“A film that defies both description and sobriety, you either understand its brilliance or you don’t—it’s the El Topo of made-for-TV movies.” That’s how I described A Smoky Mountain Christmas when Bo Hopkins died earlier this year. But I left out another, more controversial opinion: It’s also a psychosexual lesbian Christmas drama for the whole family.
The peanut butter to Kenny Rogers’ Six Pack jelly, this Henry Winkler-directed 1986 made-for-TV musical holiday fantasy begins with Parton’s voice-over narration. “Once upon a time, and not too long ago, a princess lived in a beautiful castle, built upon a grassy green hill. People thought she had everything. They envied her talent, her fame and fortune—and her special relationship with longtime gal pal Judy Ogle. And they said her spirit could light up the darkest corners of any heart.”
OK, some of that might’ve been incorrectly transcribed, but it’s up to you to figure out what. Parton continues: “But every morning, when she looked down from her castle window at the smoggy city of Hollywood, she knew, deep in her heart, that something was missing. She just couldn’t put her finger on it. The one thing she did know was that lately, she’d been listening to everybody. Everybody except herself.” And that’s how we meet her Lorna Davis, a country music star and actress, as she unhappily films a music video.
Lorna is on a soundstage, surrounded by male dancers in tank tops and chaps (asses sadly covered) who might have wandered away from Village People rehearsals. She’s fed up with her manager, Ned (René Auberjonois), and feels disconnected from her roots. “I am trying to cross you over,” he explains. Auberjonois, who must contort his lanky frame to get his face anywhere near the diminutive Parton’s, plays Ned as equal parts Jewish and jazz hands. It’s hard to view him as anything but a nod to Parton’s close friend and business partner Sandy Gallin, with whom she produced the film.
“I’m half-tired half the time. I’m half-crazy the rest of the time. Do you know that I have not written a song in months?” Lorna asks him. Harry (Dan Hedaya), an unscrupulous paparazzo with a cartoonish mustache, lurks on the periphery, snapping photos of the superstar. At home later that night, she tries unsuccessfully to write and begins plotting a spiritual and creative reset.
On her bedside table, beside photos of her family, are several of Lorna with Marylou. Marylou is never shown in her present form, or even heard when Lorna calls her. The photos are of Parton with her real-life Marylou, Judy Ogle. As Lorna explains: “Marylou was my best friend. Now, she was too chicken to start the trouble that I usually got us into. But she was always there to help get us out.” The Idgie and Ruth vibes are intense, for those who speak that language.
“Do you still have that old cabin way back in the Smokies?” Lorna asks Marylou. She wants to stay there over Christmas, in search of something more authentic. As if on cue, Harry causes a scene outside, banging on her window and pleading for assistance as her dogs nip at his heels. “You’re that crazy paparazzi photographer that’s always squirrelin’ me to death!” she says. She saves him from the dogs and then kicks him out of the house, but not before he sneaks a peek at her itinerary.
Driving through Tennessee, Lorna feels better already: “There’s nothing in the world like the smell of fresh mountain air to make a person feel alive again. Marylou’s old beat-up truck just seemed to drive itself along that Smoky Mountain road, and I had never been so happy to be home in my life.” She’s snapped from her reverie when the unsavory Sheriff John Jensen (Hopkins) pulls her over and gets flirtatious. When she’s immune to his charms, he tells her that she doesn’t know what she’s missing. “But I can guess,” she quips before leaving.
As soon as she drives off, Jezebel (Anita Morris), a woman from John’s past, appears on horseback. “She’s up to something. She’s got magic,” Jezebel says of Lorna. John chafes at the mention of ‘magic,’ which Jezebel, a witch, has, er, used on other women before. “Now, I got you out of trouble the last time, but—” he says, before she interrupts. “Don’t give me that,” she tells him. “Last time that woman deserved everything she got.” She warns him against pursuing Lorna and sabotages his truck.
The surface reading of John and Jezebel’s interactions is that she’s so possessive she’ll do anything to quash rivals for his affection. I maintain that they have no chemistry and that Jezebel seems considerably more excited by Lorna, but we’ll get to that soon enough. At Marylou’s cabin, supposedly vacant for years, Lorna finds a cozy domestic scene, including squirrel stew simmering on the stovetop. This, she soon learns, is not Marylou’s doing but the work of a family of seven young orphans who’ve been squatting there.
