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.

War Stories - Part 3 - "Love Letters" - 1945

“Love Letters” (1945) is our third and last in the series of “war stories”. It’s a love story, and a mystery that doesn’t really need The War as a backdrop, but this was a time when so many letters were written, and relationships begun on the strength of a chance meeting.

In many families, the wife said goodbye to the husband (or sweetheart) at the train station. She said welcome home to him (if she was lucky), three or four years later.  The only way to communicate in the years between were by letters. They might meet again -- to resume their lives and their relationship -- as near strangers, unless the letters were particularly heartfelt, and the communication between them was open and honest.

I doubt in our age of instant, but often weak and meaningless, communication does the power of language ever come close to matching the importance it had during World War II.

Note: Ayn Rand co-wrote the script with the writer of the novel on this story is based, Christopher Massie.

Joseph Cotten, again here in his trademark role of the troubled, romantic loner, is an officer with the British Army in Italy. He pens the letters that his fellow officer, Roger Moreland, sends to his girlfriend. Roger, played by Robert Sully, is a boorish, self-centered cad, who, though unfaithful to this woman, is amused by the idea of winning her through Mr. Cotten’s tender prose.

Cotten is sick of the idea, and disgusted with himself for doing the chore, partly because he knows Roger is an ass, and partly because he fears he is falling in love with the woman who writes sensitive replies to his letters. He has a fiancée of his own, and he is growing apart from her. He seldom writes her, saving his deepest thoughts for Roger’s friend, Victoria.

“I was able to write to her all the things I was never able to say to any woman I know.” He says, and felt the ruse was innocent as long as the girl didn’t care. “But Victoria cared, understood.” He realizes Victoria has fallen in love, not with Roger as she believes, but with his letters.

“She’s in love with a man who doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Cotten demands the charade stop. He won’t write anymore, wants to know nothing more about her. When Cotten is seriously wounded and placed in a military hospital in Italy, he gets a letter from Roger, who has returned to England for training. Roger has married Victoria.

When Cotten is sent back to England to convalesce he learns from another pal that Roger is dead, not in the war but from an accident at home. This news nags at Mr. Cotten, because it means this Victoria is now a widow, and free, and a temptation in spite of himself. He also feels guilt for making possible what he suspects must have been a bad marriage.  In a way, though it is never couched in these terms, it's as if he prostituted this earnest, romantic woman to a callous stranger.

He still wants no part of the charade he committed, and wants to distance himself from what he has done.  But when his brother takes him to a party at a friend’s flat, Cotten meets Victoria even though he is not aware of it, mainly because she is not aware she is Victoria.

Victoria is played by Jennifer Jones in their second pairing after last year’s “Since You Went Away.” She goes by another name, because she has lost her memory. There is more intrigue to come, and we get bits and pieces a little at a time. I won’t give a play-by-play on the plot, that would ruin it, but we do learn that Roger was murdered, and Mr. Cotten discovers his letters played a part in a tragedy and the great mystery of Miss Jones’ amnesia.

Jennifer Jones is by turns ethereal, and also teasing and free spirited. This is also something of a trademark role for her, the fey innocent, but she appears more at ease in this film and less fragile than in some of her other work.

Ann Richards plays her friend, a woman who took Jones into her flat and cared for her when she was unable to take care of herself. Ann Richards also had minor roles in “Random Harvest” (see this post) and in “Sorry Wrong Number” (see this post here and here), but her film career ended in the early 1950s.

It’s difficult to believe she could not have been given better promotion by a studio in Hollywood and enjoyed a longer film career, as she has an engaging presence in this film. Her role is minor, but she shows a range of emotion and great chemistry with Joseph Cotten. Until Cotten falls in love with Jennifer Jones, one might suspect, and even wish, that she would get together with Cotten.

Notice the scene where, when Ann Richards wants to discuss the tragedy/mystery privately with Cotten, she sends Jennifer Jones to the store to get some porridge. She hands her their ration book. Since the UK imported most of their cereals (and a lot of other products), rationing was more severe there and lasted well beyond the war. Though the US had its own rationing program, I don’t think we rationed oatmeal (porridge). Maybe somebody can set me straight on that. Being the so-called “bread basket of the world” had its compensations.

We don’t see too many ration books of the day in the movies, and I’m not sure why. Possibly the government requested the cooperation of the film industry not to make too big a joke of them so that people would follow the rules and take their use seriously. Possibly they did not want to harp on (though an English setting in this movie, this was still an American-made movie for an American audience), shortages to an audience weary of them and doing its utmost to sacrifice.

