Housework in I'll Be Seeing You (1944)

I'll Be Seeing You (1944), which we covered in this previous post, and also in this one, features this scene of Ginger Rogers and Spring Byington cleaning the living room. 

Can you think of any other classic films where the characters are seen doing everyday housecleaning chores -- who don't happen to be servants, just housework in their own home?

I'll Be Seeing You - (Again)

I sometimes like to watch Christmas movies when it’s not Christmas.  I’m speaking of classic films, of course, because as we’ve mentioned before, Christmas is usually only part of the setting in these films, the background.  It is hardly ever the single theme of the movie.  When watching a classic film with a Christmas setting, it is usually a cozy, sentimental experience, and we are never left—as we often are in modern-day Christmas movies—feeling as if the yuletide is being shoved in our face with all the subtlety of being smacked with a custard pie.

Cozy, sentimental, yes, but also classic films in a Christmas setting usually have a dramatic edginess to them that heightens our emotions and makes the sentimental denouement all the more powerful.  What’s at stake is not the tiresome Best Christmas Ever that so many modern stories are concerned with, but rather the retribution for the crime committed, the redemption of a shattered, sinful human…and sometimes you can toss in the angst of World War II.

We have all of that in I’ll Be Seeing You (1944).  We’ve covered this move here in this post at length, but seeing the movie recently again on TCM, a few more thoughts occurred that I wanted to bore you with.

The extra insight we get from watching a movie like I’ll  Be Seeing You when it’s not Christmas was first brought home to me many years ago.  The first time I’d seen the movie was, actually, during one Christmas when I was a teenager, but the next viewing was several years later, on a hot summer day.  Nothing Christmassy about it.  I can recall having to run some errands, though the only thing I remember clearly is going to the bank.  I delayed leaving the house because the movie had me in its clutches.  I think I stood in front of the TV with my car keys in my hand for the longest time, unable to pull away.  I remembered seeing it before, but now that years had passed, and it was a hot summer day and there was no tinsel anywhere—I was no longer focused on the Christmas week/New Year’s events of the movie, and settled in on the wonderful everyday detail of this really underrated film.

William Dieterle directs, and his inclusion into the movie of such mundane images as the jigsaw puzzle father Tom Tully has set up in the living room, the claustrophobic room at the YMCA, the family around the table, the exuberant New Year’s Eve party, the getting ready to go out to the party, the baking, the housecleaning.  The way the actors fit into these settings is strikingly meaningful and neatly done. 

Our attention is drawn to the jigsaw puzzle because Joseph Cotten stoops to pick up a piece that has fallen on the floor, something so common when we make jigsaw puzzles.  The pieces are always trying to escape.  Picking up a piece is also a metaphor of sorts, if you want to stretch it that far. 

We experience the prison cell of a room at the Y when Cotten enters and we see his heavy steps, his waning strength sapped by indecision, his helpless anxiety when he enters.  The room becomes all the worse for his reactions.  Later, of course, the horrific panic attack and the room almost becomes alive with terror.

I love the clutter of the house, the tchotchkes on the mantle, that extra chest of drawers in the upstairs hall.  Shirley Temple’s room with the tennis rack and pennants on the walls.  (Though I am puzzled by the closet in the living room entryway.  Look at the set, where the windows on either side are placed, and the outside of the house.  It doesn’t seem as if a closet should fit into that wall there.)

I love the ornaments on the pine tree in the front yard.  We are given so much to look at in this movie. 

The movie is almost a hybrid cross between William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) covered here and Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) covered here.  In Best Years, we have the troubled veterans returning to a society that is too much for them to handle, a world that has passed them by, just as it as Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten in this movie.  The taxi ride Ginger Rogers takes from the train station to her uncle and aunt’s house is similar to the cab ride of the three vets.  We see her view from the back seat, the cozy, cottage-like house out the cab window, a paperboy tossing a newspaper over the white picket fence.  Homey, idyllic, and greeted warmly by Spring Byington.  Everything should be wonderful from now on, but it isn’t.