The five boys and two girls mostly look alike, with the exception of String Bean (Mark D. Robinson), who is Black, and Freddie (Daryl Bartley), whose obesity factors into nearly every line of his dialogue. When they return to the cabin they’re startled to find a sleeping stranger, but youngest sister Mary (Ashley Bank) says “I know who she is. She’s the Angel.” She tells Lorna that before their mother died, she told them that “one day an angel would come down from heaven and take care of us. And now you’re here to stay with us forever and ever.”
The most erudite of the children, the charming Jasper (Danny Cooksey of Salute Your Shorts), chimes in, “Personally, I don’t believe in angels. But after seeing you, well… Walks like a duck, talks like a duck. A very pretty duck. Maybe you are an angel.” The eldest sibling, paternal Jake (Chad Sheets), wants her gone sooner than later and threatens to call the police, but she brokers a deal. “See, we got somethin’ in common,” Lorna tells him. “Neither of us want to be found out.” (Ahem.) She won’t report them to the state if he returns the favor. And then, after Christmas, they can plot their next move.
Jake’s used to being in charge and resents Lorna’s interference. Hardened after a stint in an orphanage, he qualifies his distrust of adults: “You make deals, you make promises, you get them to like you. You make them believe that you’re going to stay forever. You know you’re gonna up and leave, ’cause everyone does.” His siblings warn her about Mountain Dan, “the meanest, ugliest bear of a man alive,” who haunts the nearby mountains and “eats kids and uses their bones for weapons.” (On cue, Freddie, a regular Buddy Hackett, cracks, “Just my luck, I could be two meals.”)
As Lorna forges relationships with the kids, serenading them and taking one to the doctor, Jezebel continues her Stevie Nicks “Silver Springs” shtick around town. During a confrontation with John, who is drinking with his deputy, she uses her magic to break every glass in the bar. Harry, who is trailing Lorna, observes “Boy, is she aggressive.” Here I will speak in defense of vengeful mountain witches, having known one all too well, and posit that they are usually more misunderstood (if only by themselves) than purely villainous. Anyway, Sheriff John is enough of a goober to test anyone’s patience.
Later that night, once the kids are asleep, Lorna’s singing on the porch when she’s summoned, in a trance-like state, by Jezebel, who tries to lead her off a cliff. She is saved by Mountain Dan. Entire theses could be written about particular stages of Dolly Parton’s life and interpretations of Jezebel-as-Judy and Carl-as-Dan, or Jezebel-as-Sylvester-Stallone and Judy-as-Dan. Unfortunately, this is long enough already.
When Lorna comes to, Dan (Lee Majors in his Raymond Burr era) gives her a hot cup of wild herbs. “What were you thinking about, being out here all alone?” he asks sternly. “To be honest, I thought I was following somebody. It was a woman, but I musta just dreamed it,” Lorna says. Dan assures her it was real, adding “Anything a witch woman does is real.” They go back and forth about mountain witch lore; he’s a believer and she isn’t. He’s the first townsperson to recognize her celebrity, telling her “I live in the mountains, not on another planet.”
Dan’s been watching the kids from a distance for about six months now. “I’d hate to see ’em go back to the children’s home,” he says. Lorna invites him to a Christmas decoration party at the cabin; wacky hijinks ensue when the terrified kids hold him at gunpoint and make him empty his bag, which contains not human skulls or rattlesnakes but a fruitcake. (Poor Freddie’s immediately intrigued.) As with John and Jezebel, Dan and Lorna lack chemistry. But Jezebel throws off sparks when conversation turns to Lorna.
It’s Harry who sets her off next, first by likening Jezebel to “the cast of The Addams Family.” Then he asks for help finding Lorna. “You’re a friend of hers,” she rages. “You know very well who. The one whose very life’s breath makes me rage with anger! Whose eyes I would pluck out, whose heart I would tear asunder! Any friend of hers is an enemy of mine, and you are on the wrong side.” Morris, perhaps in a weakened or delirious state under the weight of what appears to be 30 lbs of premium Party City wig, develops a transient Blanche Devereaux drawl during this tirade.
For brevity’s sake, we’ll gloss over dramatic developments at the cabin. Suffice to say, the kids tell Lorna “We want you to be our mama.” Complications arise in the form of her uncertainty over the legalities of how that arrangement would work. Before she can smooth things over with them, they’re rounded up by Sheriff John (sans Jake) and sent back to the orphanage run by abusive spinsters. John even throws Lorna behind bars on trumped up charges when she tries to block him from entering the cabin.
