The Prodigal Cinephile

We tend to have a lot of egg whites on hand during the months of December and January as a result of nog making and my absolute favorite way to use them up is in Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s amaretto sour, which Imbibe notes has effectively become the standard way of making it. And for good reason! He boasts that it’s “the best Amaretto Sour you’ve ever had in your life,” and although I can’t claim to have verified this claim through extensive testing, that’s mostly because I haven’t felt the need to try another recipe since discovering this one. Here’s how you make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Amaretto (Disaronno)
3/4 oz. Cask-proof bourbon (1792)
1 oz. Lemon juice
1 tsp. 2:1 Simple syrup
1/2 oz. Egg white, lightly beaten

Dry shake all ingredients, then add ice and shake again. Strain into a chilled rocks glass with one big ice cube, making sure to get as much froth out of the shaker as you can, and garish with a cherry and a lemon twist.

My go-to bourbon for this drink is Maker’s Mark Cask Strength, but they make the spirit I featured in last month’s aged eggnog and I wanted to mix things up a bit. I’m glad I did: 1792 is just about as good of a value and contributes an even higher ABV, which is essential for cutting the sweetness of the amaretto and creating the “warm glowing warming glow” I’m looking for in the dead of winter. It results in a richer texture as well, and you definitely want to use 2:1 simple syrup for the same reason. Disaronno is delicious and easy to find and also has a great origin story: according to the company’s website, the woman the artist Bernardino Luini (a pupil of Leonardo di Vinci) chose as a model for the Madonna in one of his frescoes created it as a thank you gift. And so it was that this month’s pairing suggested itself, because when I think about painting and the winter holidays, one movie immediately springs to mind: Scarlet Street, which ends with perhaps the most cynical use of Christmas music in the history of cinema. Here’s a picture of my Kino Video DVD release:

It can also be streamed on Prime Video with a subscription or on Apple TV+ for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it via Kanopy through a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Scarlet Street begins with a flurry of symbolism. An expensive-looking car pulls up to a building. As an organ grinder entertains its glamorous passenger:

The chauffeur ascends a set of stairs, walks past a woman knitting, and knocks on a door marked “private”:

Inside the men of J.J. Hogarth & Company celebrate Christopher Cross’s (Edward G. Robinson) 25 years with the firm as (hat tip: Joseph Gibson) cigar smoke rises unmotivated from the bottom of the frame:

The boss (Russell Hicks) quiets them and stands to make a speech:

Well boys, I hate to break up a good party, but you can’t keep a woman waiting, can you? You know how it is, boys. I can see you all understand, alright! Well, believe you me boys, I’ve had the time of my life tonight. And speaking of time, I have here a 14-karat, 17-jewel timepiece. And that’s only right because the man I’m giving it to is a 14-karat, 17-jewel cashier.

Cross reads the engraving and stammers out a brief speech of gratitude. Everyone belts the refrain of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” then J.J. treats Chris and his co-worker Charlie (Samuel S. Hinds) to fancy (“it’s made special for me, a dollar apiece”) cigar before excusing himself. As the others rush to the window to ogle the “dame” he can’t keep waiting:

Chris and Charlie quietly make their own exit. Charlie doesn’t have an umbrella, so Chris sees him to his bus. As they stand waiting for it, Chris tells Charlie that he wonders what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like the one their boss is seeing and that he dreamt of being an artist and still paints every Sunday. “Well, that’s one way to kill time,” Charlie replies. Chris invites Charlie to come see him the next day when the bus arrives, then goes looking for the East Side subway. Lost among the “mixed up” streets of Greenwich Village, he witnesses what he believes to be a mugging:

Emboldened by drink, Chris charges forward to defend the damsel in distress, then braces for an answering blow that never comes:

The woman (Joan Bennett) he has “saved,” who is wrapped in a cellophane raincoat, first tests her jaw:

Then checks on her assailant. Chris runs off to find a policeman. When they return, the man is gone. The woman, whose name we will soon learn is Kitty March, tells the cop he went thataway, then says to Chris, “let’s get out of here.” He consents to take her home, and with that his fate is sealed. We are barely ten minutes into a film with a runtime of 102.

A major topic of debate among film scholars and critics is whether or not Chris is too pathetic to be someone audiences can identify with. And to be sure, if you’re going to put an apron like this on, it really should be to make a statement, not just to prevent your clothes from getting dirty!