Like a Hitchcock movie, all is not what it seems.  There is a restless, even sinister undercurrent here, and it takes a while for us to sort it out.  What I really love is that though we learn that Ginger Rogers on furlough from prison where she is serving a sentence for manslaughter, and that Joseph Cotten is on furlough from the psychiatric ward of a veterans hospital, they are not stereotypes of a convict and a mental patient.  We learn to like and accept them before we know anything about them, and we must weigh our agreeable first impression with an unsettling second glance.

Miss Rogers, who gives a really fine, nuanced, understated performance, is pensive, and really the only one in complete control of her emotions and philosophies.  She has had plenty of time to think in jail, about herself and about life in general.  She is deeply troubled, but she has both feet on the ground, so much so that angst-ridden Mr. Cotten quickly comes to lean on her emotionally and she provides the foundation for his recovery.

The “nice” middle-class family has some interesting Hitchcockian foibles.  For instance, when Spring Byington relates that life is full of accepting “second-best” choices, we may conclude a dismal life or at least a dismal marriage between her and Tom Tully.  It takes several scenes more for us to realize the first impression we have of her is incomplete, and that her character and her life is many-layered.

Tom Tully first presents as a kind of stuffy, pontificating, self-congratulatory mental lightweight.  His first meeting with a clearly embarrassed Ginger Rogers is awkward as they sort out their roles: the repentant, grateful niece, and the benefactor who reminds her he paid for her lawyer.  When he grandly announces that they should talk no more about it, as if he is waving off all she owes him, we might expect him to keeping reminding her about her imprisonment and his kindness to her, but he doesn’t.  Tom Tully turns out to be a nice guy, a little stuffy, but genuinely concerned, just a drug-store owner set in his ways.  Again, first impressions prove false.  I love his hesitation as he winds up his prayer, as if reviewing a mental list of people for whom he must pray.  Then caps it with a satisfied, "Amen."

Shirley Temple, whose morbid curiosity over her elder cousin’s imprisonment leads her to make one indelicate remark after another, but gradually demonstrates she’s only putting her foot in her mouth through ignorance and immaturity.  She's not the Bad Seed after all, she's just a teenager.

Forgiveness is strangely sometimes harder to do over the little things than the big things.  We find ourselves learning to shrug off the insensitivities of this crew in order to see how really fine they are, just as Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten must shrug off a thousand little pinpricks life is going to mete out to them if they are to really move forward.

And I love the shot of Spring Byington and Shirley Temple putting the ornaments back into the box, as if demonstrating that we can even move on after Christmas, that the holiday can be managed sanely, without overwhelming us.  Also because I have a decades-old ornament box just like that.  Kind of beat up now, but I wouldn’t part with it.  It’s older than me and deserves my respect.

When the movie ended and I finally left for the bank, the story—as a really good movie will do—came with me on the ride.  The hopeful, happy ending leads only to more questions—as a really good movie will do.  How long will the war be over before Ginger Rogers gets out of prison and Joseph Cotten is released from the hospital? 

Do they marry right away, and will they live in the same town as their new adopted family that Spring Byington, Tom Tully, and Shirley Temple represent?

Scenarios fill the mind like jigsaw puzzle pieces.  A post-war job.  What kind of a job?  Children.  More family meals around that table on visits and holidays?  Do they help look after Spring Byington and Tom Tully in their dotage? 

Does the mundane and “second best” form a protective blanket around the troubled couple at last?

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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.

Walk Softly, Stranger - 1950

“Walk Softly, Stranger” (1950) re-teams Joseph Cotten and Valli from “The Third Man” (1949) in a film that is not quite Noir and not quite romance, but which is carried by the dependable understated and nuanced playing of both leads.

