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This morning everybody's stumbling about among the debris
Most Christmas stories are stories of regeneration: the sun returning, the green boughs in the snow. In this sense George More O'Ferrall's The Holly and the Ivy (1952) is no different from the rest of its genre, but I really appreciate how much holiday stress, awkwardness, and downright dysfunction it packs into its three acts all the while looking like exactly the kind of well-spoken, well-photographed, well-made play the British New Wave was supposed to explode. Instead of a drama of exquisite repression, it's ultimately a story of misrule: how the genteel codes of keeping calm and carrying on can trap a family each in their own separate ice like the ninth circle of Dante and sometimes things need to shatter; someone needs to scream. Christmas is the most inconvenient and the most appropriate time of year for it. Cue the hangover, heartache, and mistletoe.
The film is not ironic about Christmas; it's not out to spike the eggnog of anyone who sincerely enjoys the carols, decorations, crèches, and nativity plays observed over the course of the movie, especially in the prologue—opened out from the original stage play by Wynyard Browne—which seems to promise a sentimental reunion as various members of the far-flung Gregory clan are summoned home in the winter of 1948 for Christmas at the old vicarage in Wyndenham, Norfolk. The widowed aunt on the English side of the family (Margaret Halstan) jubilantly leaves her residential hotel, the spinster aunt on the Irish side (Maureen Delany) reluctantly leaves her cat, the middle-aged cousin (Hugh Williams) leaves his army buddies at the club with the provoking thought that he almost went into the church himself. All are genuinely invested in the homely routine of family Christmas and the screenplay by producer Anatole de Grunwald does not belittle their anticipation; at the same time it is clear-eyed in its recognition that coming home for the holidays can be the least relaxing thing on earth, especially for adult children whose lives have diverged wildly from the tinsel innocence of bygone years. Scapegrace Mick (Denholm Elliott) wangles himself a leave from his national service on compassionate grounds, all demurely transparent apology for his recently widowed father and his sister bravely bearing the weight of the season all alone, but once home and hugged and roped into holly-decorating, he candidly confides, "I can't bear Christmas. I used to like it as a child, but now it's—well, as you say, it's depressing." Perhaps his older sister Margaret (Margaret Leighton) feels the same way, because no one's seen her at family gatherings for years; she exists in a glamorous, distant whirl of London fashion journalism, conspicuous by her disappearing act whenever anyone tries to get hold of her at her office, the shows she covers, or her expensive, untidy flat. And eldest sister Jenny (Celia Johnson) isn't coming home for Christmas because she's always home—the passive, collective weight of family opinion fixed her as the domestic type long ago, so despite her own restlessness and her engineer boyfriend (John Gregson)'s job offer in South America she is keeping house for their father who never remembers where he left his socks or his sermon, looking ever more luminously frayed and enduring almost without a flinch his expressions of grateful reliance, "Oh, Jenny, Jenny, what would I do without you?" They keep their secrets with long practice, individually resigned to the "perpetual pretense" whenever they have to interact with the rest of the family. But when an unexpected Margaret crashes Christmas Eve like the Ghost of Christmas Never, it's too much reality for the holiday to bear; the air that should be full of the hush of snowfall and the pure harmony of carols thickens instead with nerves and resentments and griefs held down too long to be anything but volcanic when they come out. The action adheres to the classical unities, meaning we're spending Christmas with the Gregorys whether we like it or not. Just our luck it's the one where someone passes out on the drawing-room floor.
Since stories where people don't talk to one another tend to drive me to headdesk, I appreciate that The Holly and the Ivy's is not an idiot plot. The Reverend Martin Gregory (Ralph Richardson, with snow-white hair standing in for the twenty years the role's got on him) is not a monster, not a fundamentalist or a fanatic or even just one of those Victorian patres familias that hung on after the war—with his gentle sense of humor, his academic eccentricity, and the half-lilt of his still-Irish accent, his parishioners might well describe him as a saint or at least a holy fool. He is preparing a sermon on the pagan antecedents of Christmas and shocks his romantic sister-in-law by casually declaring his hatred for the modern, commercialized holiday. He may charm the viewer just as readily, interrupting his own research to read out a passage that tickled him: "In the Middle Ages, they had a Feast of Fools at Christmas. It seems they got a bit rowdy at times and in 1444, the cathedral chapter of Saens laid down a regulation that not more than three buckets of water could be thrown over a curate at Vespers." But he has dedicated himself so seriously to his vocation that he's left his family out in the cold, assuming that they would come to him with their problems without ever inviting them to; unsurprisingly they have grown up assuming they can't. It's hard to call it selfishness outright, but it is a kind of complacency, a self-imposed insulation. Martin frets that the great fourteenth-century church that so overawed him when he first came to Wyndenham means less to his flock than "that little tinpot shack of a cinema they've gone to tonight" and can't see until it hits him across the face three times in the same day how his own children have drawn back from him, afraid to find him too unworldly or too uncompromising to sympathize with their ordinary human fuck-ups and tragedies. "A fine caricature I've made of religion if that's how it seems to me own children," he mourns more to himself than to Margaret, with whom he has the most honest, therefore the most wounding conversation of the movie; she is his favorite child, after all, the bitterest and the most elusive, and her mistrust can pierce him where Mick's trembling explosions of temper might be dismissed as mere childishness. As if he's the one receiving the Christmas wake-up, the lightning-strike: "Should be because of religion I have more sympathy and understanding for people. But I have, Margaret, I have! Do I seem like the type of man that'd turn away from the sorrows of his own children?" By his distress, plainly not, but how should she have known? It was never put to the test.