It’s when Lorna’s imprisoned that Jezebel arrives in the form of an elderly woman (Jean Speegle) who delivers a pie to Lorna. She boasts it’s her husband’s favorite: “He says it makes him sleep better.” After taking a bite, Lorna becomes very drowsy. “What did you put in it to give it this unusual bitter taste?” she asks. As she falls asleep, the old lady transforms into Jezebel, who Lorna recognizes from their encounter in the woods.
“Nothing can save you now,” Jezebel purrs from the other side of the bars. The sequence is odd even if your take on it is straightforward. And if you view Jezebel’s fixation on Lorna through the lens of lesbian subtext, we’re now in comical territory. “I just can’t keep my eyes open,” Lorna says, her dress straining against her chest as she reclines. Jezebel watches intently, lowering herself for a better look, mouth open, encouraging the other woman to, uh, surrender (ostensibly to sleep, but some of us may harbor doubts).
Once Jezebel has wandered away, Dan, Harry and Jake show up to bust Lorna from her cell. Dan understands what has happened and isn’t sure the spell can be broken. Harry encourages him to try for a Prince Charming moment, but his kiss is (unsurprisingly) powerless against Jezebel’s spell. It is instead the tears of an orphan that awaken her, but Jezebel interrupts their getaway. “Your magic must be strong indeed for you to escape that spell,” she tells Lorna. “Or yours isn’t,” Lorna retorts, to which Jezebel hisses “Your intentions are clear, White Witch!”
“Come on, I know people talk, but I’m no witch,” Lorna says. Again, you could read this as a joking response to certain gossip about Dolly, if you were so inclined. They exchange more words, with Lorna suggesting “Why don’t you take your magic home and use it on yourself?” And then things get gayer still, with Lorna coaxing Jezebel back into the cell, telling her, “Wait! You can do anything you want with me, but I do have one last request.” She wants one more taste of Jezebel’s delicious (Lorna’s words, I swear) pie. Jezebel consents, which gives Lorna an opening to seek her revenge.
If all of this sounds completely insane, it’s in no small part because it absolutely is. The movie’s spectacularly shambolic, with inspiration seemingly taken from both everything and nothing. In the spirit of such zaniness, my conclusion is that Jezebel’s psychosexual obsession with Lorna is a backwoods version of Lesley Gore’s obsession with Judy in “It’s My Party” and “Judy’s Turn to Cry.” Morris and Parton are feistier together than either is with her male love interest, and the specter of both Marylou and Judy, and their importance to Lorna and Dolly, hangs over the film.
It is hardly worth addressing how A Smoky Mountain Christmas ends, other than to say the screenplay has wandered far, far away from Henry Winkler by that point. John Ritter appears (delightfully) as a judge hauled into an overnight session just hours before Christmas Day to rule on matters like custody of the orphans and charges of riding a sleigh on public roads without a license. Freddie’s given another fat joke. (When the kids open their Christmas presents, you half-expect his will be a honey-glazed ham.) It makes less sense the more thought you give it, but this gonzo fairytale should be on everyone’s holiday watchlist.
We’ve also reviewed Dolly’s Christmas flick “Unlikely Angel,” and you can click here to browse our growing collection of holiday movie content.
Streaming and DVD availability
I’m not sure what’s going on with A Smoky Mountain Christmas on DVD. It’s not available through your more legitimate outlets but is easy to find on eBay or even Etsy. I purchased my copy from a Pigeon Forge-based seller and it arrived with a Sandollar logo, Sandollar being the production company Dolly owned with Sandy Gallin.
Is it a bootleg or are authorized copies available at Dollywood and sold on the secondary market? I have no clue and suspect it’s hit-or-miss whether you end up with decent merchandise. Mine came with nicer packaging than you typically get with bootlegs, and the video quality was higher than what’s available on YouTube, though there are some blips near the end.
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… But wait, there’s more!
I’d intended to do a whole month of holiday-themed movie reviews in July, and even made this horrible graphic to accompany those posts. But tennis beckoned, with a more interesting clay court swing than usual, so it wasn’t long before I fell behind in my viewing.
More holiday content is in the works, though, with reviews of telefilms starring everyone from Herb Edelman to LeAnn Rimes and Nancy McKeon. There’s also some Hallmark fare, including Love, Lights, Hanukkah!, which was every bit as scary as it sounds, so stay tuned.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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