Mr. Cotten takes up residence in a country cottage left to him by his deceased aunt, where he is looked after by rustic family retainer Cecil Kellaway (whom we saw in “Portrait of Jennie”, see here). Ian Wolfe plays a vicar, and Harry Allen a local farmer, both character actors who you might remember from “Mrs. Miniver”, which we reviewed in the second post on this series.

Gladys Cooper, who also teamed up with Jennifer Jones in “Song of Bernadette” (1943), see this previous post, plays Miss Jones’ guardian. She plays prominently in the tragedy/mystery, and she’s a shadowy figure for most of the film. It’s not until the very end we get her story and the truth about Victoria. It’s a good scene between Jones and Cooper, where they both reach back into their memories and describe a particular pivotal event, each finishing the other’s sentences.

The war in this movie, unlike in “Mrs. Miniver” and “The More the Merrier” is less on the surface of everyday life for these country dwellers and more in the fog-shrouded background, though there is one scene where Cotten, driving with Jones on winding lanes, does mention the gas rationing, “Since you love motoring so much, we’ll travel to the end of our coupons.”

Also, there is a scene with a wedding in what appear to be the bombed-out ruins of a church, evocative of the end of “Mrs. Miniver.” The war is still present in this movie, but it seems to be sliding into the background.

And I think that portrait of the little boy which figures in a couple of scenes that Joseph Cotten says is him as a child really was him. There is a similar photo in his autobiography, “Vanity Will Get You Somewhere” (Mercury House, Inc., San Francisco, 1987). In that book, he states that the photo was also used in “Shadow of a Doubt”.

The war is mostly represented in the letters he has written to her, and in his depression on coming home. He tells her, “Ever since I came back from the war, I’ve wanted to be alone. I’ve been miserable with other people. You’re the first one with whom I feel at peace.”

She replies, “That’s because you’re broken up inside almost the same as I am. You’ve been through the war and you can’t bear to look back.”

In this movie, and as World War II drifted into the past (the film was released in August 1945, after the Japanese surrender but before the formal surrender ceremonies in September), the generation that fought the war seemed to decide in large measure not to talk about it anymore. Many servicemen, like Joseph Cotten in the film, preferred not to look back.

Much of that war is documented in letters, and the intriguing notion that two people can fall in love without ever meeting each other…I would not hazard a guess as to how many times that actually happened. I don’t doubt that it did.

This is the end of our series on “war stories”. The all-clear has been sounded. Now get out of my cellar.  I'd better not be missing any cans of SPAM.

The Roaring Twenties - 1939

The Roaring Twenties (1939) may have even more resonance today than it did when it was produced. The year it premiered was only ten years after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, and the world had entered a new era in 1939 with a vengeance. This end of the Depression look back at how-we-got-to-where-we-are is certainly nostalgic, but it was also a critical success and should be regarded as one of the champion movies in that champion movie year of 1939.

The Roaring Twenties, fast-paced and well directed by Raoul Walsh, is remarkable for all the things it attempts to be and succeeds. It is a docu-drama as much as a melodrama. It is a gangster film, but there are so many musical numbers you could as easily call it a musical. It has some outrageously funny lines, but it contains scenes so heartbreakingly pathetic.

Most especially, it looks back on an era still so recent in 1939 and yet from such a remarkably distant perspective, the way we might pack for college and discover with condescending amusement some old souvenir from grammar school. It is a mere ten years from eight years old to adulthood. It also feels like a lifetime.

The film begins with a rolling title prologue that speaks to us today in our present economic crisis: “It may come to pass that, at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay. If that happens, I pray that events as dramatized here, will be remembered.” It is signed Mark Hellinger, the writer of the script, who took the stories of real people and real incidents as a basis for the film.

Then the stern voice of John Deering, the narrator, takes over and through a montage of images, the clock is turned back, year by year, to 1918, the last year of the Great War.

“What’s past is prologue” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, and as such it is appropriate to begin a story that concludes with the Crash at a point in time when the seeds for that event were sewn. Perhaps too often we look at a moment in time as if it really stands apart from other moments, but it does not. It cannot.


