A Christmas Eve to Be Forgotten

There are probably hundreds of Christmas movies. Most of them vanish without a trace. Titles get repeated with no similarity to the previous movie with that title simply because no one remembers that the previous one exists. Which makes it quite the challenge to find and watch the older ones, I can tell you. Some of them, I suppose, are in the public domain in that maddening “I don’t know if any of the stuff in the middle of the century is in the public domain” mess. Some aren’t old enough for that. Some are probably not in the public domain but also no one cares enough about them to release them. This year, we’re taking on a dozen or so of them.

Christmas Eve from 1947 is the story of Matilda Reed (Ann Harding), who many years past adopted three boys. She hasn’t heard from them in a long time. Meanwhile, her nephew, Phillip Hastings (Reginald Denny), has decided that she’s spending her money foolishly, which obviously proves she’s insane. So he’s going to have her declared incompetent and handle her money for her. She gets the judge (Clarence Kolb) to agree that he’ll keep her money out of Phillip’s hands if her boys, Michael (George Brooks), Mario (George Raft), and Johnny (Randolph Scott) return home for Christmas Eve dinner.

You will not be surprised to learn that the three are not leading blameless lives. Nor that there’s something fishy about nephew Phillip. Matilda’s savvy enough to hire a private detective, Gimlet (Joe Sawyer), to find her boys rather than rely on the idea that they’ll just happily appear on her doorstep when she hasn’t heard from them in Gods alone know how long. And so she finds out exactly what they’ve been up to and why Joan Blondell is going to appear on her doorstep come Christmas Eve.

The benefit of this movie from the actors’ perspective is that none of them had to work very hard. The three male leads each worked for three weeks, but only one week of that overlapped with the others; each filmed his character’s goings-on for two weeks, then they did the bits where they actually interact with one another. And so they each got credit for a full movie without having to act in a full movie or put in the time a full movie requires, which I’m sure was nice for them. There were a lot of movies like this back in the ‘40s, and from what I can tell most of them aren’t very good.

Oh, this one is . . . fine? There are plot points I don’t entirely understand, and it’s frustrating that Ann Harding was younger than two of the men playing her adopted sons, but it mostly works as a movie. The third segment is weakest, and of course it’s hard not to think that Joan Blondell can do better, but it could be worse. It even gives you a Nazi to hate, and that’s quite the desirable quality in a post-war movie. I’m not sure it’s worth the burns George Raft apparently suffered during filming, but they were only first degree. Margaret Hamilton would tell him he got off easy.