mark wakes up, and realises that the entire fabulous adventure he just had was all a dream; or was it?
***
MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE is a fascinating example of independent cinema of the mid-1960's, a full-fledged fantasy melodrama with significant occult overtones, and a most curious depiction of suburban life as seen through the eyes of a child. It features an apocalyptic climax, and as such, predates THE CHRISTMAS THAT ALMOST WASN'T with its "What if...?" premise of erasing that most holy of days from our communal experience.
The film begins in black and white, with close-ups of a skeleton and a witch, primal occult symbols, and we soon learn it is Halloween (an odd place for a Christmas film to start, although possibly significant in that the film was likely released on or about Halloween, the official beginning of Kiddie Matinee season.)
Three schoolkids (one black) chat back and forth during their lunch break, in scenes with the charming ambience of a Coronet educational film. The protagonist, a plump child called Mark, finagles one of his friends for a better lunch.
Mark then tries to interest his pals in an occult excursion, that of spying on the weird old woman down the block, who everyone thinks is a witch. (This development may evoke memories of the Hal Roach "Our Gang" comedies, in which the gang often embarked on what turned out to be "spooky" adventures.)
Mark's pals are scared (or wise?), and they decline. Mark arrives at the woman's abode (255 Elm Street), and a wizened old woman, who does look very witchlike, appears. She even has a cat named Lucifer!
(It is a curious observation that the most powerless person in modern society, the elderly, single female, is often seen as the evil and powerful villain in the traditional fairy tale formula. Is this mere misogyny, or society's fear of matriarchal power?)
The woman cons Mark into trying to get Lucifer out of a tree. Mark climbs part-way and falls, possibly due to Lucifer's actions. Lucifer jumps onto the woman's shoulder immediately after, suggesting that the rescue was a subterfuge all along.
The film now changes to color, in a direct structural rip-off of MGM's THE WIZARD OF OZ. and Mark wakes up on a puke-green lawn, with the woman now turned into a real Witch, sitting beside him. This is truly a child's nightmare brought to life. (The color sequences, with their washed-out color and grainy film stock, do look fairly ethereal.)
The Witch informs Mark that she has put him under a spell, and we immediately think of the plight of poor Hansel and Gretel.
The Witch hands Mark a cheap, gaudy "magic ring", in which there is a "magic seed", which will produce a "magic tree" if planted on Thanksgiving eve, with the appropriate magic ritual (Rotate the ring three times and chant, "Rimbum, Caninum, Poe!")
Somehow, the Witch has lured Mark into the cult of darkness, by passing on to him a powerful magic ritual! Is she good or evil? Perhaps she is an "educational" witch, trying to change man's perception of reality through this boy-vessel.
There is also the possibility that Mark desired from the beginning to become an adept, and has not accidentally "stumbled" onto the Witch, whom he seeks as teacher. We recall that back in the very first scene, Mark successfully enticed a classmate to trade away his superior lunch, thus effecting a stark model of basic alchemy (turning something into something better). Did Mark invite his next lesson thus? Regardless, this is an interesting example in Kiddie Cinema of a Witch seducing a "modern" innocent into the dark arts.
We then cut to Mark's home, an incredible portrait of a stiff, sterile "atomic family" (father, mother, son, daughter), sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. It's just the four of them, isolated in some bizarre Leavittown reality. We only see the back of Mark's bratty sister, so "non-person" is she. This creepy domestic motif is rife with the palpable repressed-hysteria atmosphere of 1960's suburban angst.
That night, obviously to escape the suffocation of his conformist hell-life, Mark obediently performs the Witch's ritual. Is he now a magi in training, or merely a dumb dupe of Evil? Several factors suggest the former, even insofar as Mark has a "familiar" in Ichabod, his gigantic pet turtle, and a magnificent symbol of the ancient!
The magic spell works, and a "magic tree" is born. The transformation scene of seed-to-tree is terribly crude, yet oddly effective. By the efficient use of lightning, smoke powder, and quick cutting, the scene inarguably succeeds, even if on an almost primal level.
