Christmas Holiday **** (1944, Deanna Durbin, Gene Kelly) – Classic Movie Review 11,999

Director Robert Siodmak’s 1944 Universal Pictures American film noir crime film Christmas Holiday is based on the 1939 best-selling novel by W Somerset Maugham, and stars Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly. The movie was part of a plan by producer Felix Jackson to broaden Durbin’s range of films. They married in June 1945.

Squeaky-clean Deanna Durbin as a sleazy nightclub singer hostess? Well here she is as Jackie Lamont, W Somerset Maugham’s heroine unhappily married to murderer Robert Manette (Kelly) in an (at the very least) interesting stab at the piece by writer Herman J Mankiewicz.

Gene Kelly as an Oedipally-afflicted psychotic killer? Well here he is.

It is a pity that Mankiewicz switches the action from France to New Orleans and drops the gay and incest themes of the novel. However, capable director Siodmak still manages to make something really intriguing out of the material.

Deanna described it as ‘my dramatic debut’, but she still trills Irving Berlin’s ‘Always’ and Frank Loesser’s ‘Spring Will Be a Little Late this Year’. Loesser’s song was written for the movie but overlooked until being rediscovered in the mid-1950s to become a much recorded pop and jazz standard. Berlin wrote ‘Always’ in 1925 as a wedding gift with its substantial royalties for his wife Ellin Mackay.

Also in the cast are Dean Harens, Gladys George, Richard Whorf, Gale Sondergaard, and David Bruce. Dean Harens makes his feature film debut after Broadway success.

Hans J Salter was Oscar nominated for Best Musical Score.

Filming took place from 15 November 1943 to 12 February 1944, and it was released on 31 July 1944.

Siodmak said the film had ‘a good plot, though the studio always wanted to change my psychological endings into physical ones –when the Hays Office didn’t intervene – and interesting casting Gene Kelly in such a way as to suggest a sinister quality behind a rather superficial charm’.

It was thanks to the Hays Code that Mankiewicz had to change the setting from a Paris brothel to a New Orleans nightclub and the main character from a prostitute to a nightclub singer hostess, and drop the gay and incest themes.

Top-billed Gene Kelly does not appear in the first 26 minutes. The Oedipally-afflicted psychotic killer Robert Manette is of course a very different character from Kelly’s later image, here loaned out to Universal by MGM.

Durbin and Siodmak did not agree over her character. Siodmak recalled: ‘Durbin was difficult. She wanted to play a new part but flinched from looking like a tramp. She always wanted to look like nice wholesome Deanna Durbin pretending to be a tramp. Still, the result was quite effective.’

Nevertheless, Siodmark said Durbin ‘is a real actress. For five days she had to cry and for five days she cried and cried. But each day at 4 pm sharp and would cry no more. It was amazing. That is a real actress for you.’

Mankiewicz was fired when Universal executives saw him drunk on the studio lot but Felix Jackson rehired him a week later after he walked into Jackson’s office and said: ‘Felix, don’t you think Herman Mankiewicz drunk is still better than [his replacement] Dwight Taylor sober?’

However, disagreements aside, Durbin considered Christmas Holiday as the one film she was proud of and Mankiewicz judged the screenplay as one he was most proud of.

Siodmak concluded: ‘Oddly enough it did very well. I suppose everyone was so interested to see what Deanna Durbin would be like in a dramatic role.’ It took more than $2 million at the US box office, Universal’s most successful film of the year.

The cast are Deanna Durbin as Jackie Lamont / Abigail Martin, Gene Kelly as Robert Manette, Richard Whorf as Simon Fenimore, Dean Harens as Charlie Mason, Gladys George as Valerie De Merode, Gale Sondergaard as Mrs. Manette and David Bruce as Gerald Tyler.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 11,999

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