Sadly Over-hyped

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

I would consider this among Deanna Durbins' more disappointing films. As I watched it, I seriously wondered if the film was originally just the portion with Gene Kelly and the other plot involving the soldier was done as an afterthought. In hindsight, this was a mistake and the soldier's story really wasn't necessary to this clumsy movie.When the film begins, a Lieutenant serving in WWII gets a dear John letter from his sweetie. Naturally he's hurt and angry...and this occurs just before he goes on leave. However, during the leave, he is diverted to New Orleans and is stuck there...and he meets Abigail (Durbin). She then tells him about her experience with love...and it consists of a series of flashbacks with her then husband (Gene Kelly)...a man who is a total scum-bag. The ending of the film, is very abrupt and you wonder what the studio was thinking.Overall, a disappointing and slightly confusing film...one that made you wonder, as Durbin was one of the studio's biggest assets and deserved a better picture than this.

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.

Deanna tries something different and does very well by it. This tough little noir was a film that she had insisted on doing to try and break away from the Mary Sunshine roles that were her stock in trade. It's lack of success at the box office kept Universal from letting her tackle different roles for the rest of her career and contributed to her retirement a few years after this, although she hated the movie business so even if it had been a smash she probably would have still called it quits. Her performance is strong as the "dance hall hostess/singer" who the film manages in roundabout ways to make clear is a prostitute. One of the film's strengths is while of course they find a way to have Deanna sing her songbird is not singled out as special. Sure she sings much better than most roadside canaries but the patrons hardly break from what they're doing while she performs and her style is subdued almost beaten down, especially during "Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year". Her version of Always is achingly beautiful though full of hopelessness and despair. The picture is also fortunate to have two outstanding character actresses among the cast, Gale Sondergaard reserved and conflicted as the no account Kelly's mother and the great and under-appreciated Gladys George in her typical role of the been around goodhearted but tough owner of the joint where Deanna has landed. Where the film is weakest is in the male cast members. Richard Whorf is good as the huckster for the road house who pulls Dean Harens into Deanna's sphere where he learns her sad tale but Harens while not bad doesn't really make much of an impression on screen. He is just a catalyst for the actual story to kick in so his blandness doesn't hurt the picture. That only leaves Gene Kelly who again while not bad is the wrong actor for the part. His glib facileness suits the lout he's playing but there is no underlying menace to his personality that would have punched the innate danger of the character across, John Garfield would have been ideal and taken the film from being good, which it is, to extraordinary which it just misses. Still well worth seeking out.

My mother SWEARS Deanna sang "Spring..." while standing on a train station platform. ("She must have sung it twice and the one time was deleted since I saw it when it was new.") But she is 84 and she does misremember sometimes. The movie was shown at least once on TBS, but our cable company chose those two hours to perform maintenance... Correcting an earlier comment, Richard Whorf is the reporter, not the soldier. I couldn't help but notice similarities to "Suddenly Last Summer," set in New Orleans, with big windows looking out on courtyards, and a domineering mother... and that just happened to be a Joseph Mankiewicz production.