DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI is in the midst of their annual collection of holiday films, which includes the usual suspects like Home Alone, It’s a Wonderful Life, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and Jim Henson’s Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas. (For those of you who can’t get enough of Muppet-ized Christmas stories, the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theater is screening A Muppet Family Christmas this weekend.) They have, however, snuck one oddball title into the mix, a rarely seen Robert Siodmak film noir from 1944, Christmas Holiday.
The generic title does no favors for this film, which takes place around Christmas and features one long scene in a midnight mass, but otherwise has little to do with the holiday. Siodmak directs a script by Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz, with many of the narrative complexities and flashbacks that typified his work on Welles’ film. The story, based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel follows an unlucky-in-love soldier who meets up with a prostitute for an evening of churchgoing and late-night walks, during which she relates to him the story of her ne’er-do-well jailbird husband. The film is remarkable for casting two well known song-and-dancers, Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, as the prostitute and the husband. The former just gets a couple of songs in the cathouse, while the latter sings not a note, and dances not a step. Both actors show darker sides they rarely, if ever, showed in the rest of their careers. Merry Christmas!
There’s a trailer in this clip, but you’ll want to skip ahead to the 3:07 mark to avoid spoilers. For some reason, whoever posted the clip included final three minutes of the movie ahead of the trailer.
Christmas Holiday screens Saturday-Monday at the AFI while the rest of their holiday programming continues through Christmas Eve.
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Recovered Treasure: UCLA’s Festival of Preservation
For fifteen years, the UCLA Film and Television Archive has been dedicated to preserving the moving image, taking often deteriorating original materials from both rare and well known works and transferring them to more stable media. Ever since they started preservation activities in 1995, they also presented film festivals featuring works from their archives. This year, for the first time, they’re taking that show on the road, and the National Gallery is currently hosting a number of screenings associated with the festival. Those screenings continue through the end of the month, and this weekend there are four films. Saturday there’s a double feature of Frank Borzage directed films from the early 30s, and on Sunday there’s a film noir double shot with dark tales from noir masters Edward G. Ulmer and Fritz Lang.
The Festival has three programs this weekend at the National Gallery, on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Free.
