Christmas Holiday (1944)

Christmas Holiday (1944) is an absorbing noir that despite the bleakness of the tale, captivates the audience with quiet storytelling sprinkled with visual epiphanies, clever cinematography, and stellar performances.

The title credit announces this is “W. Somerset Maugham’s” Christmas Holiday, and though it is not entirely faithful to the Maugham story, one suspects the studio judiciously gave top credit to the noted author in order to ease the way a little for its two stars Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly to be presented in a movie so unlike what either had ever done or would do again.  It’s as if the execs felt the audience needed to be prepared for what they were about to see.  It’s okay everybody, it’s English literature.

This post is part of the countdown to Christmas coinciding with the launch of my newest book, Christmas in Classic Films.

Some of the public and evidently, critics, were put off by this unexpected handling of the normally bright, chipper, and virginal Miss Durbin into a vehicle that was decidedly sordid.  She is great in the movie, in what is probably her best ever performance.  She deserves credit not only for her work in this odd little film, but for the courage to want to test her abilities and expand her career options into something a little meatier.

In the original Maugham story, an English university student skips his family’s Christmas gathering to go to Paris for a little adventure, meets an old friend who has now fallen under the spell of fascism, who takes him to a brothel and introduces him to a Russian emigree down on her luck and now a prostitute.  Her husband is in prison for murder, and she still loves him, degrades herself in a masochistic attempt to share his misery. 

Maugham tells it better than I do.

Possibly the main confounding aspect to the movie is not so much that Deanna Durbin is playing a slightly cleaned up version of the prostitute, but that the title Christmas Holiday would seem to evoke for us scenes of sleighrides and snowball-throwing jocularity. To further complicate matters, the cheery title credits are accompanied by a sprightly instrumental leaving us to believe this might be a musical.

The studio could have changed the movie’s title from the original source material—something that they did, let’s face it, all the time.  But sticking their most important star in a movie called something like “Rainy Night in New Orleans” and then later on in tiny script at the bottom, “adapted from a story by W. Somerset Maugham” would not give the movie the same prestige of pasting the name of a noted English author, whose rights to his story the studio had paid good money for and wanted us to know it.

So Christmas Holiday is not exactly meant to be a deceiving title.  But it deceives, and there’s a lot of deception going on in this movie.

Dean Harens plays a newly minted lieutenant, just graduated from officers’ training school.  He’s on a furlough before deployment, and he intends to fly to San Francisco to be married.  The commanding officer awarding them their commissions has a brief and frank, and frankly, chilling, admonition to them:  “Some of you will serve in one way, some in another. Some by living. Some by dying.”

One has to wonder about the table-top Christmas tree in the barracks.  Not regulation, I’m thinking, but it’s as if the director, noir master Robert Siodmak is deliberately saying, “You want Christmas?  I got your stinking Christmas!”

Just as the young lieutenant is packing his duds, he gets a telegram from his fiancée announcing that she has married someone else. 

It’s Christmas Eve.  There has never been a cheatin’ song to match this.

Though his pals invite him to join them on furlough as they go on the razzle in New York, he grimly decides to continue his plan to fly to San Francisco and evidently confront the couple.  “They’re not going to get away with this.” 

Does he mean them harm?  It is a passionate decision by a man who’s just been gut punched, but we will come to know this fellow by following over his shoulder on this 24-hour adventure that he is actually a cool, level-headed type, ready to step in when he’s needed, and nonjudgmental: good qualities in a man and in an officer.

I like Dean Harens in the role.  He made only a few movies, but went on to do decades of television.  His reactions and his support of Deanna Durbin in this film are solid and he is as interesting to watch as she is.  His acting style seems quite mature for a fellow with so little experience before the camera.  He and Miss Durbin certainly play well off each other, there is a rapport that indicates their characters bring comfort to each other, but that there is still an enigmatic wall between them that is intriguing.

The whole movie is an enigma, and it’s one of those that you have to see a couple times at least to catch everything.

He catches his flight to California, but there is bad weather and the plane must land near New Orleans.  Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz plucked the story from Paris and plunked it down in New Orleans as a suitable substitute.  There’s French placenames and a certain gothic decay that lends verisimilitude.  Ornate wrought iron and Spanish moss.

In the bar of the hotel where the airline puts him up, he is annoyed by Richard Whorf, a splendid scamp of a journalist lush.  In only a few moments, when he quickly gives up questioning passengers over their plane being forced down because he is desperate to have anything to write about, we discover he’s really more of a boozehound than a reporter.  He might have been a good reporter years ago, but he really doesn’t care anymore, if he ever did.

Though his sales pitch is vague, he entices Harens to come with him to a “joint” where the owner might be able to fix him up with another way home.  The joint is a cheap nightclub as a meager front to what is actually a cheap brothel.  Even with the Production Code, we can clearly see this is a brothel.  Gladys George is the madam, reliable in her fallen woman with a heart of gold resume.  Though she apparently has connections, Miss Gladys is not able to help Harens get onto another flight, if that was even realistic. 