Later, we suffer another angst-ridden domestic scene. These scenes, with the film's quasi-realistic pov, become highly dramatic, as they might look in an "adult" drama. As seen by a terribly cynical Mark, Mother and Father are crudely-drawn puppets. Mother nags Father, and talks on the phone all day. Father does chores and suffers silently. There is nothing else to them. Is this merely Mark's harsh judgement on his parents, or is this how superficial folks of the day really were? Could this be how '60's kids actually saw their parents?
Further, Mark completely ignores his parents as he leaves the house in the morning. He definitely sees himself as an authority figure in the household, and quite possibly in charge of things. This may reflect either Mark's fantasy view of himself, or how things really were back then. (Mark's sister is quite willful as well.) Either way, this independence of children combined with an unflattering view of parenthood is a fairly provocative revelation.
The film then shifts gears dramatically, with an extended comic montage worthy of note. Father attempts to start the lawnmower, but the confounded contraption keeps getting away from him (a common 60's theme of "everyman vs machine"). Meanwhile, Mother yaps incessantly on the phone with her good pal Betty, while trying to ignore the loud, cartoony sound effects the lawn mower is creating. To add the completely surreal touch, a third element is added in Ichabod the turtle, waddling across the lawn in extreme close-up. The cross-cutting is exemplary, and it is at this point, much to our shock, that MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE elevates itself to cinema art.
There is next a rather amazing comic battle twixt Mother and Father about who really planted the new tree, a clever and subtle bout of sexual politics that implies that Mark is either very imaginative, or very observant, of his parents' individual psychologies.
The tree turns out to be less magic than merely indestructible, as Father attempts to chop it down in an exhausting, Sisyphisian exercise in futility worthy of the Three Stooges. He finally gives up, and resignedly lets the new evil into his world: "OK, tree, you're one of the family now!"
Time shifts once again, now to Christmas Eve. Mark's family is about to go out to buy a tree. The two males are slumped on a couch, reading and arguing with Mother. We get a quick glimpse of the sexy teenage daughter preening at a mirror. The daughter comes out: "Well, I'm finally ready!" The others leave. Mark stays behind, and walks outside. The scene changes to night, and we understand that it really is Christmas EVE. And again, the film changes moods starkly, dramatically, brilliantly.
Soon, the Tree comes to life, via an overdubbed (and fairly bitchy) voice. The Tree explains that he is Mark's servant, ala "Aladdin", and that his has three wishes coming to him. The Tree shifts itself inside the house, and adorns itself with ornament in a crude series of quick cuts.
When the Tree talks to Mark, we see a close-up of the branches, certainly one of the cheapest possible fantasy effects, yet clearly implying that we are supposed to see the Tree as a live, narrative character.
Mark's first wish is for "unlimited power for one hour", a spurious choice for certain. Tree instructs Mark to perform that same ritual which gave life to the Tree; turn the magic Santa Ring three times, and chant, "Rimbum, Carinum, Po!"
Mark's "Hour of Power" is, of course, an unbridled nightmare of childish abuse, as he tries to endanger or annoy as many people as he can. If this weren't G-rated, you could clearly understand a character saying, "Jeez, what an asshole!"
Mark turns night into day, a clearly diabolical move which suggests that Mark longs to be an evil master of time and space. Indeed, Mark runs downtown, pointing his finger at everyone, speeding them up and forcing them to perform unnatural acts.
A good deal of time is spent in a comic montage featuring a runaway antique fire truck, a not-unsuccessful attempt to evoke the silent comedy era. This is intercut with another silent-era motif, a baker chasing a waitress down the street, threatening to throw a pie at her. Why the baker wants to harm the woman in unclear, but it seems somehow perfectly in line with the agenda of this post-modern "fairy tale".
The last act of Mark's power-hour is to turn and point his evil magic finger at us! We shudder to think what he had in store for us, but luckily, his time runs out.