James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Jeffrey Lynn are doughboys in France. Cagney is the rough-and-ready average Joe. Jeffrey Lynn is the sensitive college boy who struggles with ideas of right and wrong. Bogart is the thug. It would be one of Humphrey Bogart’s last thug roles before he moved on to being the reluctant hero in 1940s films. He’s looking hale and hearty here, fit and much younger than he did even four years later in Casablanca.

In one scene, his thuggishness borders on the psychotic, when Jeffrey Lynn hesitates to shoot a German soldier because he looks only about 15 years old. Bogart plugs him with relish. He loves his gun.

The war ends, and Cagney straggles back home to New York to try to get his old mechanic’s job back, but his job has been given to someone else in the meantime, and he can’t find another one in the post-war recession. This is rather like a foreshadowing of Dana Andrews’ inability to fit in and find a place for himself after World War II in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). (It was in reaction to such conditions that the government mandated during World War II that returning veterans be guaranteed a job with their former employers.)

One very brief, but funny scene if you catch it, is when Cagney gives his old pal, Frank McHugh, a souvenir from the war. It is a German helmet, and McHugh hides it from would-be thieves by shoving it under his bed. Cagney wordlessly motions McHugh to turn the helmet over, because the way he placed it under his bed looks like a chamber pot.


The narrator comes back with more March of Time stuff about bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and the power that drives the rest of the film, Prohibition. Cagney, working as a cab driver, innocently delivers some bootleg liquor to Gladys George, who plays a gal-who’s-seen-it-all and runs a speakeasy. Cagney gets nabbed, takes the fall for Miss George, who later gets him out of jail and becomes his partner in the bootlegging business.

James Cagney spends the rest of the decade getting richer and richer, and more deeply involved in bootlegging, corruption, and gangland murders. Eventually, Priscilla Lane shows up to expose Cagney’s softer side. She had written him pen-pal letters during the war, but when he returned, he dismissed her as a schoolgirl when he had mistakenly thought she was much older. Reunited when she is a struggling dancer in the chorus, Cagney promotes her career in Gladys George’s speakeasy as a singer.

Priscilla Lane actually shares top billing with James Cagney in this movie, and would continue to have a successful year with Four Daughters where she was reunited in the first of several more films with Jeffrey Lynn. Here, likewise, Lane and Lynn fall for each other. Cagney falls for Lane. Gladys George falls for Cagney. It is an inextricable web of unrequited love.


Jeffrey Lynn, now a lawyer, helps Cagney with the legal aspects of his business empire and rather hypocritically tries to overlook the illegal. Eventually, Humphrey Bogart joins the business, and the intense scenes between Bogart and Cagney trying to assert their power over each other are something terrific.

If you have ever seen the Carol Burnett parody of this film with Carol as Gladys George, Steve Lawrence as Cagney, Harvey Korman as Jeffrey Lynn, and Sally Struthers as Priscilla Lane, then perhaps, like me, you are reminded of it all through watching this movie. Thanks a whole lot, Carol.

Gladys George, who played the world-weary dame with the heart of gold better than anyone (and speaking of The Best Years of Our Lives, pulled off the same magic there in a minor role), has some great lines and delivers them with deadpan humor. She is most effective silently pining after James Cagney. In the scene where Cagney brings Priscilla Lane to audition for Miss George, he fidgets with the excitement of a schoolboy crush, and he absently grips Gladys George’s hand as he listens to Priscilla Lane sing.

Gladys George seems to feel an electric current at Cagney’s touch, and sadly watches his enchantment for another, much younger, much prettier woman. Another actress might have shown a cliché tinge of jealously or resentment in her reaction, but Gladys George plays it inwardly, almost with shyness.

“What a load of ice!” she blurts when he shows her the diamond rings he has bought for Priscilla Lane. We know her heart is breaking, and we know that Cagney’s will, too, when he discovers Priscilla does not love him, despite the fact that he also bought her a new-fangled crystal set radio which she and Cagney listen to on headphones.

Speaking of 1920s paraphernalia, look at the scenes of Cagney and others handling money. The paper bills are much larger and wider than we have today. The government changed to the size bills we use today in July 1929, ostensibly to save paper. As a result, wallet manufacturers had to come up with new, slimmer, models.

We see the crystal sets, the bathtub gin, the rum runners, the Tommy guns, the gangsters, the cops on the make, but the film manages to give us a tour of the Roaring Twenties with only a little feeling of parody. Most of it is a survey class in what can happen when lives are lived to excess, without a thought of tomorrow.