Because Harens plays his role like a young man who is bitter and unhappy, but not at all naïve or foolish, we are not really sure if he is unaware what kind of place this is, or that Mr. Whorf’s side gig is bringing men to the establishment as prospective customers.  Harens may not be aware because he is too distracted by his own problems, or he may just not care.  He’s not looking for a prostitute; he might not even want anything to do with women right now.

Still, he’s a gentleman.  Watch how he stands whenever Miss Gladys comes and goes, and when Deanna Durbin is summoned to his table.  Both the ladies notice this about him. 

Deanna also has troubles of her own, and the movie, unlike a lot of noirs, will take a leisurely pace unraveling them.  We see her first as a singer in this brothel, performing a breathy, half-hearted version of “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year.”  It is not same trilling soprano that captivated “100 Men”, etc., in the string of hits that filled Universal’s coffers.  Her mood, like her lovely voice, is restrained, reined in, and she is almost somnambulant. 

An older chap, a businessman perhaps, silently hands his card to a waiter, who sneaks it to Deanna.  She reads it with no expression and continues her song.  Afterwards, she sits at table with a couple of other female staff and hands the card to one of them, as if to say she doesn’t want the customer and she’s giving up the chance to earn to her friend.  The other lady takes the card and introduces herself to the businessman, who briefly looks with surprise at Deanna, since she is the one he wanted, but he takes the substitute.  We see young women climbing the stairs over Deanna’s shoulder as she’s singing.  We know what kind of place this is.

Gladys George hands Harens a flyer announcing Midnight Mass at a local church, and says Richard Whorf suggested he might want to take it in.  This is a strange turn of events, but in hindsight, the kind you get when you watch the movie a couple times, it seems as if Miss Gladys has read this chap to be a decent guy and she is setting up a chance for Deanna to get away for the evening, because Miss Durbin has suddenly come alive, eager to go to church.  Gladys also refuses to take Harens’ money for the drink and the cab ride over, but slyly says it would be okay if he wanted to tip Deanna, however.

Ah-ha, so maybe she’s not just giving Deanna the night off.  Maybe she’s just finishing the setup that the drunken Whorf started.

The church service is an actual filmed Latin Mass in a Catholic church, and the director lingers over the enormous Gothic cathedral with its full attendance, choir, several priests and altar servers.  The organ thunders, and perhaps the director is saying again, “Yeah, I got your Christmas right here.”

Dean Harens, who didn’t really want to come to church, is nevertheless patiently watching the proceedings, perhaps lulled to a peaceful forgetting of his troubles for the moment, but Deanna Durbin, who is absorbed in the Mass, will break the serenity first when her eyes fill with tears as she watches the people gather for Communion, and then as the boy choir launches into “Adeste Fideles,” she begins to cry, struggling to stop.

Harens notices, and kindly asks her if she would like to leave, but she shakes her head.  In another moment, she is kneeling not on the kneeler but on the floor, in an effort to hide herself, and sobs uncontrollably.  Others glance at her and at Harens with embarrassment, and he is helpless to either comfort or remove her, so he stands at the end of the pew and blocks her from view with his long trench coat so that she may weep in private.

After the Mass has ended (“Deo gratias”), he waits for her to pull herself together.  Most of the church has emptied out, but for a few left kneeling, perhaps saying the Rosary, and one fellow who appears to be doing the Stations of the Cross.  She apologizes to him, gives him back his handkerchief, and they go to an all-night diner, where she confesses she has never cried like that before.  When it is too late for her to get a bus back to her room, she intends to sit up all night there, but he takes her back to his hotel suite.

It is not the meeting up that Glady George would have preferred for her employee perhaps, but neither Harens nor Miss Durbin have designs on each other.  Having pulled herself together, she is no damsel in distress.  There is a quiet, sensible strength about her.  When he offers to take the couch so she can have his room, she refuses.  I love her reply, “In my own little way, I’m just as much a gentleman as you are.” 

He doesn’t press the point, but sleeps in his room (though with twin beds, one would think if it were not for the Production Code, these two very tired people would be perfectly happy each taking one and sleeping in the same room).

The next morning, she has ordered breakfast and they chat over his “dear John” telegram, which he has left lying around and she has read.  Then it’s her turn, and we launch into the noir flashback. She is originally from Vermont, has been on her own since her teens.  I love that she wears reading glasses to peruse the morning paper, without a joke or explanation.

Her husband is in prison for murder.  She tells him, and prepares us, that the prison psychologist said “his relations with his mother were pathological.” 

Lots of enigmatic inferences, code talk, and unfinished sentences.

