By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1986 festive season heart-warmer A Smoky Mountain Christmas, starring Dolly Parton, Lee Majors, Bo Hopkins, Anita Morris and Dan Hedaya.
It’s Christmas in July, so it’s officially the second-best time to take a look back at A Smoky Mountain Christmas, country music legend and all-round American icon Dolly Parton’s festive season gift to her fans, and to the world at large. A sweet, charming and occasionally slightly warped family flick, A Smoky Mountain Christmas was first broadcast on major US network ABC on December 14, 1986, and has rather curiously not seen a home entertainment release since its long-ago VHS bow in 1992.
A singer and songwriter of absolutely prodigious gifts, an actress of abundant sass and assurance (1980’s 9 To 5 and 1992’s The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas are her best), and a consistent source of both upbeat joy and knowing grit, Dolly Parton has also been spruiking Christmas way before Mariah Carey tried to trademark it. “I love being home for Christmas,” Dolly told People Magazine in 2024. “I’ve missed all kinds of holidays, but I have never not been home for Christmas. I love the tradition of being home for Christmas, and being with family, and having all the good food and all the different dishes that different family members make. I love the music, the lights and the sounds…I love everything to do with Christmas.”
Dolly has produced albums, TV music specials, live performances, and narrative telemovies based around the festive season, but her first tilt at televisual yuletide immortality came with 1986’s A Smoky Mountain Christmas. Decades before she teamed up with James Patterson, Dolly originated the telemovie’s story, which was then scripted by William Bleich, who has penned a batch of small screen horror, as well as Abel Ferarra’s 1986 telemovie The Gladiator. Parton’s one-time manager Sandy Gallin was an executive producer, and there are plenty of songs from Dolly too, which certainly gives A Smoky Mountain Christmas the feel of a vanity project…but if anyone is entitled to a vanity project, it’s Dolly Parton…and she crafts a pretty good one too with this enjoyably quirky telemovie.
Directed by The Fonz himself, Henry Winkler (this was the Happy Days icon’s first longform work, and he would direct two more features with 1988’s Memories Of Me and 1993’s Cop & ½), A Smoky Mountain Christmas sees Parton pretty much play herself, though under the somewhat underwhelming moniker of Lorna Davis. Lorna is a country music megastar and bigtime movie actress first glimpsed in LA shooting a very eighties music video (choreographed by Paula Abdul, no less!), complete with singlet-clad male dancers and smoke galore. Despite the protestations of her manager (a welcome cameo from Rene Auberjonois), the overworked Lorna quits mid-shoot after demanding a much-needed break.
Wanting to reconnect with her roots, Lorna lights out from LA and heads off to a friend’s cabin in the Tennessee Smoky Mountains to relax over Christmas. Unfortunately, the cabin has been co-opted by seven, unsurprisingly very cute, escapee orphans on the run from the authorities. Lorna soon becomes the surrogate mother for the kids, and brings a little Christmas cheer into their lives. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, not quite.
On the way into the mountains, Lorna very understandably catches the eye of smalltown sheriff John Jensen (nicely played by cult hero and Vintage Telemovie regular Bo Hopkins, who has featured previously in this column in Dawn: Portrait Of A Teenage Runaway, Rodeo Girl and Kansas City Massacre), which unfortunately raises the ire of his ex-girlfriend Jezebel (played with enjoyable gusto by stage legend and Ruthless People scene stealer Anita Morris), who just happens to be a for-real mountain “witch woman”, complete with magic spells, supernatural abilities, and a very, very bad temper.
Also in the loopy mix is mysterious woodsman Mountain Dan (an engagingly authoritative but still light-hearted turn from the great Lee Majors, of The Six Million Dollar Man fame) and determined paparazzi photographer Harry (character actor Dan Hedaya is off the leash and very funny), both of whom get involved with Lorna and the escapee kids, who are cruelly used as leverage by the crooked and arrogant Sheriff John Jensen, who’s still sore at being turned down by Lorna. There are also multiple allusions to Snow White; plentiful weirdness from Jezebel; actual magic; Santa Claus cosplay (Dolly looks impossibly cute as Santa’s helper, just saying); storybook imagery; and a court case finale surprisingly presided over by a late TV comedy legend.
There’s so much going on in A Smoky Mountain Christmas that it really shouldn’t work…but it does. There are tonal shifts galore, and truly sticky sentimentality. Anita Morris’s Jezebel, meanwhile, feels like she’s wandered in from a different film, but it doesn’t matter. This is like a crazy quilt of a telemovie, and it all just adds welcome dashes of colour that don’t necessarily have to match up perfectly in order to catch the eye. It’s great, silly, but heartfelt fun, and the seven songs from Dolly are terrific.
In her seventy extraordinary years as a performer, Dolly Parton has brought much joy into the world, especially around Christmas, and A Smoky Mountain Christmas rates as one of the best gifts you never knew you needed.
Availability: A Smoky Mountain Christmas is pretty easy to find online, and in a nice, clear, good-sounding presentation to boot.