Drifter Cotten wanders into an anywhere-in-America factory town and for a minute we might wonder if this is going to be a Van Heflin in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946) sort of adventure. Not quite. We don’t have the snap and sizzle of the true Noir of “Ivers”, but what we do have is a male lead more intriguingly ambiguous. We know Van Heflin is a sharp character right off the bat. But we don’t really know what Joseph Cotten is. Jack Paar, incidentally, has a small role as a co-worker.

Cotten picks out Spring Byington’s house seemingly according to some plan, and tells her a tale of it’s being his boyhood home. A lonely widow whose only son was killed in The War, she trustingly rents him a room in her house. Soon his comfortable teasing of her evolves into a warm almost mother-son relationship, but the thought that she might not be safe with him still lingers.

He accosts the elegant Valli, the daughter of the town’s wealthy manufacturer on the terrace of a country club party with the self-assuredness again of somebody following a carefully plotted plan. He spins a story of having a crush on her when she was a girl and he was the paperboy. We see he has designs on her, but the glimmer of surprise in his expression when he notices she is in a wheelchair makes us wonder if his plans are changing, or merely gelling.


Mr. Cotten is a gambler and a thief, hiding out from the mob. When his weasel pal played to a self-interested, nervous crescendo by the sinister Paul Stewart shows up with the even badder guys on his tail, the jig is up.

There are some pensive scenes with the lovely Valli as a depressed and bitter invalid after a wild debutante life of cocktails and skiing accidents, and how she becomes drawn to Cotten’s ingratiating bravado about the wheelchair. They fall in love, though we are more certain of her attachment than his, so steady is his reserved guise as a man with many angles, many hands to play, and more than one name.

The ending is improbable, but inevitable. You can’t leave a girl in a wheelchair, already sadder but wiser, alone without a date on New Year’s Eve. So, when the cuffs are on him at last, she declares will wait for him. It’s hard to say whether this cozy moment is better or worse than her just coldly walking past him into the distance and the end credits like she did in “The Third Man.” There was something awfully right about that, in an agonizing sort of way. But then, “The Third Man” really was Noir, and “Walk Softly, Stranger” is gray, groping in the dark.

Dragonwyck (1946)

“Dragonwyck” (1946) is a fine example of gothic suspense, beautifully filmed. Another in our series this month of movies where the setting of a house drives the story, Dragonwyck of the title is a manor on the Hudson River of upstate New York in the days of the great Dutch landowners or “patroons.”

Set in 1844, at the height of the land reform battles wherein sharecropping farmers were demanding entitlement to their farms, Vincent Price plays the patroon of the Dragonwyck estate. He is a haughty autocrat unwilling to bend an inch in the life of hereditary privilege he has known. Gene Tierney plays a Yankee girl from Connecticut who is brought to Dragonwyck as a companion and teacher to Mr. Price’s young daughter, and finds herself captured under the spell of elegant living among the rich. But it comes at a price, for Dragonwyck is a place of secrets, and family curses, and restless spirits, and murder.

The mansion in this film does more than just provide a setting for the story; it serves to represent the proud heritage of its owner, Vincent Price, and the source of his haughtiness, his self-superiority. It is the brick and mortar personification of the man himself. Even his tower room, where he seeks privacy and solace, the highest room in a great mansion on a hill, places him physically above everybody else.

Price plays his cultured, arrogant autocrat with an irresistible mixture of charm and implacable stubbornness. Probably another actor might not bring the same multi-layered characterization to the role, and might play the patroon as only conceited or stomping about with one-dimensional meanness. But Price brings a fascinating appealing nuance to the role, and seduces the audience as much as he does Gene Tierney. It is his film.

Mr. Price as master of Dragonwyck, the sole ruler of this minor kingdom, controls with almost god-like power the lives of his tenants who must remove their hats before him and pay tribute.

He is self-satisfied, and stands before his ornamented windows admiring the requisite “dark and stormy” night outside, “There is no thunder in the world like the thunder of the Catskills. The lightning seems to set the mountains on fire and they roar back.” The only source of his displeasure is his gluttonous, neglected wife, who has given him a sweet daughter, but whose being female makes her useless to him. His wife can bear him no more children, not the son he desires for the sole purpose of inheriting Dragonwyck. Enter Gene Tierney.

