In short: Ghost Story (1981)

Every couple of years, I’ve forgotten enough about John Irvin’s all too free adaptation of Peter Straub’s fantastic eponymous novel to try and change my mind about the film.

Alas, once I start watching, I remember again why I’ll never be able to call this one worth rediscovering, a hidden gem, or anything else positive. The problem really isn’t me here, it is that the film’s just a mess. In part, that’s the fault of a lot of heavy-handed studio intervention that tried to pull the film away from subtlety to more obvious shock effects, as if all that a film needs to be visceral are some often very awkwardly added in shots of a bad looking corpse make-up job. Director John Irvin has quite a bit to answer for, too. The glacial pace in which the film develops through pointless scene and pointless scene of little specific happening is all on him and scriptwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, as are the bizarre tonal shifts between the film’s main timeline and the long, long, way too long flashbacks.

That the film needs to cut back considerable parts of Straub’s novel to fit into anything but a modern mini series runtime (this one could really make a great contemporary streaming series) is obvious. It just seems to wilfully cut out the most important parts of the book, while keeping elements in that do not make sense anymore without what’s been lost. The completely rewritten elements of the film – particular the nature of its big bad - go out of their way to weaken one of the book’s main themes - the destructive force of male fear of women. That the originals many-coloured play with the traditions of the written (or really, told) supernatural tale have gone the way of the dodo is no surprise, but it makes it hard to see the point of the old men telling each other ghost stories at all.

But then, this is a film that makes a big thing out of featuring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman in the leads and does sod all with them, focussing on their flashback selves (played by nobody you need to remember), and on Craig Wasson, who, I’m sad to point out, could not act his way out of a wet paper bag, and is actively, wilfully bad here. Alice Krige as our villainess is great, mixing cold anger and strange sensuality perfectly, but again, the film never seems to understand the performance Krige gives (or even what the point of her character is) and simply wastes it on nothing of consequence.

All of this is little improved by Irvin’s failings as a horror director: slow burn horror, shock horror, American Gothic mood, mild (and therefore heavily toned down from the novel) surrealist horror – there’s no mode of the genre you’ll see any ability for here.

In short: Holiday Inn (1941)

Say what you will about Mark Sandrich’s tale of showbiz woe in which Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are vying for Marjorie Reynolds, but it certainly is ambitious in its attempt to encompass all holidays known to North Americans (half of which involve presidents, apparently) in a single movie fit for all holidays, with each and every one of them getting their own Irving Berlin tune.

For my tastes, Berlin always was the least interesting big name songwriter of this sort of thing at his time, tending to be a bit too tame and conventional, frankly a wee bit boring, when compared to the Porters and Gershwins of the world. So it’ll come as no surprise that I don’t actually think much about most of his ditties here, with the obvious exceptions of “Easter Parade” and the unstoppable juggernaut of proper holiday sentimentality that is “White Christmas”. But to be fair to Berlin, and to pretend I’m not an insufferable snob when it comes to my favourites in the Great American Songbook, holiday songs aren’t easy.

The film knows on which side its bread is buttered, too, seeing as White Christmas is the only song used twice here. Otherwise this is a very typical musical comedy of its time, with Crosby crooning second rate Berlin holiday songs, Fred Astaire mostly – there are a couple of exceptions – coasting through comparatively uninventive choreography, getting by on charm and the fact that he’s Astaire (which works out nicely for him and for at least this viewer), Reynolds making no impression whatsoever, and the typically obvious jokes falling flat more often than not, though not in an unpleasant manner.


There are a couple of interesting elements here, like a rather meta ending that seems to belong to a much more inventive, and perhaps emotionally more involving, movie, or how a film that includes a, probably well-meant, blackface number (for Lincoln’s Birthday, no less) that’ll make 2010s and 2020s audiences cringe also treats its black characters (who are of course and alas a maid played by Louise Beavers and her children) with comparative dignity and humanity. Despite that and its status as at least a minor holiday classic, I simply don’t believe Holiday Inn’s a terribly great film. Thanks to Old Hollywood magic doing its work, it is, however, still a slick and watchable production, and at least we’ll always have “White Christmas”.