One Christmas (1994)

In 1994, CBS aired a TV movie that almost nobody watched and almost everybody has since forgotten. One Christmas is based on a short story by Truman Capote, stars Katharine Hepburn in one of her final screen appearances, features Henry Winkler playing against type as a slippery con man, and takes place in 1930s New Orleans during the holidays. That sentence should not describe an obscure footnote in television history. Yet here we are.

The film follows Buddy, a young boy growing up with a prim, cautious aunt in rural Alabama. His father, Smoky Packard (Winkler), is the kind of man who shows up with a big smile and a bad plan, and Buddy has never really known him. When Smoky invites the boy to spend Christmas in New Orleans, Buddy goes. What he finds is a father who is generous, warm, unreliable, and fundamentally not built for the responsibilities that fatherhood requires.

What Truman Capote Actually Wrote

Capote wrote "One Christmas" in 1982, late in his life and career. It's a companion piece of sorts to his better-known autobiographical story "A Christmas Memory," which he published in 1956. Both stories draw from his own childhood experience of being raised by relatives in Alabama after his parents' marriage fell apart. Capote spent time with his father, Archulus Persons, a man with real charm and real instability, and the dynamic in the story is clearly personal.

The TV movie stays fairly faithful to that emotional core. Buddy idolizes a father he barely knows, discovers the man is a con artist, and spends Christmas watching him scheme. The aunt, Miss Sook in the original story, is played by Hepburn with an economy of performance that suits a woman who has learned not to expect much from life.

Capote's original story is less than 40 pages. Adapting it to feature length required expansion, and the screenplay by Una Lowry does the reasonable thing: it fills time by making Smoky's New Orleans world more vivid, adding supporting characters who populate his con-man orbit. The additions don't damage the story, but they don't deepen it much either.

Henry Winkler Playing a Con Man in 1930s New Orleans

This is the casting decision that sounds wrong and turns out to be right. Winkler was coming off years of being The Fonz, a role that had defined him so thoroughly that serious dramatic work was difficult to get. Playing Smoky Packard gave him something genuinely interesting to do: a character who isn't villainous, exactly, but is constitutionally incapable of being good.

Winkler finds the correct register for Smoky. He doesn't play him as a schemer; he plays him as a man who genuinely believes everything will work out, because it usually does, and if it doesn't he'll find another angle. That's a harder performance than it looks. There's something almost affectionate about the way Winkler handles the character's self-delusions.

T.J. Lowther plays Buddy. If the name rings a bell, it's because he played the young Kevin Costner in A Perfect World the year before, also a film about a boy navigating a complicated relationship with a charming, unreliable man who is not his father. Lowther was one of the better child actors of that period and brings real watchfulness to Buddy, a kid who is always evaluating, always trying to figure out if the man in front of him is worth trusting.

Katharine Hepburn's Final Years

Hepburn made only a handful of screen appearances after 1981's On Golden Pond, for which she won her fourth Academy Award. One Christmas was one of the last. She was 86 or 87 during production (sources vary on her birth year; she claimed 1909 but records suggest 1907), and age shows in the physical performance. Her voice was still distinctly her own, that clipped Connecticut cadence that no one has ever successfully imitated.

She plays Buddy's aunt with very little sentimentality. The aunt is a woman who loves Buddy but also believes in hard truths, and Hepburn plays those qualities without softening either of them. There's a scene where she and Buddy discuss what kind of man Smoky is. Hepburn doesn't editorialize or comfort. She just tells the boy what she knows, and trusts him to handle it. It's a good scene.

Hepburn rarely gave interviews about her later TV work. She tended to discuss it the way skilled professionals discuss the necessary parts of the job: honestly but briefly.

Is One Christmas Worth Watching?

It is, with calibrated expectations. This is a TV movie from 1994, which means the production values are modest, the pacing is deliberate, and it's designed for an audience watching at home on a Tuesday night in December, not for a theatrical crowd.

What the film does well is the emotional specificity of Capote's source material. The gap between who Buddy needs his father to be and who Smoky actually is never gets collapsed into a tidy lesson. The film doesn't punish Smoky or redeem him. He stays himself, which is more honest than most holiday television manages.

Director Tony Bill, who won an Oscar as a producer for The Sting (1973), keeps the film clean and uncluttered. He doesn't push for significance. New Orleans at Christmas in the 1930s has its own atmosphere, and the film lets that do some of the work.

The ending, which I won't spoil, earns its emotion by not reaching for it. Buddy goes home understanding something he didn't understand before. That's all. That's enough.