The best Christmas movie you never saw

The Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth made a quiet sort of splash in the 1980s with his films Local Hero and Gregory’s Girl, understated comedies about people unmoored by their own emotions. Lured stateside late in the decade, he endured three commercial flops in a row — Housekeeping, Breaking In and Being Human — before returning to the UK and slipping from view. In between, though, he made what may be his best film. It’s arguably his most obscure. It’s also in the pantheon of great (if seldom-seen) Christmas movies: Comfort and Joy, from 1984.

Comfort and Joy is the story of a Glasgow DJ, Alan Bird — or “Dickie Bird,” as he’s styled for the benefit of his morning-drive easy-listening audience. Bird  is an affable sort, unchallenged by life, and seemingly content. (The great light comedian Bill Paterson, a Glaswegian himself, absolutely nails the complacent cockiness of the local celebrity. I once saw Tom Snyder, who was then a local news anchor in Philadelphia, walk through a middle-school fair like a visiting rajah. Paterson gets that shoulders-back, eyes-ahead air of entitlement exactly right.) Alan/Dickie’s world suddenly unravels, though, when his kleptomaniac girlfriend leaves him days before Christmas.

What happens next manages to be both heartbreaking and charming. Bird plunges into a depression, questions his own existence, and finds an unlikely way out when he stumbles into a street war between competing ice-cream barons.

I’ll leave it there, because what I want you to do now is seek the movie out and watch it. Finding it won’t be easy: It’s never been released to the States on DVD, and even the VHS is out of print. You can find it used, though, at Amazon and other sellers. It’s well worth your time to track it down. It has, as the old cliche has it, both laughs and tears, and it ends with one of the sweetest, emotionally truest, and most satisfying Christmas-morning scenes ever put on film.

Comfort and Joy is one of those movies that makes you want to buttonhole people in the street and tell them about it. Which is, in a sense, what I’m doing here. It’s a gift. Merry Christmas.