In short: Home for the Holidays (1972)

A very merry Christmas to the daughters of what is laughingly called the Morgan “family”! After years, their much hated Dad (Walter Brennan), whom they make responsible for the suicide of their mother, has invited his daughters home for the holidays to their huge house in the deep dark woods. Actually, he has called them for help, because he is suspecting his second wife Elizabeth (Julie Harris) – hereafter known to everyone only as “That Woman” – is poisoning him. He wants his dear daughters to protect him by…killing her.

However, despite all of them being plenty stupid, not even Chris the naïf (Sally Field), Freddie the pill-popping alcoholic (Jessica Walter), Jo the party girl (Jill Haworth) and Alex the replacement mom (Eleanor Parker) are quite so stupid as to just start going around killing That Woman only on their father’s word. They are also, as it turns out, way too much into melodramatic whining to find time for this sort of thing. Someone however is a bit more of a go-getter, and soon, the daughters find themselves threatened, murdered and coming to absurd conclusions about who the killer anyone in the audience will have pegged in the first ten minutes or so is, while the film continues to pretend That Woman is totally suspicious. Help would be good, but alas, they also find themselves victims of heavy rainstorms. What a Christmas!

TV director great John Llewellyn Moxey’s Home for the Holidays is generally held in high esteem by connoisseurs of 70s horror and suspense TV movies, and in a couple scenes in the last third of the film, I can see why. To be precise, once Moxey gets the opportunity to stage a couple of suspenseful - gialloesque more than proto slasher-style - stalk sequences with Chris running idiotically through the woods, the film gets much more interesting. If there’s one thing this director has down pat, it’s staging classicist suspense on a TV budget, and this part of the film is indeed a bit of a master class on how to stage a suspenseful chase through the rainy woods.


My problem really isn’t with Moxey’s direction at all, but with Joseph Stefano’s screenplay. Stefano was an interesting writer, involved in a lot of classic SF and horror TV, as well as the screenwriter for Hitchcock’s Psycho; on the other hand, he is also responsible for stuff like Snowbeast. Here, he seems to be trying his hardest to make his cast of female characters the most annoying troupe of talking clichés about “neurotic” bourgeois women possible; after half an hour of rich people whining about how Daddy didn’t love them, killed their mother and really only wanted boys, and all the “That Woman” bullshit, I was rather siding with the killer. It doesn’t help the film’s case that Stefano puts way too much emphasis on the That Woman red herring, adding terminal stupidity to the family’s special traits. Don’t get me wrong, there are some subtle elements to the script too, like the way the daughters of the guy who only wanted boys all go by pretty boy-like short versions of their names, but as a whole, this delivers all the clichés about women of a certain class I loathe to encounter in concentrated form.

In short: Scaramouche (1952)

France, a few years before the Revolution. Actor and charming rogue Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger doing what he does best) has to confront the more serious sides of life when the Queen's (Nina Foch) cousin, the Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), slaughters his best friend and foster brother in a duel for having written a pamphlet in praise of certain soon to be revolutionary principles. The poor boy never stood a chance against de Maynes, who isn't just the best duelist in France but also a man quite willing to use his abilities to get rid of any political enemy he can provoke into a fight.

Not being a swordsman himself Andre barely escapes with his life when he attempts to avenge his brother right on the spot. From this point onward, Andre dedicates his life to taking revenge on de Maynes, learning the art of fencing from the man's own fencing teacher and getting in trouble. On the way, our hero stumbles into the commedia dell'arte role of Scaramouche.

Further complications ensue because of love, for Andre has fallen for de Maynes's ward Aline de Gavrillac (Janet Leigh), as does de Maynes himself soon enough. Aline actually reciprocates Andre's feelings, alas, Andre thinks she is his half-sister (it's complicated), so the romance is rather a no-go for him, and he spends most of his time on a rather complicated (obviously) relationship with the actress Lenore (Eleanor Parker). It's a wonder all these - and more - plot lines will get tied up in less than two hours of running time.

As every fool knows, the swashbuckling genre was one of the things 40s and 50s Hollywood was particularly good at, which comes as no surprise when one keeps in mind how exactly the mixture of a colourful view of the past, grand emotions, and light consequences many swashbucklers prefer also is what the studio movies at the time were particularly good at; in that sense, one can see the swashbuckling adventure as the slightly more violent sister to the musical. With that sentence, I've done my duty of giving film historians apoplexy.

George Sidney's Scaramouche (of course based on Rafael Sabatini's novel) is a particularly fine example of the form with a particularly deft hand at gliding from high melodrama to silliness to fine quipping in front of eye-poppingly colourful backgrounds and back again in a most organic way that does remind me of dancing; again, I think there's an obvious parallel to musicals and the wuxia film here, though that may just be me. Be that as it may, I don't think it's any question its flow creates large parts of Scaramouche's impressive charms as a film in a genre that is all about the flow.

Apart from this, there are of course also some fine moments of old-style Hollywood acting by Granger, Leigh, Parker and Ferrer to praise, fanciful art direction to admire, swashbuckling deeds to thrill at, and so on, and so forth, until the sympathetic viewer will be left with the happiest of grins on her face; or so I, and quite obviously the film itself also, hope. As a bonus, Scaramouche is one of those swashbucklers where the female characters - even though they don't buckle any swashes - have a certain degree of personality and agency. It's even one where the "bad" (not that the film moralizes at her) girl may let the hero go into the arms of the "good" girl but where she doesn't have to run into a sword for him, instead finding better prospects of a kind.

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