She met him at a concert where they are both absorbed in the nosebleed section by the thunderous “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.  It is a pretty tepid meet-cute, but there is something puppy-like in Gene Kelly’s demeanor, desperate to be liked, and after a few dates, she was charmed by his boyish awkwardness and flighty, happy manner.  She had been alone for years, without family, that when he brought her home to Mother, she had found the place of belonging she had missed.

Kelly’s awkward, strangely needy young man may touch our sympathy as well, but like a good mystery, there is sleight of hand happening here and we won’t really know the truth about him until the end.  Kelly had played rogues before and would make a career of playing them, but this character has many layers to him and Kelly plays him with eerie panache.  He seems like only an odd duck on first appearance, a little pathetic and somewhat tiresome; but by the end of the film, he is a soulless monster, and Kelly is masterful in the progression.  It is not until the end of the movie that we really see, as does Durbin, that the character always was a sociopath.  He never changed; we just weren’t really seeing him.  He was playing us for fools, and we were.

Gale Sondergaard, as Mother, is…well, Gale Sondergaard.  She created the template for sinister gloss.  She welcomes Deanna Durbin into the family with vague warnings about her son but requires Durbin’s devoted partnership.  Between the two of them, they will make a man of her boy.

The trio is cozy at first, with Mother knitting, fondly watching as her boy plays the piano and Durbin, clinging to him, bending over him like a protective cape, sings “I’ll Be Loving You Always.” It is their song, a leitmotif that, like so much else in this movie, will turn sour.

At one point in their courtship, Kelly takes Deanna to a gambler’s den he frequents, wanting her to see it, maybe just perversely wanting to see this beautiful woman in it, to say farewell to his old life of dissolute behavior.  We are startled by seeing Richard Whorf there; he has been part of this tangled web farther then we knew. 

Gene has a hard time keeping a job, and admits his own inability to live up to the greatness of his ancestors, who practically ran Louisiana once upon a time.  He falters, and apologizes again.

Not too far into their marriage, he returns to his old ways, if he ever really left them.  In one scene he returns late at night, she has waited for him, and he, boyishly, teasingly, apologizes, almost clownishly begging for forgiveness to make her smile.  She does, as she murmurs, “Devil.”  Her delivery in the half-shadows is delectable.

But he gets deeper into trouble, and murders his bookie.  Mom tries to cover it up, and when Deanna finally finds out about it and has cops searching their rooms, she tries to cover it up, too. But Gene is caught, awaiting trial, and Gale Sondergaard lambastes her daughter-in-law for not loving her son enough, for not pulling her weight and helping her to “manage” him.  If only she were a better wife, had done her part, then they could have saved Gene from himself.

Gene goes to prison, Mother leaves New Orleans to find work as a housekeeper to a wealthy family in New York, and Deanna, maybe with the assistance of Richard Whorf, finds herself at Madam Gladys’s bordello, still singing “I’ll Be Loving You Always,” but now like a lament.

Dean Harens decides not to fly to San Francisco to confront his former fiancée after all, he will just let it go.  He’s learned a lot in the last 24 hours.  He decides he will just go back to camp, but when he sees the newspaper headline this Christmas morning that Gene Kelly has broken out of prison…

He rushes to Gladys George’s establishment to warn Deanna and to support her in any way he can.  Nice guy, for not being in love with her, and though Deanna and Dean clearly have a strong connection with each other, we are never given any indication they are in love, and realism of that makes the impact of the movie stronger.

Gene Kelly tracks down Richard Whorf and holds a gun on him, forcing him to take him to Deanna.  When Whorf gestures to her that her husband is in the building, she rushes forward, eager to see Kelly again.

But this is a sneering, angry Gene Kelly, no longer asking insincerely for forgiveness.  He’s quite sincere when he accuses her of being a tramp, of being unfaithful to him here.  If we assumed that Deanna had taken the filthy job in this disreputable place as the only option she had of supporting herself, we are shocked to hear her excuse for choosing to work here: she wanted to subject herself to degradation as a punishment and as a way to share his misery in prison.

He doesn’t believe her, pulls his gun on her, and when he is gunned down by the cop and she tearfully cradles him in her arms, we see she is still gripped by that hopeless, helpless love for someone who can’t seem to cope without her.

In what is probably the most magnanimous gesture, though he obviously means it ironically, Kelly tells her, “You can let go now.”

But she doesn’t let go until Dean Harens, in his quiet but firm voice repeats, “You heard what he said.  You can let go now.”

She seems to wake up and lets him go.  She looks up and the parting clouds reveal a starry sky as “Liebestod” swells up and one star seems brighter than the others.  After all, it’s Christmas night.

Director Siodmak is saying again, “Yeah, I got your Christmas right here.”

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Come back next week for a (much) lighter story in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), in which a visiting Judy Garland saves Christmas.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.