On this 80th anniversary of the Crash of 1929, we may look for parallels between this time and our own. There are inevitably some parallels, but nothing so neat and clear. Time isn’t a blueprint for us to follow. We still have to make up much of it as we go along.

Perhaps at this anniversary, we may watch this movie with something more than just nostalgia. Perhaps we might even be moved to empathy as we understand a bit more about excess and failure with the economy of the last few years.

There are no films of “the Crash.” Newsreel cameras cranked out footage of panicked crowds at Wall Street this day 80 years ago, but that was rather like today when the news media shifts (and wastes) its enormous resources not to cover an event but to cover the public opinion poll about the event. Perhaps filming panicked crowds is more exciting than filming numbers on a chalk board being erased and written over.

This movie covers the Crash by framing it in the context of this whole era, from the end of World War I, through the Noble Experiment, from Main Street to Wall Street, and the resulting Great Depression. In the study of any historic event, it is the months and years preceding the event that really tell us all about the event. We might say our current economic challenges have their roots as far back as the 1980s. We do know, in hindsight, that the 1929 Crash devastated a generation, and forever colored the world of that generation’s children, the ones who would spend their childhoods during the Great Depression and would grow up to fight World War II.

For a long time after this movie, after that generation grew up, the perspective of this 1929 nightmare was growing dim and made somehow quaint by nostalgia crazes. Eighty years on, we might be in perfect position, the first audience for this film in generations, to really identify with the suckers and the straight arrows, the crooks and the gangsters, and the average Joes, and maybe even the omniscient narrator, the whole menagerie that make up The Roaring Twenties.

When this film was released in 1939, though it was a success, the world was moving at breakneck speed into another, even more sinister era. It was as if this film was a last look back at the life they knew before they became engulfed in the complete unknown.


James Cagney loses his shirt in the Crash, and loses much of his business to Bogart. Cagney is on the skids, but he has Gladys George to keep him company, now singing herself (“A Shanty in Old Shantytown” no less) in a cheap saloon. Prohibition is over.

“The days of the rackets are over,” Jeffrey Lynn tells Cagney, but he answers with more truthfulness than even the writer of the script probably knew,
“Don’t kid yourself about that.”

Cagney has one last, very violent, power play with Bogart, and in the memorable final scene on the snow-covered church steps, only Gladys George is left to comfort a dying Cagney. When a cop asks who the bum on the steps is, she replies, “He used to be a big shot.”

It might be a pronouncement upon that whole careless era -- or on any Ponzi schemer, unscrupulous investment manager, or average chump who lost a good chunk of his retirement in ours.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Movie Luggage

These days we have soft luggage made of lightweight material, with shoulder straps, a million zippered pockets, and quite often on wheels. We still struggle with our bags through airports (where our luggage is sometimes reduced to a clear plastic ziplock bag), struggle with jamming overstuffed suitcases in the ever-smaller trunks of cars, and drag on gummy wheels “pilot’s cases” on sprints through subways and train platforms.

George Bailey wanted a “great big” suitcase in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) to take with him on the wonderful adventures he was never to have. It was a hard boxy second-hand thing with no retractable handle and certainly no wheels. One wonders how far he could have gotten anyway.

Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen hustle to catch a train in “White Christmas” (1954) and lament they must leave behind their trunks. Their trunks? Their trunks with no wheels? Can you imagine traveling these days with a trunk? John Candy, maybe, in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Nobody else would dare.

Actually, Laurel and Hardy tried to take off with a neighbor lady in a trunk, twice -- once in “Unaccustomed As We Are,” (1929) and once in its remake of “Block-Heads” (1938), but didn’t get very far either time. Too unwieldy.

One of the iconic images of “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) was Dana Andrews’ hauling around an overstuffed army suitcase through the entire movie. It is with him at the beginning when he arrives home from the war, and at the end when he bitterly decides to leave his hometown. It is one of the few times I can remember where a suitcase actually looked heavy. He clearly struggles with it, leaning to keep his balance as it bangs against his hip. Usually the luggage carried in old movies looks light as a feather. The characters carry their worldly belongings and never seem out of breath.

That is, of course, because the suitcases are actually empty. The prop guy made sure Dana Andrews’ bag was stuffed to the gills. Even Gladys George won’t let him leave without an additional sweater.

Charlie Chaplin sometimes carried everything in a bandana tied to the end of his cane. Holds about as much as a clear plastic ziplock bag, so you can see how far we haven’t come.