When Angels Come to Town

When Angels Come To Town / 2004 / made-for-tv movie

The prop department ran out of stripes for this candy cane.

When Angels Come To Town is a bizarre and confusing 2004 movie from The Hallmark Channel.  This is 2-3 movies shoved into one.

In the first hour, we see a kid failing in the foster care system, social workers not being able to help fix the foster care system, an old man being told his way of life is outdated, post-Christmas factory layoffs, a penny-pinching store owner not getting the magic of Christmas, a package getting mixed up in delivery, an old German man remembering how he fled Germany in the 40’s, a poor twentysomething girl with gumption but no luck whatsoever, an angel get drunk, a department store catch on fire, and another angel get fired.  Yep.  An angel gets FIRED.  I imagine that had George Bailey jumped, we’d see a similar scene between Clarence and that talking orb in heaven.

Sally (Tammy Blanchard) is the saddest assistant manager of a small town shop ever.  Her parents are dead.  She’s too young to adopt her brother out of the foster care system.  Her ex-boyfriend Karl (Sean Gallagher) is a heartless jerk who wants to shut down his father’s glass blowing ornament factory so they can automate and make a profit.  They’re trying to solve the mystery of a box that she got in the mail with his grandmother’s initials on it.  It’s clear that through all this mystery solving, they’ll be getting back together at the end of the two hours.

Peter Falk is a weird, senile angel named Max.  Like all Christmas angels starting with It’s a Wonderful Life, he is on this earth to help sad people at Christmastime.  Unlike It’s A Wonderful Life, Max has decided the best way to do that is to sometimes dress up like an extra from The Music Man and at other times dressed up in drag and pretending to be a woman.  Honestly I didn’t think when I woke up this morning “seeing Peter Falk in drag” would be checked off my bucket list.  But oh it was.

It was really hard following all the plot points in this movie.  Do we want Sally to adopt her Karl from the department store?  Is Max a glass-blowing German social worker?  I have no idea.  An hour and twenty minutes in, we went back to old-timey Germany where they fled the Communists, and that’s where I gave up trying to follow the plot.

It’s entertaining enough by trying to guess the plot, but you need to watch it from the beginning because there’s no way you’ll make up for lost time as you go along.  That being said, and this might be because he is the late great Peter Falk, I’m giving an Elfie Nominee to Peter Falk as Max the Angel for the best senile-old-man-angel.  This is very niche.


A – Angels
FJ – Fake Jobs
ECM – Extreme Christmas Mysticism
DP – Dead Parents
CDEM – Capitalist Deus Ex Machina
EN – Elfie Nominee - Peter Falk as "Max the Angel"

Memorable line:
"Jimmy, we can’t lose hope!" - Sally, after an hour of disappointment and sadness.


Merry X-mas,

- Sarah Elf