With all their katabasis and catharsis, the other thing Christmas stories tend to be is mythological and The Holly and the Ivy is no exception here either; both plot and dialogue play consciously but never pretentiously with metaphors of winter and Yule, the dark and icy as well as the candlelit. Jenny's love for David is inseparable from her despair over its futility—literally fruitless, kisses stolen in the cloakroom of the vicarage as she sinks against his shoulder in a moment of respite equated with death. "I suppose people who fall asleep in the snow feel like this. They know they've got to keep awake, but just for a moment they give up the struggle because the snow's so warm and so cozy." If she freezes for love of David, though, she might find herself in the same position as her sister, of whose brittle flamboyance she demands, "Why must you always crackle like ice? What's happened to make you seem all frozen over inside? You're like someone out of a Hans Andersen story—the frozen queen who went down to the gardens of the dead," as if Demeter harrowed hell for Persephone. But Margaret never will regain her lost child, born to an incorporeal father in dreadful parody of the Nativity; she is not Madonna but Magdalene of the Snows as she confronts her family, pale and stinging in her armor of white furs and reckless indifference, much the worse for drink. "Your gardens of the dead are here tonight with a vengeance, Jenny. It's like walking over the surface of the moon. The snow's too pale—" Considering as I do the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities an essential Christmas movie, I am glad to see any seasonal narrative star a cynical drunk who is not yet beyond all hope and even gladder that this time self-sacrifice is not what's asked of her. Very little has really changed by the end of this story. Two sisters trade places at the hinge of the year; a brother for once tells the truth; a father for the first time hears it. Nothing is solved overnight. Nothing is even guaranteed. And yet it feels momentous enough to justify Mick's giddy report to a bemused David, who went home early and missed all the anagnorisis: "There's been an atomic explosion since last night. The whole of our lives has been split open, exposed . . . the place is radioactive. I must go"—to meet his family for services, impertinent atheist that he is, having skimmed sixpence for the collection off his future brother-in-law who still doesn't know what hit him. Back in a discussion of the topsy-turvy days around Christmas and the New Year, Martin recalled that the ancients thought of them as "queer sort of days that didn't really exist—days on which anything might happen." Well, look at that. Anything did.
I believe I first read of this movie exactly ten years ago, when Denholm Elliott was suddenly everywhere, and then it got back on my radar four or five years after that, when Ralph Richardson was suddenly everywhere, and then it took until this Christmas to make its debut on TCM where I could see it. It does give very good Elliott and Richardson; the former is as young as I've ever seen him and so slipperily beautiful, he looks one moment like he could do you mischief in the wood and the next like he'd panic, while the latter draws quietly on his knack for the workaday numinous, so that you believe his parson both as a force for good in the world and a parent who could stand real improvement. Johnson and Leighton share some of the best scenes as sisters who simultaneously envy and can't make sense of each other's lives; doing the washing-up at the sink together, they look like a white owl and a lioness somehow sprung from the same stock. Gregson is playing more of a romantic object than an active character, but he makes an attractive object, Halstan, Delany, and Williams all turn in familiar types who are still not totally predictable people, and an additional handful of character actors turn welcomely up—Roland Culver, Robert Flemyng, William Hartnell in an awful mustache. The cinematography by Edward Scaife is not fancy, but there's one eloquent shot through a Christmas tree that summarizes everything wrong with a relationship. I rather like the music by Malcolm Arnold, since it's all variations on carols I enjoy. In a year in which I felt relatively ambivalent about Christmas, The Holly and the Ivy worked for me: it is thorny without cruelty, hopeful without schmaltz, and contains a bravura monologue about guano. Show me the Hallmark movie that has one of those. This crown brought to you by my sweet backers at Patreon.