The gothic premise of an innocent young girl brought to an imposing mansion where evil may lurk had been a device used by writers for nearly a couple of hundred years. It was already so popular at the turn of the 19th century that Jane Austen parodied it in her novel “Northanger Abbey” (1803), and was just as successful for Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” (1847).

The difference here is we have an American story, and though the mansion and the Dutch heritage of its patroon does give the setting an “Old World” feel, nevertheless this is a film that explores the entirely American story of antebellum land controversy in the state of New York, where patrician landowners manipulated the peasant class which worked their lands, and consolidated power against the urban businessmen and the first rush of the rabble of immigrants. The Roosevelts were part of this Dutch wealthy elite, but their 20th century progressive programs would have made their ancestors, like the character played by Vincent Price, blanch.

Walter Huston steals scenes as the crusty Yankee farmer father of Gene Tierney, who prays aloud that the Lord will deliver them “from hankering after fleshpots,” and Anne Revere brings her customary authentic hardscrabble mother role as his wife. Jessica Tandy has a small, but scene-stealing role as the sprightly, steadfast and comical Irish maid devoted to Gene Tierney. Spring Byington has one of the most interesting roles of her career as the housekeeper of Dragonwyck. She plays the role with a slightly off-center brittleness, punctuated by a nervous giggle and somewhat crazed demeanor. She appears unstable, perhaps dangerously so.

She notices things and speaks aloud what she should not, remarking to a newly-arrived Tierney, “You like the feel of silk sheets against your young body. And one day you’ll wish with all your heart you’d never come to Dragonwyck.” It is prophetic, for Miss Tierney matures from a flighty young girl to a sadder but wiser woman through tragedy.

We have class wars, a lesson in regional American history of the 1840s, murder by oleander, drug addiction, and a ball sequence. You can’t beat that for stacking the deck.

Unlike many costume dramas of Hollywood’s heyday where the depiction of certain historical eras seems like somebody’s wild guess, this film actually portrays the 1840s in hair styles, costume, furniture, and props with admirable accuracy. I take exception with only one minor point, the line where Gene Tierney, dismayed at being rebuffed by the wealthy young ladies at the ball who represent the Dutch landowning families, laments, “I’m not from the top of the Hudson. I’m from the Connecticut River bottom.” Her hometown Greenwich, Connecticut is not located on the Connecticut River.

(Come to think of it, Katharine Hepburn lived on the Connecticut River bottom at Fenwick, so it must not have been such a bad address.)

Here, like “The Spiral Staircase”, (see post here) an outside character in the form of the local doctor provides a lifeline to the heroine, a hero upon whom she can depend for a sane point of view, who represents a brighter, kinder reality beyond the walls of this sinister place. Just as in “Staircase”, the doctor does not actually save the young lady; she must save herself. But we imagine that they will be together when the dust settles.

The mansion, we are told, is haunted by the ghost of a tragic ancestor, and we see how both Price and his daughter fall under the spell of this restless spirit, but the real horror of the story comes not from the supernatural, but from Price’s own actions, and his inability to adapt in a changing world that is ever encroaching upon his cocoon of Dragonwyck. Two terrific close-ups of Vincent Price are the scene where he gazes into the bassinette of his newborn son, like a greedy man looking upon a stash of gold he has found, awestruck that he has it, but somehow anxious that someone might take it away from him.

The second is at the end of the film when he notes with prideful satisfaction that the tenants before him are removing their hats, and he assumes it is because of their respect for his position as patroon. He never faces the truth. The gothic film ends with an inspired note of irony.

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s read the novel on which the film was based.

Here is an interesting series of clips of photos and production stills from “Dragonwyck” as posted on YouTube. Accompanied by Enya’s “Tempus Vernum”, it drips gothic intrigue.

