So the Siren has joined Facebook, as Campaspe Smith. She did this in July after being asked by a lot of people if she was on Facebook. When the Siren said no, it was as if she had admitted to having rabbit ears on her TV set. Eventually the peer pressure became too much.
Trouble was, little Luddite that she is, the Siren completely forgot she'd signed up until a couple of weeks ago when she got a friend request from Richard Gibson, and then later when she got one from David Cairns. The first time she got a Facebook email, the Siren looked at the "friend request" and thought "I read your blog all the time, does that not count for something?" Then she read further and realized it was that old Facebook wheeze. Then she had to remember when and how she had signed up. Then she had to figure out her password. And find Girish on there because that is the first thing a self-respecting film blogger does, find Girish. It's work, this Facebook thing, I tell you.
Anyway, it's all set up now and the Siren feels a bit like Irma on the street corner, all dressed up and waiting for people to drop by. Which brings me to this week's anecdote, from Billy Wilder in Hollywood by Maurice Zolotow:
Most of Irma La Douce was filmed on the back lot of the Goldwyn studio. They had put up a beautiful reproduction of a street near Les Halles--the shops, the bistros, the louche hotels. The most gorgeous starlets in town were cast as the whores. Filming the street scenes, Billy became aware that every day the set was jammed with reporters. He turned on them one day and snarled,
'Where were you bastards when I was filming Stalag 17?'
(The Siren suspects Sheila O'Malley happily would have hung out on the Stalag set 24/7, but of course Irma was filmed back when journalism was the most boyish of boys' clubs.)
Meanwhile, the Siren is digging into her unwatched DVDs because you people simply won't learn, and keep sending her more of the things. A particularly kind and knowledgeable reader is sending a new batch even as we speak, after dropping the Siren a line to tell her that she shouldn't identify something as "unobtainable" because people then take it as a challenge. This tempts the Siren to describe Four Devils and the original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons as unobtainable but that, unfortunately, probably won't work.
So last night the Siren tackled Christmas Holiday, which you can see in segments on Youtube if you can tolerate that format. (Update to add: here is the link to part 1 and the other parts follow.) Sometimes you see a movie that flopped upon first release and think, "This is brilliant and the initial viewers were dopes." And sometimes you see a good movie that flopped and wonder it got made at all. To this latter category belongs Christmas Holiday. Director Robert Siodmak and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz evidently decided to take every last one of the audience's expectations, and back over them with a Mack truck. Winsome, virginal Deanna Durbin has star billing. She is playing a (barely Code-concealed) hooker and she shows up about 15 minutes in, wearing an extremely vampy black halter gown. Gene Kelly plays a psychopath, "mother-fixated" which, as David Ehrenstein points out, once was code for homosexual--as if all the delicate talk of Kelly's problems and his mother's hopes that marriage will "fix" him weren't tipoff enough. (Did Vito Russo see this movie?) Kelly has second billing but he doesn't show up until about 10 minutes after Deanna.
The "holiday" referred to is a soldier's last leave before heading for the battlefield. The soldier is on his way home, quite possibly with plans to kill the fiancee who just married another guy. Christmas comes into play at a midnight mass where Deanna breaks down into sobs at the intonation of "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Irving Berlin's exquisitely sentimental "Always" is played like a funeral march. It's a wonderful treat of a movie, a real Christmas noir, but the Siren eventually began to wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate attempt to lose money, it is that perverse.
Adding interest to an essentially simple story is the narrative structure, which swerves around even more than Mankiewicz's screenplay for Citizen Kane. The story leaps back and forth, the first flashback showing the wreck of Durbin's marriage and the next showing its beginnings, then leaping back again to show the consequences. The Siren's favorite moments include that midnight mass, gleamingly beautiful and very moving. Then there are the sequences on the staircase of the New Orleans mansion Durbin is sharing with Gene Kelly and dear old mom, Gale Sondergaard. As Durbin goes about her domestic tasks in clean, chirpy, whistle-while-you-work fashion, she moves up and down, peers through windows and gradually comes to realize that Sondergaard is concealing a murder for Kelly.
Highly recommended, and many thanks to Goatdog. Onward we progress through the stack.
Postscript: In comments David Ehrenstein reminds the Siren that the movie wasn't actually a flop--it did fine at the box office upon release. But it's never been on video and--go figure--it never became a holiday TV staple alongside The Littlest Angel and Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, to name two specials that always brought the Siren to what Mr. E calls the true holiday spirit of "suicidal despair." And Durbin added the protests over her attempting a fallen woman character to all the reasons she wanted to leave "that asshole business."