The film is not ironic about Christmas; it's not out to spike the eggnog of anyone who sincerely enjoys the carols, decorations, crèches, and nativity plays observed over the course of the movie, especially in the prologue—opened out from the original stage play by Wynyard Browne—which seems to promise a sentimental reunion as various members of the far-flung Gregory clan are summoned home in the winter of 1948 for Christmas at the old vicarage in Wyndenham, Norfolk. The widowed aunt on the English side of the family (Margaret Halstan) jubilantly leaves her residential hotel, the spinster aunt on the Irish side (Maureen Delany) reluctantly leaves her cat, the middle-aged cousin (Hugh Williams) leaves his army buddies at the club with the provoking thought that he almost went into the church himself. All are genuinely invested in the homely routine of family Christmas and the screenplay by producer Anatole de Grunwald does not belittle their anticipation; at the same time it is clear-eyed in its recognition that coming home for the holidays can be the least relaxing thing on earth, especially for adult children whose lives have diverged wildly from the tinsel innocence of bygone years. Scapegrace Mick (Denholm Elliott) wangles himself a leave from his national service on compassionate grounds, all demurely transparent apology for his recently widowed father and his sister bravely bearing the weight of the season all alone, but once home and hugged and roped into holly-decorating, he candidly confides, "I can't bear Christmas. I used to like it as a child, but now it's—well, as you say, it's depressing." Perhaps his older sister Margaret (Margaret Leighton) feels the same way, because no one's seen her at family gatherings for years; she exists in a glamorous, distant whirl of London fashion journalism, conspicuous by her disappearing act whenever anyone tries to get hold of her at her office, the shows she covers, or her expensive, untidy flat. And eldest sister Jenny (Celia Johnson) isn't coming home for Christmas because she's always home—the passive, collective weight of family opinion fixed her as the domestic type long ago, so despite her own restlessness and her engineer boyfriend (John Gregson)'s job offer in South America she is keeping house for their father who never remembers where he left his socks or his sermon, looking ever more luminously frayed and enduring almost without a flinch his expressions of grateful reliance, "Oh, Jenny, Jenny, what would I do without you?" They keep their secrets with long practice, individually resigned to the "perpetual pretense" whenever they have to interact with the rest of the family. But when an unexpected Margaret crashes Christmas Eve like the Ghost of Christmas Never, it's too much reality for the holiday to bear; the air that should be full of the hush of snowfall and the pure harmony of carols thickens instead with nerves and resentments and griefs held down too long to be anything but volcanic when they come out. The action adheres to the classical unities, meaning we're spending Christmas with the Gregorys whether we like it or not. Just our luck it's the one where someone passes out on the drawing-room floor.
Since stories where people don't talk to one another tend to drive me to headdesk, I appreciate that The Holly and the Ivy's is not an idiot plot. The Reverend Martin Gregory (Ralph Richardson, with snow-white hair standing in for the twenty years the role's got on him) is not a monster, not a fundamentalist or a fanatic or even just one of those Victorian patres familias that hung on after the war—with his gentle sense of humor, his academic eccentricity, and the half-lilt of his still-Irish accent, his parishioners might well describe him as a saint or at least a holy fool. He is preparing a sermon on the pagan antecedents of Christmas and shocks his romantic sister-in-law by casually declaring his hatred for the modern, commercialized holiday. He may charm the viewer just as readily, interrupting his own research to read out a passage that tickled him: "In the Middle Ages, they had a Feast of Fools at Christmas. It seems they got a bit rowdy at times and in 1444, the cathedral chapter of Saens laid down a regulation that not more than three buckets of water could be thrown over a curate at Vespers." But he has dedicated himself so seriously to his vocation that he's left his family out in the cold, assuming that they would come to him with their problems without ever inviting them to; unsurprisingly they have grown up assuming they can't. It's hard to call it selfishness outright, but it is a kind of complacency, a self-imposed insulation. Martin frets that the great fourteenth-century church that so overawed him when he first came to Wyndenham means less to his flock than "that little tinpot shack of a cinema they've gone to tonight" and can't see until it hits him across the face three times in the same day how his own children have drawn back from him, afraid to find him too unworldly or too uncompromising to sympathize with their ordinary human fuck-ups and tragedies. "A fine caricature I've made of religion if that's how it seems to me own children," he mourns more to himself than to Margaret, with whom he has the most honest, therefore the most wounding conversation of the movie; she is his favorite child, after all, the bitterest and the most elusive, and her mistrust can pierce him where Mick's trembling explosions of temper might be dismissed as mere childishness. As if he's the one receiving the Christmas wake-up, the lightning-strike: "Should be because of religion I have more sympathy and understanding for people. But I have, Margaret, I have! Do I seem like the type of man that'd turn away from the sorrows of his own children?" By his distress, plainly not, but how should she have known? It was never put to the test.
