One of my favourite films is White Christmas. Up there with All That Heaven Allows. It looks INCREDIBLE. Cinematography, design, an amazing film. And it’s several films - only one of which, the last 15 minutes, has much to do with Christmas. Look at the incredible mise-en-scene and painterly colours of the initial military scenes. They look like old masters.
But it’s also an absolutely bizarre film. The hagiography of the Sarge, the alpha male, the doting, soft but stern, patriarch, who seems emotionally unstable even from the first time you meet him (his eyes are glistening with tears by minute 3) and later is a total wreck. It’s all so extreme, it’s almost absurd. The incredible deference, desperate love, tenderness, and awe for daddy, the fallen, wounded hero.
What strength of feeling, what a massive cultural faultline, must that have been to produce a film like that? With singing and dancing. And the birth of a new saviour? A secular saviour to go with the Christmas cards and sleigh bells and snow.
Note that this film came out a year after America elected war hero Eisenhower. Just saying....
The birth of our saviour