With a surprisingly boring script by Herman J Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane), and supposedly based on a story by Somerset Maugham, Christmas Holiday proves that you can chunk and mess up a story all you want with no dramatic effect other than the viewer disinterest.
We have a story that begins with a lieutenant on leave at Christmas who finds out at the last minute that his girlfriend he is going to marry in San Francisco has left him. Then we follow the adventures of this lieutenant who cannot travel and has to stay in New Orleans by the storm. Later he meets a girl in a club, accompanies her to mass and discovers that the girl does not stop crying during the liturgical ceremony (a very long scene justifiable only with the aim of assessing the supposed acting skills of the actress). Half an hour has passed and the couple decides to have dinner at a bar. There the girl begins to tell him the story of her life in a flashback that we have the feeling will be short and almost marginal in the story, but surprisingly ends up being the main plot of the film.
After that flashback in which the girl tells that she married a murderer who is nowadays arrested (total spoiler), we realize that unfortunately (because of the lack of interest) there are other flashbacks in which she tells how they met, got married and went to live with the mother of the husband. They are loose scenes, without any relief, without links, simply the three or four important moments. At no time do they form a story, nor do they configure characters.
We don't understand what was the use of so much preamble, so much lieutenant, so much mass... the film wanders from one idea to another without arousing the slightest interest or emotion in the viewer: there is crime but neither suspense nor tension, there is love but it leaves us cold , there are three or four characters that at no time take on the slightest life.
If we add to this an absolutely wrong cast, the result could not be more disheartening. Gene Kelly was a great dancer, a great choreographer, a solvent comedy actor, but his dramatic ability is non-existent; Deanna Durbin was the cutest next-door-girl of the 1930s, who could outsmile and outsing any other teen actress. But growing older she was not cute anymore, she acquired a certainly matronly face, she was tired of the same mediocre childish films and desperate for dramatic roles. She still had the power and the money to try to find them. The result was not even passable and she had to return to her inconsequential comedies and ended her career shortly after.
If the film's footage and its meandering style didn't leave much time to develop the plot and the characters, Durbin spends time singing a few ditties. If we include more spent time playing almost complete Isolde's Liebestod, we start guessing Siodmack found he didn't have much of a story, or needn't much time to tell it.
When one thinks that in 1944 Siodmack had just shot the brilliant Phantom Lady, and in 1945 he would shoot another couple of notable films such as The suspect and The strange affair of Uncle Harry, always with the wonderful Ella Raines, a film as dead as this one becomes incomprehensible.
We have a story that begins with a lieutenant on leave at Christmas who finds out at the last minute that his girlfriend he is going to marry in San Francisco has left him. Then we follow the adventures of this lieutenant who cannot travel and has to stay in New Orleans by the storm. Later he meets a girl in a club, accompanies her to mass and discovers that the girl does not stop crying during the liturgical ceremony (a very long scene justifiable only with the aim of assessing the supposed acting skills of the actress). Half an hour has passed and the couple decides to have dinner at a bar. There the girl begins to tell him the story of her life in a flashback that we have the feeling will be short and almost marginal in the story, but surprisingly ends up being the main plot of the film.
After that flashback in which the girl tells that she married a murderer who is nowadays arrested (total spoiler), we realize that unfortunately (because of the lack of interest) there are other flashbacks in which she tells how they met, got married and went to live with the mother of the husband. They are loose scenes, without any relief, without links, simply the three or four important moments. At no time do they form a story, nor do they configure characters.
We don't understand what was the use of so much preamble, so much lieutenant, so much mass... the film wanders from one idea to another without arousing the slightest interest or emotion in the viewer: there is crime but neither suspense nor tension, there is love but it leaves us cold , there are three or four characters that at no time take on the slightest life.
If we add to this an absolutely wrong cast, the result could not be more disheartening. Gene Kelly was a great dancer, a great choreographer, a solvent comedy actor, but his dramatic ability is non-existent; Deanna Durbin was the cutest next-door-girl of the 1930s, who could outsmile and outsing any other teen actress. But growing older she was not cute anymore, she acquired a certainly matronly face, she was tired of the same mediocre childish films and desperate for dramatic roles. She still had the power and the money to try to find them. The result was not even passable and she had to return to her inconsequential comedies and ended her career shortly after.
If the film's footage and its meandering style didn't leave much time to develop the plot and the characters, Durbin spends time singing a few ditties. If we include more spent time playing almost complete Isolde's Liebestod, we start guessing Siodmack found he didn't have much of a story, or needn't much time to tell it.
When one thinks that in 1944 Siodmack had just shot the brilliant Phantom Lady, and in 1945 he would shoot another couple of notable films such as The suspect and The strange affair of Uncle Harry, always with the wonderful Ella Raines, a film as dead as this one becomes incomprehensible.