With all their katabasis and catharsis, the other thing Christmas stories tend to be is mythological and The Holly and the Ivy is no exception here either; both plot and dialogue play consciously but never pretentiously with metaphors of winter and Yule, the dark and icy as well as the candlelit. Jenny's love for David is inseparable from her despair over its futility—literally fruitless, kisses stolen in the cloakroom of the vicarage as she sinks against his shoulder in a moment of respite equated with death. "I suppose people who fall asleep in the snow feel like this. They know they've got to keep awake, but just for a moment they give up the struggle because the snow's so warm and so cozy." If she freezes for love of David, though, she might find herself in the same position as her sister, of whose brittle flamboyance she demands, "Why must you always crackle like ice? What's happened to make you seem all frozen over inside? You're like someone out of a Hans Andersen story—the frozen queen who went down to the gardens of the dead," as if Demeter harrowed hell for Persephone. But Margaret never will regain her lost child, born to an incorporeal father in dreadful parody of the Nativity; she is not Madonna but Magdalene of the Snows as she confronts her family, pale and stinging in her armor of white furs and reckless indifference, much the worse for drink. "Your gardens of the dead are here tonight with a vengeance, Jenny. It's like walking over the surface of the moon. The snow's too pale—" Considering as I do the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities an essential Christmas movie, I am glad to see any seasonal narrative star a cynical drunk who is not yet beyond all hope and even gladder that this time self-sacrifice is not what's asked of her. Very little has really changed by the end of this story. Two sisters trade places at the hinge of the year; a brother for once tells the truth; a father for the first time hears it. Nothing is solved overnight. Nothing is even guaranteed. And yet it feels momentous enough to justify Mick's giddy report to a bemused David, who went home early and missed all the anagnorisis: "There's been an atomic explosion since last night. The whole of our lives has been split open, exposed . . . the place is radioactive. I must go"—to meet his family for services, impertinent atheist that he is, having skimmed sixpence for the collection off his future brother-in-law who still doesn't know what hit him. Back in a discussion of the topsy-turvy days around Christmas and the New Year, Martin recalled that the ancients thought of them as "queer sort of days that didn't really exist—days on which anything might happen." Well, look at that. Anything did.
I believe I first read of this movie exactly ten years ago, when Denholm Elliott was suddenly everywhere, and then it got back on my radar four or five years after that, when Ralph Richardson was suddenly everywhere, and then it took until this Christmas to make its debut on TCM where I could see it. It does give very good Elliott and Richardson; the former is as young as I've ever seen him and so slipperily beautiful, he looks one moment like he could do you mischief in the wood and the next like he'd panic, while the latter draws quietly on his knack for the workaday numinous, so that you believe his parson both as a force for good in the world and a parent who could stand real improvement. Johnson and Leighton share some of the best scenes as sisters who simultaneously envy and can't make sense of each other's lives; doing the washing-up at the sink together, they look like a white owl and a lioness somehow sprung from the same stock. Gregson is playing more of a romantic object than an active character, but he makes an attractive object, Halstan, Delany, and Williams all turn in familiar types who are still not totally predictable people, and an additional handful of character actors turn welcomely up—Roland Culver, Robert Flemyng, William Hartnell in an awful mustache. The cinematography by Edward Scaife is not fancy, but there's one eloquent shot through a Christmas tree that summarizes everything wrong with a relationship. I rather like the music by Malcolm Arnold, since it's all variations on carols I enjoy. In a year in which I felt relatively ambivalent about Christmas, The Holly and the Ivy worked for me: it is thorny without cruelty, hopeful without schmaltz, and contains a bravura monologue about guano. Show me the Hallmark movie that has one of those. This crown brought to you by my sweet backers at Patreon.
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You're welcome! I feel like I see few enough holiday movies I really love, especially family holiday movies, especially family holiday movies where people actually communicate with one another instead of being made happy by deus ex machina shorthand, and finding one from 1952 just felt like a gift. Plus that cast. It was worth the ten-year patience.
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It's been nice hearing the song itself around the house these past few days, too.
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Maybe it was the Jennifer of its generation.
It's been nice hearing the song itself around the house these past few days, too.
I really like it as a carol. I have many more mixed feelings toward Christmas music now than I did as a child, but I have always liked "The Holly and the Ivy" and "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" and a handful of others in Latin and English and I am not letting the current administration snuff that out. Besides, I got used to hearing Winston's version around the house as a child. It makes me happy that you like it.