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The quicksilver progression from Army barracks to packed hotel lobby to seedy cabaret is prelude to the revelation (Deanna Durbin grown into a bluesy "hostess"), the midnight-mass sequence sets up the intricate flashback structure. A Dear John letter on Christmas Eve and a lieutenant (Dean Harens) stuck in stormy New Orleans, the local maison des putains offers glowing yuletide tree and crystal chandelier. Durbin in plunging neckline is the doleful chanteuse, prematurely worldly under the spotlight ("Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year") yet uncontrollably misty-eyed at the cathedral. Her jailed husband (Gene Kelly) is her albatross, a gambling weakling with family issues (his relationship with Mommy Gale Sondergaard is offhandedly described as "pathological") and the source of the heroine's guilt and passion. "Who do you like better, the person I pretend to be or...?" W. Somerset Maugham by way of Herman J. Mankiewicz in a shuffle of romance and degradation, Robert Siodmak paints it with dark elation, double lives, a variety of melodic spaces. (The camera dollies out from a violinist in the pavilion and cranes upwards a few floors to find the noir couple, a downward movement follows them from their table to reach the dance floor just as the tune ends.) The Kelly grin here has a malefic side, he comes home with blood-stained trousers and reappears later to "straighten out the family." Liebestod for the first meeting and "Always" for the union—in a candlelit composition by the piano, the pinched gorgon suddenly glows with maternal pride. "I guess maybe there's another meaning to love than what I was taught." The masochistic former child star and the grounded dancer face each other in the shadows, and Siodmak marvels at how America got to this point. With Richard Whorf, Gladys George, and David Bruce. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |