Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

an accepted and well-known screenwriter. As discussed in chapter 1.6 (p. 195), this studio
focused essentially on horror films, and Siodmak was asked to direct the programmer Son
of Dracula (1943), but still managed to bring his original compositions to this Gothic
horror film, before going on to make Phantom Lady, Universal’s first noir, a film which
not only boosted Siodmak’s career but also gave him the possibility of working on one of
the pulpiest of Woolrich novels (the film’s tour de force jazz as sex sequence analysed on
p. 211).
Siodmak’s second film for Universal, Christmas Holiday (1944), is his most
unusual noir movie, with a bizarre flashback structure, and more audacious than Phantom
Lady in its examination of sexual pathology. In this film, Siodmak was attempting the
same sort of transformation as was shown in Ella Raines’s impersonation of a street-walker
at the jazz club, when Deena Durbin (in the role of Abigail Mannette) sings her trademark
ballads sheathed in a tight black dress. The relationships of love and sex (with suggestions
of incest and homosexuality) are so vividly presented in the film (deployed with a touch of
blunt wit and about as much perverse sexuality as the Code would allow) 87 that they evoke
the noir underworld as if it were the foundation of all corruption, like Eliot’s skull beneath
the skin, underlying an ostensibly attractive reality.
Looking back on his career, Siodmak saw himself trapped in crime films, as he
says:
I was under contract to Universal International, and as it is usual in the film city, if
you are successful at making a certain type of picture then you are given more of
them to make. You have to be one of the boys! (Siodmak 1959:10)
However, in his opinion, crime films were for stirring major emotions and they
were the type of films that managed to provide some depth of characterisation, especially
because they searched for the motivation of the protagonist, trying to understand his
position and above all creating sympathy for him / her. This he considered to be the major
difference from the thirties gangster films. This sympathy was an important element to
appear in his other two films for Universal, The Suspect (1944) and Uncle Harry (1945,
87 When the script was sent to Joe Breen to see whether there was potential material to produce a film by
Hays Code standards, Breen advised against Christmas Holiday: “The specific objection to this material is
that it is a story of gross sexual irregularities which not only contains ‘no compensating moral values’ of any
kind, but, on the contrary, it is a story which condones and justifies, and makes it appear ‘right and
acceptable’ this improper sex” (August 14, 1939) (in Greco 1999:27)
301