Casting Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly against type, Robert Siodmak created a commercially successful but critically unappreciated film noir that very soon disappeared from view due to story rights problems. Very loosely adapted from a Somerset Maugham story, it is set in a rainy New Orleans, where a soldier en route to California for Christmas gets held over. He invites a beguiling singer (Durbin) to attend midnight mass. She enters into a litany of her own, telling him--in true film noir flashback style--of her marriage to a New Orleans gentleman (Kelly) whose violent nature came to light only after the marriage, when she was slow to realize that he and his mother had conspired to conceal a murder. The film moves back into the present tense as Kelly slips out of jail...
Christmas Holiday received this entry in Silver and Ward's “Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference”: “Siodmak's Germanic sensibility allowed him deeply to undercut that almost Rockwellian portrait of a smiling mother, son, and daughter-in-law... by suggestions of incest and homosexuality. Present are relationships of love and sex that are so perverse they evoke the noir underworld as if it were a foundation of corruption, like Eliot's skull beneath the skin, underlying an ostensibly attractive reality. Finally, Hans Salter's use of Wagner's ‘Tristan' theme to open and close Robert and Abby's relationship, and the slow, highly syncopated rendition of ‘Always' that he forces on Deanna Durbin as a reaffirmation of the love that destroys as it consumes, reinforce the noir conceptions of the film.” William K. Everson notes: “Durbin herself astutely characterized it as her best film...”