To the Tree's vocal dismay, Mark's second wish is even more evil: to kidnap Santa Claus all for himself, and get everything he has ever wanted! We realize at this point that Mark, in his present incarnation, is selfish and heartless, the time-honored formula for evil. We rightly begin to fear for his soul.
Santa Claus is a played as fairly depressed and ineffectual character here, although being rendered impotent by a selfish little brat would certainly make anyone depressed.
What follows is an impressive stock-footage collage of the world's reaction to the disappearance of Santa Claus, with scenes of familiar locations like the Seattle Space Needle and New York City's United Nations building. This documentary montage shifts the film again, into a fairly serious narrative melodrama mode, and one is forced to think we are meant to take the whole thing quite seriously.
Mark ends up in a spooky netherworld populated by a very creepy Giant, who fancies the boy for some unspecified, surely unhealthy, purpose. Faced with this disgusting prospect, Mark finally sees the light; he repents his fatal powerlust, and pleads for his former, selfish wishes to be erased. As Mark splits, the Giant threatens, "I'll find another greedy little boy to make my slave! Maybe you!". And he points at us! Eeyyoouu!
Back at home, the Magic Christmas Tree disappears, after leaving Mark with a cryptic message: "I am the spirit of giving, the spirit of love, I am 'for giving'. You are wishing to release me from your spell! But you shall always have me in your heart!"
The scene returns to black and white, and Mark once again falls out of the tree. Back in drab reality, the old woman apologizes and explains that Lucifer was surprised by Marks's rescue attempt, and this is what precipitated the fall, and the bewildering chain of unearthly events which followed. Mark is taken aback, unsure now what is real, and what is not. He (and we) analyze what has happened, and what to make of it.
As in other fantastic fictions which turn out to be filtered by the protagonist's personal vision (THE ANGRY RED PLANET, CITIZEN KANE), the body of MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE is open to interpretation and highly subjective, making the story psychological rather than sociological (and allegorical rather than literal).
When, finally, Mark turns and sees a full-color hallucination of his Magic Tree, which says, "There's a little bit of magic in every Christmas tree...!", we are to assume that the entire color sequence was in fact reality, reality under the tint of a dark spell. This too, is troubling. Yet perhaps the most troubling revelation in MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE is that Mark's family may or may not have been part of his fabricated fantasy! We never see them in the "real" scenes, and we will never know how radically they might differ from Mark's emotionally-charged sketches of them. In the end, all we are left with is a frustrating yet significant truth: "It's all perspective".
Ultimately, MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE is a largely effective contemporary fable of children dabbling in black magic (shades of Harry Potter!) and a cautionary tale of the "All-American Boy" confronting and conquering Evil (both existential and personal). That the scenario unfolds on three pivotal days, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve, the "Holy Trinity" of modern holidays, places the film smack dab in the belly of postwar culture, aimed at the very heart of a society in spiritual upheaval.
MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE boasts an unnerving "realism" that other fantasies of the period don't share, due to the opening expository sequence, and the general neo-realistic air to the film. This gives the film an impact it might not have were it filmed in a more whimsical manner or expressionist style. This straight-forward look may indeed be partly due to the obviously low budget, but it conveys a sense of dramatic urgency nonetheless, and delivers a fairly amazing film.
MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE was a Kiddie Matinee perennial, first released in 1964, and reissued in 1966, 1970, 1974, and 1980! In some markets, it was "double-billed" with Dave Fleischer's classic cartoon RUDOLPH THE REDNOSED REINDEER, which would make the entire program appx. 65 minutes long!
And from the TV spot: "It's Magic! It's Fun! It's For Everyone! See the Christmas Tree talk! See the magic ring! See the wicky-wacky witch! See the greedy, grizzly, grumpy giant, and more, in the Magic Christmas Tree! All wrapped up in holiday color at a theatre near you! No adults admitted without children."
Video/DVD availability: VHS (Goodtimes, United American , VCI, oop)
Holiday Pictures / Orrin Films
Screenplay: Harold Vaughn Taylor
Music: Victor Kirk
Cinematography: Richard Kendall
Produced by Fred C. Gerrior
Directed by Richard C. Parish