Working in the Movies

It may have started the day Charlie Chaplin noticed a HELP WANTED placard in the window of a shop or a restaurant. I don’t recall the name of the film, for this scenario was repeated by him and others. He takes the sign and carries it in to the proprietor. Being a silent film, he points to the sign he holds, and then points to himself, placing his index finger imploringly against his chest, tapping his sternum a couple times. The gruff proprietor looks him up and down, and hires him.

There is no mention of requiring a resume or CV. There is no scheduling of first, let alone second interviews, and no references. No human resources director asks him, “If you were an ingredient in a salad, what would you be?” Or asks him any other question as inane as it is insulting, meant to delve into his psychology and ability to become a Team Member. It is a different world of being hired for a job. But then, when the unlucky Chaplin or Keaton, or Lloyd is discharged from employment, it’s often with a boot to the backside, so firing was a different game then, too.

In the early years of motion pictures, quite a lot of films used the workplace as the scene, and even the device which drove the plot of the story. The store, the factory assembly line, the office, the construction jobsite. This was the hard reality playground in the otherwise fanciful world of movie make-believe. Perhaps it was the Great Depression, when one-quarter of this country’s population was out of work in the worst years that changed the focus of the setting and story line of popular films. The little world, this all-consuming focus of the common worker faded like the disintegrating nitrate film on which it was recorded.

The big stars of the 1930s did not seem to play the guy who swept the floor. Character actors now took over the mundane jobs in the background, getting another keg of beer from the cellar while the star sang on stage. The star did not deliver ice anymore. The star was a roving reporter, or a private detective, or soldier of fortune. The star was an heiress or a princess, or the owner of the factory. Once in a while we might see Jean Arthur and co-workers in “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941) but mostly the idealized proletariat we saw emblazoned in the WPA-sponsored post office murals was not what greeted us in the movie theater. Escape was the order of the day, escape from our troubles of not having a job, or else, the trouble and bother of having one to earn one’s living at all.

A generation later after The Little Tramp’s job hunt, we have the charming film “In the Good Old Summertime” (1949) with Buster Keaton, who used to play the worker as hero, now relegated to a minor role of just worker in a little shop selling musical instruments, a remake of “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940). Of course, the film’s stars, Van Johnson and Judy Garland are also salespeople in the store, but soon the focus shifts from the day-to-day mundane matter of being salespeople and turns into a love story. The film is a musical and a romantic comedy about finding one’s true love. Always a comforting message, but we know how it’s going to turn out. They will find true love. That’s what we paid for.

But possibly more fascinating, more gripping is what will happen to them if they lose their jobs? What if Spring Byington does not marry shop owner S.Z. Sakall? She is approaching her retirement years; will she be able to afford to retire on her salary? Retirement in those days for spinster shop ladies usually meant poverty.

Will Van Johnson ever be able to marry if he does not get a promotion and more money? People used to consider finances first and then commitment. Will he be a bachelor all his life if he cannot get ahead in the workplace?

When harried Judy Garland complains to Johnson, “When I came here I was a very enthusiastic girl. Now look at me!” we can commiserate because how many of us have felt frazzled by our jobs?

When boss Sakall makes them work overtime and take inventory, we see their frustration at having their personal plans for the evening thwarted, their lives thrown off kilter by the need to please their employer. All this stuff of the workplace is fraught with dramatic tension. While it is not as lovely as the quest for true love, it is what most of us can identify with because work takes up most of our lives.

We spend a lot of time at work. Yet even on television, where for decades the workplace was the setting for dramas and sitcoms, quite of lot of the storylines and action does not center on work. Rather, it focuses on the private lives of the characters and their personal relationships. We don’t really see much work being done. Ninety years ago all it took was a HELP WANTED sign to set the ball rolling for the plot to thicken, and the fun to begin, and the springboard for dreams to come true. Have a look at this clip from “Modern Times” below, and Happy Labor Day.

