Christmas Holiday (1944)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A Major Disappointment

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Cast against type both Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly are excellent in Robert Siodmak's noirish romance "Christmas Holiday". She's an chanteuse in a New Orleans 'club' (for that read brothel) telling her story, (it's mostly in flashback), to soldier Dean Harens one stormy Christmas Eve. You see, she was married to good-for-nothing wastrel Kelly who's now in jail for murder. The fine supporting cast also includes Gale Sondergaard as Kelly's possessive mother, Gladys George as a big-hearted madam and the director Richard Whorf as a low-life reporter. Herman J Mankiewicz wrote the fine script from a novel by Somerset Maugham. Certainly not your usual Christmas fare and all the better for it.

Before MGM decided that they would be the only ones commanding Gene Kelly's services, they did lend him out for two memorable roles. One was Cover Girl for Columbia which firmly established Kelly as a musical star and the second was as Deanna Durbin's co-star in Christmas Holiday. Deanna sang a couple of numbers, but Kelly didn't even tap his foot to keep time. Yet he showed he was an actor to be reckoned with.Through a combination of circumstances soldier on leave Dean Harens who was supposed to be getting married but has just gotten a 'dear john' letter is alone and at sea in New Orleans and meets up with Deanna Durbin who is singing in a nightclub. Trying to console each other Durbin tells the story of her marriage to Gene Kelly who has enough charm for ten men, but at heart is a wastrel. The blood of the original French settlers in the New Orleans are has become pretty thin. He lives with his mother Gale Sondergaard in genteel poverty. Sondergaard's hopes is that marriage might straighten her boy out, but that doesn't work out. Kelly kills Cy Kendall, a bookmaker he's into for some big bucks and eventually the cops catch up with him.But that is hardly the end of the story as both Harens and Durbin learn a lot about life and love in that Christmas Holiday season.New song that Deanna sings is Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year and Irving Berlin's classic Always is given a fine rendition. Christmas Holiday got an Oscar nomination for Best Musical Scoring in 1944.But it's both Deanna and Gene's acting is what you'll remember most from Christmas Holiday.

I've never really understood the fascination or the popularity of Deanna Durbin. I've seen a few of her films and she's just not much of an actress. I guess because in most she tries to be a comedienne and to me...it doesn't work. Not so in this case.A solider is heading home to marry his girlfriend. Just before he leaves he gets a dear john letter saying she has married someone else. He thinks he can change things by going back early but weather conditions strand him in a small town near New Orleans. He ends up at a bar and then a "Cat House" where he meets a singer who's also one of the regulars at the place. He listens to her life story and it's a tragedy. She tells of her fast marriage to a nice guy gambler type but was really a go nowhere type to begin with. He ends up killing somebody and from there it's remembrances and tales of the past. Maybe his girlfriend marrying someone else doesn't pale in comparison to this girl's life.They don't say it outright but basically Mrs. Durbin plays a prostitute who happens to sing in a Cat House. It's inferred slightly but it only enhances how down and out her life had become. I imagine this was a different type of role for Deanna Durbin so she took it. This is no comedy or uplifting tale. It's a down and out film about where life can take you after bad things happen.I liked it for what it was. It's not perfect but it's entertaining and a load off to see Durbin do something other than bad comedies.

OK first...how funny to read these reviewers feeling cheated and misled because the movie with "Christmas" in the title doesn't have santa and egg nog and snow and jingle bells and holiday cheer. Not enough that a pivotal scene occurs at midnight mass during the gloomy homefront years of WWII...no, it must have mistletoe & holly if the word "Christmas" is in the title. (I wonder if they got mad when DINNER AT EIGHT actually ended without showing the dinner party...?) Good grief, let me dislodge my rolled-back eyeballs and move on.For those with broader minds, this ultra-elusive little film noir is worth seeking out. There is something grave about seeing two sunny, legendary musical stars in such brooding circumstances, especially Deanna Durbin--world-weary and gorgeous as Jackie, who tells her sad tale (in two elaborate flashbacks) to a pilot on his holiday leave.Durbin's musicals are an acquired taste, but this dramatic turn requires no suspension of disbelief--she's entirely plausible as the luckless prostitute who must sing for her supper. Clearly, we are no longer in THREE SMART GIRLS territory. When she first enters the film to sing "Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year", she is both poignant and bored to death, a combo I tend to love in my leading ladies (Dietrich, anyone?).Kelly always seems self-conscious and over-rehearsed to me (this mommas-boy-psycho role might be a little out of his grasp), but OK, I'll buy his shift from smirking charmer to brooding villain, especially since he's terribly sexy when he emerges in the final reel with his 3-day beard.I wouldn't call Christmas HOLIDAY a raging success--so much needs to be squeezed into this running time to make the finale ring true, and yet it still feels rather sleepy (I have similar issues with Siodmak's PHANTOM LADY). But its always these oddball, subversive products of the studio system that are most fascinating, so it needs to be seen (it has never made it to video in the US). Fans of noir will appreciate the relentlessly grim atmosphere, even if it doesn't have a Christmas tree.