Over the holiday season I’ll be sharing streaming recommendations for movies for when you want to feel festive but not necessarily Christmassy, and also for Christmas movies that you may not have heard of before. Today: one of the latter.
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It’s got ghosts, a down-on-her-luck aristocrat, a poor but handsome singing cowboy, a poor but kindly schoolteacher, and rich men who need to learn the spirit of giving. In fact, the rich men are the ones who become the ghosts — not long after one of them exclaims, “What the Dickens!” — and from beyond the grave they help reunite the singing cowboy with the kindly schoolteacher. The young couple only met and fell in love in the first place because of the rich guys, as a result of the rich-man’s bet they engaged in one Christmas Eve. Before they died, natch.
Whew! The 1940 flick Beyond Christmas (aka Beyond Tomorrow) is a literal B-movie, a downticket bit of entertainment from the era when a nickel got you multiple feature films (plus a cartoon, newsreel, and several shorts). It’s mostly been forgotten today, but it is not without its charms, most of which revolve around just how much twisty melodrama can be crammed into an 84-minute movie. It’s like a magical bottomless Christmas stocking of sensation and sentiment that does not stop giving until its very last moment.
US: stream on Film Box Live (via Prime), at Internet Archive, and on YouTube (with ads); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Film Box Live (via Prime), at Internet Archive, on YouTube (with ads), and on Talking Pictures TV Encore (with ads); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Beyond Christmas (aka Beyond Tomorrow) at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
