Tom Hanks picks his all-time favourite Christmas movie
Over the past 40 years, Tom Hanks has blessed his global fanbase with a healthy range of characters across more blockbusting titles than you could shake a stick at. After breaking through in the late 1980s with a lead role in Penny Marshall’s fantasy comedy Big, Hanks reached an early peak in the early 1990s, winning back-to-back ‘Best Actor’ Oscars for his compelling roles in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump.
Throughout the remainder of the 1990s, Hanks balanced serious dramatic roles, such as those in Saving Private Ryan and The Green Mile, with family-friendly efforts, like those in Toy Story and You’ve Got Mail. While Hanks can’t boast the immersive range of Daniel Day-Lewis or Joaquin Phoenix, he has a knack for on-screen amiability that makes him perfect for gentle comedic or stoic hero roles.
Hanks’ affability has made him a staple presence in children’s family movies but, oddly, very few holiday movies. One could argue that 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle is a Christmas movie of sorts, but Hanks’ only true festive flick to date is 2004’s The Polar Express.
In Robert Zemeckis’ animated Christmas classic, Hanks made up for his lack of festive roles by portraying five roles: the father, the Conductor, the homeless ghost, Santa Claus and even a young boy. The haunting yet emotionally electrifying picture was notable as one of the early movies to use cutting-edge motion capture animation.
Speaking to IGN in November 2004, Hanks revealed that he joined the Polar Express project because he fell in love with the 1985 book by Chris Van Allsburg from which it was adapted. “The book itself, the 29 pages of it, is a haunting, very effective story, and you really can’t quite put your finger on it,” Hanks praised. “I’ve been reading it to my kids, I think, since it was published. And as you get closer and closer to Christmas, you read it more and more.”
Continuing, Hanks noted the cinematic escapism of the book’s original illustrations. “There’s something very stunning, quite frankly, about Chris Van Allsburg’s paintings. They’re not drawings,” he said. “They’re impressionistic versions of this child’s house and what it was like to be on a train and all the aspects of the adventure that they go on. It was always a very tactile feeling that I got from reading the book as well as a very elegant, simple, but complicated, sophisticated story about what Christmas means to each and every one of us.”
Although The Polar Express undoubtedly holds a place in Hank’s heart, it’s not his favourite festive movie. Later in the conversation, Hanks dug back to his childhood when asked to pick out his all-time favourite.
“I always took the Greyhound bus from Oakland, CA, to Red Bluff, CA, to go to my mom’s house,” Hanks recalled. “The day we’d get out of school we’d go down to the Greyhound bus station and get on the bus for three and a half to five hours, depending if we were transferring through Sacramento or not. And I’d have a little stack of comic books and look forward to hopefully staying awake by the time we pulled into the frigid cold of Red Bluff. And I’d hope we sat nice to some nice old lady passing out banana bread. Happened quite often. And my favourite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s just not December without All Quiet on the Western Front in my house.”
Although not usually associated with Christmas, Hanks’ favourite was released in 1930 by director Lewis Milestone and follows the emotional story of a young German soldier who encounters both physical and moral battles in the trenches during the First World War. The movie was based on the 1929 book of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque and has been updated for the big screen twice since: in 1979 by Delbert Mann and in 2022 by Edward Berger.
Watch the trailer for Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front below.