Now Playing - 1945

This ad for “Captain Eddie” (1945) seems to encapsulate the entire film with scenes from the life of the Eddie Rickenbaker, the American World War I flying ace, and with gushing superlatives.

Like many biographic films of the day, some of it is fact, some of it invention. Perhaps the film needed a little publicity push, as the end months of World War II may not have been the most opportune time to make a film about a World War I hero. It worked with “Sergeant York” (1941), but there was a huge gulf in the span of four years between films. The innocence of an earlier age and the idealism of an earlier war had possibly worn thin after the brutality of World War II.

Fred MacMurray starred, along with Lynn Bari, and three of the finest charmingly crusty old fellows: Charles Bickford, Thomas Mitchell, and James Gleason. To balance this curmudgeon convention, Spring Byington lends her customary comfort.

I'll Be Seeing You (1944)

I’ll Be Seeing You (1944) is an unusual holiday film, quite grim despite its sentimentality, and manages to be hopeful despite the dismal circumstances of the man and woman who meet on furlough and fall in love. It was one of the first films to deal with what today we would call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Joseph Cotten plays a soldier on furlough from a military hospital where he has been treated for wounds suffered in the South Pacific, and for what were then called neuropsychiatric issues. In World War I, it was called shell shock.

Ginger Rogers is on furlough from a local women’s prison, having been incarcerated three years ago for manslaughter when she fended off the sexual assault of her employer, and accidentally caused his death. She is halfway through her sentence, and is being granted a Christmas leave on a special program for inmates with good behavior.

We first see them wandering shyly through a train station. In contrast to the hectic bustle around them, both move slowly, as if dazed. She has been in prison since before the war, and the pace and energy of wartime society is new to her, with an urgency that intimidates her. She tries to buy candy and gum at the newsstand, and the man behind the counter sarcastically wonders aloud where she has been? Wartime shortages are new to her. The soldier is clearly anxious, and physically tired. Every move seems to cost him effort. He makes many mistakes doing simple things, like buying a magazine.

They meet on the train. Two other young servicemen join them, fast talking, both flirting with Ginger, loud and cheerful, and annoying. When they both leave momentarily to get food, the two older, quieter passengers strike up a halting conversation. Cotten’s character is obviously trying to tough out some kind of challenge by speaking to a strange woman, and Ginger’s character responds with patience and kindliness. Her prison years have left her nonjudgmental, and cautious, and introspective. Both actors carry the story well, as Mr. Cotten displays heartbreaking vulnerability and courage, and Miss Rogers shows she is adept at more than comedy or dancing with Fred Astaire with her quiet and understated performance.

Through the train windows we see the landscape of the American Southwest slip by. When she tells him she is disembarking at a nearby town to visit her uncle and aunt for Christmas, he invents a reason to get off at the same stop, and makes an awkward attempt to ask for her phone number. He is clearly not the predator that the other two young men in uniform were, and she allows him to contact her later. At this point, the audience has only a scant idea of the soldier’s psychiatric problems, and knows nothing of her past.

Tom Tully and Spring Byington play the uncle and aunt, and Miss Byington must win the prize in this role for most motherly person on the planet. Theirs is a warm and cozy kind of fantasy home for a person who has none. There is a decorated table top tree, a radio that plays Christmas music, and what in one scene that sounds like National Barn Dance. Dad stubbornly perseveres at a jigsaw puzzle set up in the living room. Shirley Temple is their teenage daughter. Miss Temple is probably one of the few child stars to ease gracefully into her teen years, the most awkward time in anyone’s life. She successfully plays a typical soldier-crazy, hepcat teen of her generation, likable if not a little exasperating at times. She is well-meaning, but throughout the film unthinkingly ostracizes Ginger with blundering comments and actions. Anytime anyone mentions words like prison or cell or criminal, her pain is acute.

