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 on Christmas holiday 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."