1986, d. Henry Winkler - youtube
There's never been anything particularly "cool" about Dolly Parton. Her twangy country music was part of the pop crossover movement of the 1970's establishing Dolly as a big music star. But she also had a big personality, and an immense amount of charm, so even if you didn't particularly care for Dolly's music, she was hard to dislike. She has an innate warmth and a disarmingly gentle and playful demeanour that makes her seem like just a sweet, nice, and fun person to be around. She's the type of person who no doubt make you feel good just being around her, because she kind of makes you feel good just watching her perform or act from a distance.
Today, the general population loves Dolly the person far more than they love her music. She's still an immensely charitable person with a big heart who seems to endorse love and kindness unironically and sell it without anyone being snarky about it. Even her shrine to herself and her passion for "folksy" Smoky Mountain life crossed with her unabashed capitalistic streak -- Dollywood in Pigeon Forge Tennessee -- can't tarnish the near-saintly figure she casts.
Dolly, besides being a singer and public figure and activist and theme park owner, also acts from time to time. Most of her major appearances were in films in the 1980s, starting with 9 to 5 and ending with Steel Magnolias, and none of the parts were very celebrated. Let's face it, Dolly is a flat out lovely and wonderful human being, she's at best a decent actress.
Her starring role in A Smoky Mountain Christmas really lets Dolly stretch her wings playing Lorna Davis, a popular and successful pop-country music star with a folksy charm and a twangy accent hailing from the Smoky Mountains. (Way to stretch, Doll). She's having a tough time with her latest recordings and subsequent video shoot, and a creepy paparazzo (Dan Hedaya) keeps stalking her, so for Christmas she wants to get away back to her homelands of the Smoky Mountains to stay in a cabin that belongs to her best friend (who is dead, maybe? In the first act she has a few narrations to her best friend who we never meet nor does she ever get referenced again past the first act).
Upon arriving into the region, Lorna is stopped and harassed by the local sheriff, John Jensen (Bo Hopkins). (ACAB. Dolly knew it!) Not only does Sherrif Jensen have his eyes on her, but so does the horse-riding, cloak-wearing, spell-casting Jezebel, who sees Lorna as her enemy because Jezebel has claimed sheriff Jensen as her own (she can have him). Yes, Jezebel is a witch-woman.
Forging on to the cabin. There she finds the cabin is occupied by a septet of precocious orphans, or seven dwarves if you will. They all (well, all except cynical Jake) love her immediately. They call her an angel, what with her giant golden hair and always strikingly made-up face and her exceptionally clingy and cleavy wardrobe... you know, like angels have.
I can't go through all the weird twists and turns of the plot here, but, quickly, Lorna meets Mountain Dan (Lee Majors) who turns out to be an ex-lawyer from the city who ran away from the hustle-bustle and has built up a reputation as a local mythical figure of danger. They have a romance, of sorts, which involves no romance of any sort, save a big kiss at the end after Judge John Ritter awards Lorna custody of the kids, and decrees that the duly elected sheriff has been terrible at his job and can be sheriff no more, and the mean old orphanage ladies from James and the Giant Peach can no longer run the orphanage. (Jezebel ate her own poisoned pie and is in a sleep for the ages in a jail cell with one wall missing. Also Dan Hedaya's paparazzo tracked Lorna down and somehow became a good guy in all this, even proclaiming himself uncle to the orphans? That's weird and not suss at all.)
Watching from a VHS transfer to YouTube then ported to my big screen tv, the resolution was godawful (there are about five different videos up on YouTube all of differing qualities of awful... in one version, nobody had a face, it was like they were all in witness protection and their identities were blurred) so it wasn't the prettiest watch ever. The story is goofy nonsense in the most glorious vein of 1980s TV movies. It was like a mash up of a Muppets Christmas special and an Ewok adventure, but with human cartoons instead of puppets and people in wee bear suits. Once the witch was introduced I was hoping for more magic, and for Lorna and Jezebel to have some sort of faceoff, either like Gandolf and Saruman, or a kind of magical music-off like from Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Alas, Lorna just tricks her into eating her own poisoned pie.
Dolly does a *lot* of singing here. They are typical Dolly tunes. They are what they are. Not bad, but soooo not my thing. At one point Dolly sings a song to one of the wee orphans about loving one's self and natural beauty, a tune that in the moment struck me as ironic given that Dolly has had countless plastic surgeries and bodily enhancements...but then I realized the dark undercurrent of it all is Dolly's body dysmorphia and her own inability to be happy with herself. The song is about her trying to tell herself to be happy with herself. In this context, pretty potent.
This movie also acts like a template for late stage Tom Cruise productions where all the peripheral characters, even the bad guys, cannot help but heap compliments upon the main character and its performer by proxy. Is Cruise a Dolly fan? Something seems very right about that.
Lorna, and Dolly by proxy, is very upbeat and likeable, wholly inoffensive to a fault. She has no sass or snark in her, she's just a genuinely nice person, and so the bad guys kind of have the run of her. She has little to counter them with. In modern contexts, Lorna's kindness would win them over, have them turn over a new leaf, but in the 1980s, the bad guys were irredeemable... mostly.
A Smoky Mountain Christmas is definitely not a good movie nor a Christmas classic, but it's a delightful retro-fest of a watch that is both utter nonsense and yet quite endearing. It's a weird movie, yes, but it really needed to be, like, twenty percent weirder in order to really develop a lasting cult following. There's a reason you've never seen nor heard of it.
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