I got up early this beautiful Christmas morning to watch the sunrise, as is my habit (every day, not just December 25th) and saw that a 1940s Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck film that was NOT “Double Indemnity” was playing on TCM, so I watched it and wish to recommend it highly to all of you.
I’ll spare you the plot, other than to say that it concerns a shoplifter and the DA who starts out prosecuting her and ends up marrying her, with a long sidetrip from NYC, where the crime takes place, to Indiana, where each of them grew up, her in a miserable, hateful, rejecting family and him in a poor but happy loving family. Needless to say, he takes her to his widowed mother’s home rather than subjecting her to her own mother’s lack of hospitality and love, and in his boyhood home they fall in love themselves. The best scene is the penultimate resumption of her trial, in which he tries to blow her case by prosecuting it too hard, which is a nice tack since the judge has his suspicions of their improper ex parte relationship, so this tack is designed both to get her off while shielding himself from the judge’s suspicion.
It’s wonderful entertaining movie, written by Preston Sturges just before embarking on his own directing career, and not least for its heart-warming (yet perfectly sectarian) portrayal of the holiday season, contrasting the two Indiana homes, and showing a lonely and unsocialized woman’s moving response to the loving homelife of simple country folks.
Two geographic facts I’d noticed: early on, she tries to pawn some stolen goods at the corner of 3rd Avenue and West 54th street, which does not exist and never did, and (because of some legal hijinx they committed on the drive westward) they have to drive eastward from Indiana to NYC by way of Canada, which doesn’t seem possible without driving WAY out of their way. And a cultural sidenote is the portrayal and billing of MacMurray’s black man-servant: billed (amazingly to me) only as “Snowflake,” this small role gives a very enlightening view of race relations in the US just 15 years before “Brown vs. Board of Ed.”
The contrast between these two characters and their hard-hearted counterparts in Double Indemnity couldn’t be greater (and I love that film madly as well). See it if you can–it’s a terrific old-fashioned movie for the holidays!