The soldier is invited to have dinner at the uncle and aunt’s house, is teased by Miss Temple, and later in the film he is at ease with this family enough to tease her back like an older brother. But a long journey for the soldier must be traveled first, even though it happens in a short time.

In his dreary YMCA room, we see his loneliness and his fear at being alone. A voice over by Cotten speaking the soldier’s thoughts lets us in on his fear at having another panic attack, and he struggles with himself to keep his anxiety down, giving himself a pep talk. Later in the film, he experiences a panic attack in his room, and we go through the sensations with him, his rapid heartbeat, his aural and visual hallucinations, as he collapses on his bed, pouring sweat, and panicked that he will not come out of this dark terror without the help of orderlies and medication. He grips his shirt at his stomach, perhaps reliving the moment of his bayonet wound.

However, he comes out of his attack, in part through the memory of the sound of Miss Rogers’ voice calming him, and when he stands up, exhausted, his clothes soaked in perspiration, lifting his face to the bare ceiling light that had taunted him with fireballs a moment before, he is astonished and triumphant, whispering, “I made it” over and over. It is one of the most affecting scenes in the film.

Ginger’s troubles are less debilitating but less able to conquered. She is in a dark hole, too, and has no expectation of ever claiming a normal life again. She confesses to her aunt, “Coming out in the world and seeing everybody in uniform, everybody doing something. I just don’t belong. I don’t fit in. And dreams that I had for the future are just impossible.”

To which Ms. Byington replies, “Most dreams are, Mary. It’s the dreaming that counts.”

Ginger does not tell the soldier she is going back to prison after the holidays, for his sake as much as her own. She is sensitive to his anxiety and lack of confidence. When they go to a movie together, and it is a war picture, he can barely make himself look at the screen.

They take an outing in the country, and being from the east, he remarks how strange it is to celebrate Christmas in a Southwest desert. She replies, “I don’t know. This seems more like Christmas to me than the kind they have back east. I mean, this is more like the country where they celebrated the first Christmas.”

He must face a noisy New Year’s Eve party, and she must face running into people she knows there. Eventually, the vacation ends, Spring Byington takes the ornaments off the Christmas tree, and Ginger has to go back to prison, where she likely has another three years to serve. Her soldier finds out, and retreats briefly back into depression and feelings of betrayal, and they part. She is devastated when she discovers he knows.

Their 11th-hour reunion at the gates of the women’s prison is certainly an unlikely trysting place for a Hollywood film during the war and about Christmas. It is both sad, and yet hopeful as they renew their feelings for each other. The film’s title comes from one of the most popular and wistful songs of the era, evoking the longing of separated lovers. This is perhaps the only war film where the man must wait for the woman to come back, instead of the woman keeping the home fires burning waiting for the man. It is also, I think, except for various versions of A Christmas Carol, one of few Christmas films whose theme is redemption, the ultimate Christmas message.

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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.

Beach Scene 1941

Now that we’re nearing the end of summer, a nod to my favorite beach scene in the movies. This is in “The Devil and Miss Jones” (1941) where Jean Arthur, Robert Cummings, Charles Coburn, and Spring Byington share a picnic lunch on the crowded beach of Coney Island. Rented bathing suits and a lesson on how the masses live are the order of the day for the wealthy Coburn incognito as a worker in his own store. Miss Arthur, Mr. Cummings, and Miss Byington are his unwitting employees who befriend him and show him the ropes.

This film deserves its own essay at another time, but for now, the scene at the crowded beach is enough to invoke a sense of quickly fading summer. It is not a beach of teenagers twitching to the twang of electric guitars as in a future era. There is no surfing by privileged middle class youngsters, but only a stolen moment for the Depression-era laboring classes on the weekend to try to snatch some essence of the good life. Not easy in the elbow-to-elbow mob on that beach. But, like all working people everywhere, as Mr. Coburn learns, you take what you can get, and make the most of it.

What are your favorite beach scenes?

That’s all for this week. See you Monday. Hope some of you can get to the beach.