So now that it’s December, it’s time for Christmas movies, right?

First up, The Shop Around the Corner, an Ernst Lubitsch joint. You may recall that when I watched Trouble in Paradise I was shocked by how good it was. This time around, I wasn’t quite as shocked and the movie wasn’t quite as good — but it was still better than it ought to have been; my wife, skeptical going in, was won over by the end.

This is the movie that they quasi-remade into You’ve Got Mail, except that it actually doesn’t have some of the key elements of that movie. The premise here is that Jimmy Stewart is a store clerk at a store in Budapest[1] who is corresponding via post office box with a woman who advertised in the paper for a literate correspondent, and they fall in love, but (surprise!) it turns out they are actually coworkers and hate each other (with vibes reminiscent of Sam and Diane from Cheers).

But it’s not just about that, because there’s also a large subplot about Jimmy’s relationship with the shop owner, about the shop owner’s marriage, and really a whole bunch of characters get their own little story told.

It’s charming, it’s witty, and if it feels like a polished Hollywood romcom, it’s at least a very good exemplar of its genre. (And I’ll also note that if it feels like a polished Hollywood romcom, it’s worth remembering that it came out in 1940, so just holding up that well for that long is an achievement on its own.)

Next up, a selection from Criterion’s “Holiday Noir” collection (I guess when you don’t have any Hallmark movies available, you stretch for whatever you can define as even vaguely seasonally appropriate), Repeat Performance. This movie keeps us in the 1940s (it’s from 1947), but is a rather darker film.

We’re dropped into the movie in medias res, with a woman holding a gun and a man’s body on the floor. Pounding at the door; she flees the scene. Meeting up with her friends at a New Year’s Eve party, there’s a lot of conversation about people whose names we don’t recognize; and when she confesses to one of her friends that she just killed her husband, he doesn’t seem even remotely upset about it. As they leave to meet up with another friend, she wishes that she could go back to “before this all happened” and after a clunky bit of narration, when she meets up with her friend, it turns out that now it’s New Year’s Eve of the previous year.

And so now we’re going to get the backstory that got us to that opening scene, and which fills in the details on all those friends’ gossip at the beginning. And so we see her meet up with her husband, with whom she’s greatly in love, and she determines to change the future this time around.

It’s a neat premise — 12 Monkeys, but for a marriage rather than an apocalypse — and it’s executed well. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is often sharp, the story is mysterious and intriguing, and about the only thing that weakens it is that the husband is such an asshole that his getting shot honestly doesn’t seem like that terrible of an outcome.

The sense I get from reading about it, is that the movie wasn’t a big hit in its day, with its fantasy noir romance genre not exactly hitting audiences where they were. It was apparently all-but-lost for a long time, but had a restoration recently (with a Blu-ray released in 2022; there’s still more visible damage to the print than you usually see in movies of this vintage). I don’t think it quite rises to the level of a rediscovered treasure, but I’m certainly glad it wasn’t lost forever.

Last is Black Christmas, a 1974 Christmas horror movie that’s one of the first slasher films, and apparently inspired Halloween. The problem watching it today is that the slashers that followed are often much better, having taken what’s good about this movie and amplified it and added more good stuff. Which means that if you watch it now, you’re essentially watching a slow-moving slasher with mostly-rote kills done by a dull villain, in the service of a plot that doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.

Still, there’s some solid acting in here (Margot Kidder and Keir Dullea are two of the stars, and it’s so weird to think that Dullea just five years before was in 2001), and it’s not bad, but I think it’s worth watching more as a movie of historical importance than anything else.

  1. (A question we had throughout the entire movie is: Why the heck is this pseudo-set in Hungary? Like, it’s going to almost no effort to make it feel authentically Hungarian, Jimmy Stewart is doing his normal Jimmy Stewart accent, and yet every proper noun is Hungarian. Answer seems to be that it’s based on a play set there, and they kept the play’s setting.) ↩︎