Happy New Year!

My deepest thanks for the pleasure of your company in 2023, and best wishes to all for a pleasant and peaceful 2024!

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

 A very Merry Christmas for those who celebrate!

Recently, I was interviewed by Gregory Wakeman for the BBC website on The Shop Around the Corner (1940)  which we previously discussed here.  Have a look at the article at this link.

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Get your copy of CHRISTMAS IN CLASSIC FILMS here at Amazon in print or eBook...

...and here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a variety of other online stores.

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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 and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Christmas Eve - 1947

 

Christmas Eve (1947) coasts on its title and its setting on Christmas Eve to enter the hallowed sphere of yuletide movies, but it’s not very Christmas-y.  The sentiment, what little there is of it, seems forced and we have to even wonder what the point is. 

Ann Harding, fresh off her great role in It Happened on 5^th Avenue (1947) has a very different role here as a much older, frail, wealthy dowager who is lonely and a bit eccentric.  Her nephew, played by Reginald Denny, wants control of her finances.  The judge will decide her competence, and perhaps even her moral value, on the contest if her three adopted sons will return home to visit her on Christmas Eve.  We need to accept a lot of plot points on face value if we are to enjoy a movie, especially a Christmas movie, but this seems to stretch things not only beyond belief but beyond our ability to perhaps even enjoy the film. 

She is most proud of the fact that her three adoptive sons left home years ago to make their own way in the world and not sponge off her, like Reginald Denny.  Will they come home if she bids them?  She has had no contact with them for years.  That is the suspense of the story, but we are taken down avenues of the men’s current adventures that may make us doubt not only that they will make it home, but that they are even worth seeing.

George Brent plays her son Michael, who is a playboy, bankrupt, and not above writing bad checks, and trying to marry heiresses on the strength of their family fortune.  Regular gal Joan Blondell attaches herself to him like a barnacle and intends to drag him to the altar whether he likes it or not.  She’s probably the only thing that can save him from himself.

George Raft plays her son Mario, who is a gangster, but we see he has his good points too, taking the rap years ago for a crime Reginald Denny committed, just for the old lady’s sake.  His side story is the most interesting, an action-packed episode of fisticuffs with Nazis on a yacht off South America. It’s a risk for him to enter the U.S. with the feds after him, but anything for Mom.

Randolph Scott plays her son Jonathan, a rodeo cowboy who drinks quite a bit, and isn’t the sharpest blade in the drawer, but he proves to be a good guy, too, when he adopts (or runs off with) three baby girls and with luck, manages to entangle himself romantically with the lady officer incognito who is trying to break up a black-market baby adoption ring.  His rash action makes Ann Harding an instant grandma, and she couldn’t be happier.

By the end of the film, the boys have made it back to Ann Harding’s mansion, and the judge lets her keep control of her finances, and Reginald Denny is in trouble.  John Litel’s along as an FBI agent here to escort George Raft to prison, but he’s a good egg and they all have Christmas Eve dinner first. 

They bow their heads to say grace, and then the fade-out.  It’s a Christmas movie in spite it itself, but leaves us wondering, “What the heck was that?”  You can believe in Santa Claus, but it’s harder to believe this.

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Get your copy of CHRISTMAS IN CLASSIC FILMS here at Amazon in print or eBook...

...and here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a variety of other online stores.

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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 and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

"That's What I Want for Christmas"

Stowaway (1936), which is not a Christmas movie, ends the movie with a Christmas scene in which Shirley Temple sings about what she wants for Christmas.

It’s used to tie up the movie, to show the happily ever after of her new family. In this adventure, Shirley is the orphaned daughter of missionaries in China. Cute as a bug, she’s raised speaking Chinese and learning Confucius-type pearls of wisdom from Philip Ahn. She’s on her own after the person who is assigned to take her to safety away from country bandits does not do his job. She wanders into Robert Young, a rich American playboy, and accidently stows away on the very ship he is taking around the South Seas. Also on board is Alice Faye, who chides Mr. Young on both his wealth and his irresponsibility (she is traveling with her dour future mother-in-law played by Helen Westley to reunite with her drip of a fiancé on a colonial plantation), but Alice eventually warms to Robert as they both find themselves shipboard babysitters to Shirley. Young’s valet, the ever-proper Arthur Treacher, helps.

Young wants to adopt Shirley, and he and Alice Faye create a fake marriage so that he can do so, which then after a few twists and turns in the plot, and a few songs, the judge in Reno at their divorce decides they should stay together. 

In the final scene, everybody’s sitting around the Christmas tree in their jammies and bathrobes and Shirley, the little girl everybody wants for a daughter in the 1930s, sings “That’s What I Want for Christmas.”  The lyrics include shoes for poor children everywhere, and soldiers who never fight, and making her new mommy and daddy happy, safe, and strong. What a swell kid!

Christmas is a convenient sort of ready-made finale for this movie. It’s the shorthand for happily ever after.

But I keep worrying about Philip Ahn not knowing where she is. 

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Get your copy of CHRISTMAS IN CLASSIC FILMS here at Amazon in print or eBook...

...and here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a variety of other online stores.

  ************

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 and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Strictly Personal - 1945

Today, we mark Pearl Harbor Day, the 82nd anniversary of the catastrophe that brought the United States into the worldwide fight against fascism.  It's a shame it often seems to take a catastrophe to take a stand against the evils of fascism, but to our credit, once we get going, we can do a good job of it.

Hollywood, as we've noted many times on this blog, helped enormously to get out the message on the evils of fascism and did much to support the Allied war effort.  This previous post on FMPU - the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army discussed the production of war information and training films, and this previous post on Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944) highlighted one of those films, featuring many actors early in their careers who have since become well known to us.

Sara Haden, quite familiar to us old movie buffs and certainly familiar to movie audiences in her day, starred in another training film, this one meant for the Women's Army Corps (WAC).  Strictly Personal (1945), about 35 minutes long, is an interesting film for its frank and rather easygoing discussion of health and hygiene.  In similar films meant for male recruits, the message of health and hygiene was sometimes delivered with humor and cartoons, as if the subject was too uncomfortable for the boys to receive it in any other way.  Films discussing sex and venereal disease were perhaps delivered with more seriousness and certainly, more warning.  

Strictly Personal seems to take for granted its audience would be interested in the subject, and perhaps they were; it contains actually sound advice even for today on nutrition, exercise, musculature, sleep, health and dental concerns, as well as instruction in the use of cosmetics and hair care within the restrictions of military regulations.  Discussion of constipation and menstruation is particularly refreshing for the no-nonsense and friendly advice.  We may imagine that some young women back in the day got scant scientific information on these subjects at home.  The subject of menopause is also introduced, with the reassuring promise that it would not mean the end of enjoyment of sex.  No warnings about venereal disease, though.   At the time, the WAC was open to women volunteers between 21 and 45 years of age.  As the narrator tells us, the women can aspire to be "in perfect shape -- that's what it takes for the man-sized job you've picked for yourselves when you volunteered."

Sara Haden, with her mid-Atlantic stage diction, presents these topics breezily and banishes the very idea that her audience should be at all embarrassed.  The daughter of actress Charlotte Walker, Miss Haden began on stage in the 1920s and made her film debut in 1934.  We know her from many films where she portrayed spinster-type supporting roles, usually somebody's aunt -- most famously, Andy Hardy's Aunt Milly.  It's interesting to think that her contribution to the war effort was probably the most screen time she got in her long career.  However, like many from Hollywood who appeared in these military training films, she was uncredited.

You can watch Strictly Personal shared from YouTube below:

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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 and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.