Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Twelve

 I'll let the pin-ups do the talking today.  Merry Christmas everyone!

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Eleven

Since it’s been almost a year since I last mentioned Barbara Stanwyck’s name, I figured that my Stanwyck ban can come to an end. As mentioned in one of my previous posts about Stanwyck, she starred in multiple Christmas movies. I’ve already talked about Christmas in Connecticuit (1945) and I’ve made brief mention of Meet John Doe (1941), but I have not spoke about her first, most obscure, Christmas film.
Remember the Night ( directed by Mitchell Liesen in 1940) finds Stanywyck playing Lee Leander, a shoplifter who gets picked up right before the Christmas holiday. During her preliminary hearing for the crime she meets prosecuting lawyer John Sargent, played by Fred MacMurray. While as a lawyer John is known to be a killer, he turns out to be a pretty nice guy and offers to give Lee a ride home to her family home in Indiana while on the way to his own family's Christmas. Of course, the pair meet up with misadventure on their way from New York to Indiana, and when Lee’s mother rejects her upon her return John offers to take her home to his mother’s for Christmas. All of the warm hospitality of the Sargent family soften Lee and she and John soon fall in love. However, the specter of Lee's post-holiday court date loom heavy.  Will John take a dive in the courtroom to help Lee get off? Will Lee let him jepordize his carreer to do it?

The reason that Remember the Night has remained fairly obscure is due to the fact that it does have such a bittersweet finale.  MacMurray's character is such a good guy and Stanwyck's has such a jaded past that it is inevitable that a union between the two of them would have more than its share of difficulties.  Yet, the scenes of the Sargent family Christmas are quite lovely, and the misadventures that the two expereince on the way home are pretty enduring.  It's funny that a few years later Stanwyck and MacMurray would be play cold-blooded killers in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944).  Mind you, you can see where their chemistry began.  It's also interesting to note that the screenplay was written by Preston Sturges who would go on to direct Stanwyck in The Lady Eve a year later.

Here's the trailer...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Ten

If you're looking for Christmas cards with a retro twist look no further than The Retro Christmas Card Company.  I wish I had stumbled upon this earlier, since it's a little too late to be sending Christmas cards.  Oh well! I guess it's never too soon to start planing for next year.  I wonder if the company will branch out into other cards for other occasions. 

 

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Nine

Some of the more subversive filmmakers have looked towards the holidays as a perfect setting for horror.  The first, and most successful, example of this is Bob Clark's 1974 film Black Christmas.   In Black Christmas a sorority house full of girls is terrorized by an unseen maniac.  At first they get just explicit phone calls, but soon after girls start to go missing. 

Black Christmas is a landmark in horror films for a couple of reasons. It was the first horror film to use the first-person point of view for the killer.  Clocking in at almost four years before Halloween it is the first horror film based around a major holiday (John Carpenter's original Halloween was originally intended to be a sequel to Black Christmas).  The film also bucks the standard horror film cliches in making having the main heroine be a pregnant girl who wants an abortion (as opposed to the virgin being the one person left alive). 

Beyond this, Black Christmas is a great film overall.  It's really fun watching the suspense build as characters fall prey to the killer and it has a marvelous twist ending.  There's also a great sense of humour coursing beneath the surface. It's also Canadian for those who are counting. Here's the trailer...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Eight

Here's a couple more retro holiday ads for your enjoyment.  I'll keep refrain from the glib comments this time around.  Enjoy!