In Praise of Gene Kelly’s Noir Turn
Gene Kelly may be remembered by most as an energetic and athletic dancer, but in the 1944 film ‘Christmas Holiday,’ he has a beguiling foray into shadowy noir.
As far as noirs go, 1944’s Christmas Holiday, directed by Robert Siodmak, is fairly unremarkable. All velvet shadows and molten hearts beneath chilly veneers, the film features Deanna Durbin as a woman forced by circumstance to be a nightclub hostess/singer; baby-faced Dean Harens is a jilted army officer who falls for her as she trembles before god. The film’s story, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same name and with a screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz, finds suspense and tension in the friction between the past and the facts of the present day. Durbin’s character is nothing to write home about — she weepily and wistfully leads the film as a madonna-esque character, forced by her past to an ignoble position; she is the opposite of a femme fatale here. Aside from its Academy Award-winning score, there isn’t much else in the film that is too revolutionary, save for a singular, glimmering aspect: Gene Kelly as its unhinged, vicious homme fatale.
The film opens with Hearns’s character Charles Mason, an army officer excitedly preparing to spend Christmas holiday getting married and honeymooning. The night he is to leave to meet his fiancée in San Francisco, she sends him a telegram saying she married someone else. Charles decides to go down to confront his ex-fiancée, but a storm leaves him stranded in New Orleans, where, at the urging of a sketchy, drunken reporter (Richard Whorf), Charles ends up in a nightclub called Maison Lafitte. At the club, he is introduced to a brooding Jackie (Durbin), hostess and singer, who asks Charles to take her to midnight mass, where she falls to the floor weeping. Over the course of the night, through flashbacks, Jackie tells Charles more about her past: that her real name is Abigail Manette, and that her husband is Robert Manette (Kelly), a man known across the country for having murdered a bookie.
Abigail tells Charles of Robert’s initial charm, which lured her in irrevocably — his joviality and airiness, his appreciation of high art and music, and his sense of humor she couldn’t help but fall in love with. But over the course of their marriage, she tells of how Robert became increasingly unbalanced, gambling late into the night and squandering what little money they have. After the murder, Robert’s overbearing mother (played compellingly sternly by Gale Sondergaard) — with whom the young couple live and with whom Robert is extremely close — helps him to cover up the murder. When Robert is arrested and sentenced to death (with the sentence later commuted to life in prison), his mother, distraught (there is an incestuous subtext to the mother-son relationship), blames Abigail for not having been a more conscientious wife in her protection of Robert. Robert’s mother slaps Abigail, who then runs away to Maison Lafitte, still a married woman, and gives herself a name change. In the film’s third act, Abigail and Charles are confronted by Robert, who’s escaped from prison, and in a swift altercation involving the police, Robert is shot and dies in Abigail’s arms, with the film hinting at Abigail’s convenient freedom to marry Charles.
Much has been written about how Christmas Holiday is a curious undermining of Christmas cheer — for a movie with “Christmas” in its title, there is little Christmas cheer or holiday-related iconography. But not much has been meaningfully written of Kelly’s performance as the charming but tragic Robert Manette. Many argue that the film casts Kelly against type: “Could anyone be more out of place in a story like this? Kelly was a man with a spring in his step and music in his bones, a performer born for light musical comedy. The final moments of Christmas Holiday fail to work in large part because Kelly, at least as an actor, has no dark depths to plumb,” one piece states.
I heartily disagree with this and with any reading that sees Robert as an aberrant blip in Kelly’s early career, or that argues that Kelly was ill-equipped to portray dramatic roles with as much force or perceptive, technical skill as can be found in his dance work. In fact, his psychological understanding of the homme fatale in Christmas Holiday suggests respect on his part for a character’s wholeness and dimensionality, and this respect is something Kelly brought to many of his roles throughout his career. Kelly took care to flesh out his more comedic roles to be dynamic people with a more fulsome screen presence than vaudevillian quips, physical gags, and joyfully bounding leaps, particularly in films like Cover Girl, from the same year as Christmas Holiday, which sees Kelly’s character dancing for joy, sure, but also from angst and fear. Readings of Robert by others fall flat, are superficial only, which is deeply disappointing because Kelly brings such nuance and depth to this character, which Siodmak saw, using the interplay between Kelly’s charming veneer and his brain (his churning acumen) to his advantage. According to a Sight and Sound piece, Siodmak said it was “interesting casting Gene Kelly in such a way as to suggest a sinister quality behind a rather superficial charm.”
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