All I want for Christmas

Comfort and joy. That’s what the song talks about, and that’s what the classic Christmas movies deliver. Whether it’s Die Hard (1988) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Home Alone (1990) or White Christmas (1954), we enjoy these films, in part, because they are so comfortable. Time and tradition have made them as familiar as carols, mince pies, woolly jumpers, and avoiding the lancinating gaze of your least favourite aunt over the sprouts.

But, at the end of 2016, perhaps we can upset the usual way of things. The Christmas holiday should also be a time for Christmas Holiday, Robert Siodmak’s chilly noir from 1944. It starts as it continues: a puppy-dog soldier, excited about proposing to his girlfriend while on leave, receives a telegram just before he sets off — she’s married someone else. Storms and diversions then bring him to a seamy New Orleans club on Christmas Eve, where he meets a girl whose wounds are even deeper.

Christmas Holiday is, in many respects, a Hollywood-ised version of the W. Somerset Maugham story on which it was based — but it gains from being so. The girl, now reduced to singing for drunks, is played by the cherubic soprano Deanna Durbin. The man she fell for in the past, now serving time for murder, is played by Gene Kelly. Casting these actors in these roles is part of the film’s wicked allure. It even has the perversity to show Kelly asking her for a dance, and then fades to black.

There’s no chance of missing the dancing in another of my favourite Christmas movies, François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002). Some of the grandest French actresses, including Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, hoof and holler their way around a country house as a question hangs over them: who killed the only man of the household? It’s a peculiar mix of Douglas Sirk melodrama (in look), amateur musical (in delivery) and Cluedo (in spirit), with more than a dash of kinkiness.