But I agree with Kino’s DVD commentator David Kalat that Edward G. Robinson’s performance is “extraordinarily warm and humane” and recognize a great many things in the character he brings to life, especially his struggle to find a sustainable balance between the hobby that brings him happiness and the career that pays his bills. In a book-length interview with Peter Bogdanovich, director Fritz Lang claims that “Robinson’s fate in the picture is the fate of an artist who cares much more for his paintings than for gaining money.” He then specifically references the scene in which Chris discovers that Kitty has been signing her name to his paintings so that she can sell them and instead of getting mad at her, acquiesces to the scheme: “it’s just like we were married, only I take your name,” he says.

In a chapter for Joe McElhaney’s A Companion to Fritz Lang, Vinzenz Hediger argues that for Chris, “the realization of his dream to be recognized as an artist, even though it only happens through the intermediary of the woman he loves, in combination with that woman’s attention, appears to be the only moment of genuine happiness he has experienced in life.” This is consonant with Jeanne Hall’s observation in a Film Criticism article called “‘A Little Trouble With Perspective’: Art and Authorship in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street“ that far from painting being his escape from a loveless marriage like many scholars claim, Chris’s hobby was what brought him to his wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan) in the first place when he rented a room from her in order to save money for paint. Chris describes what happened next to Charlie thusly: “oh she was sweet–butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And, uh, well, you know how these things go.” To translate this into (somewhat) contemporary terms, yada yada yada, now he has to paint in the bathroom:

In Kitty he thinks he has found not just a young girl who loves him, but a young girl who loves him and his work. Per Hediger, “[t]he recognition may be false but it can be lived vicariously so long as it is grounded in true devotion,” and for the length of time Chris believes it to be true, he blossoms. Dan Duryea’s Johnny Prince (more on him in a second) notes that Damon Janeway (Jess Barker), the art critic who has “discovered” Kitty, thinks that the work he produces during this time are the “best things [he’s] done,” and I agree with scholar Tom Gunning when he argues in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity that “Chris’s identification with the image of a woman could also be seen as an essential step in his development as an artist, keeping him alive to his polymorphic childlike perversity, but gaining authority rather than regressing through it.” After all, as Gunning goes on to point out, “Chris’s lack of interest in signing his own name to his works and his feminine alter-ego, both recall the fundamental avant-gardist gestures of Marcel Duchamp: signing several works with the name of his feminine alter-ego (whom he had himself photographed as, in drag) Rose Selavy (glossed as Eros, c’est la vie).”

Chris loves to paint, but he’s also lonely. His marriage to Adele is a bitter disappointment because it not only failed to solve the latter problem, but jeopardizes his freedom to engage in the former activity when she threatens to give all his paintings and supplies to the junkman in retaliation for him not buying her a radio. Kitty gives him sustenance until, abruptly, she doesn’t. Although Mark Osteen is technically correct when in his Journal of Film and Video article “Framed: Forging Identities in Film Noir” he pinpoints Chris’s disavowal of his identity as an artist as the moment “Chris’s painter self dies along with the lover and the cashier,” but that self likely would have starved to death anyway even if Chris had responded to Kitty laughing in his face and saying “you’re old and ugly and I’m sick of you” by calmly placing the fateful ice pick back on the table he knocked it off of and walking away instead of, well, you know:

One of my favorite things about Scarlet Street is its treatment of Chris’s paintings, which were modeled after the work of Henri Rousseau and created by a friend of Fritz Lang named John Decker (who I assume was also responsible for the illustrations by “Tony Rivera” which adorn the walls of the apartment Chris rents for Kitty). Hall is right that the movie is unusual in the way it “encourages viewers to reflect on the socially-constructed and class-based nature of art and aesthetics by insistently raising questions about the quality of Chris’s work and persistently refusing to answer them.” Like Kitty, I personally think this one is pretty excellent:

And although “Self-Portrait” is a title he will later bestow upon a painting of Kitty, one of the film’s many dissolves suggests that maybe it would have been better applied here:

Meanwhile, the other painting which inspired this month’s photograph certainly is interesting:

Some of the other dissolves are absolutely brilliant, including these two involving of Johnny which Gunning discusses at length:

In the process of doing so, Gunning describes Johnny as being “[a]s nasty, slimy, sadistic, cowardly, lazy, ignorant and venial a character as one could find in a Hollywood film,” which is accurate. Dan Duryea is so effective in this role that I wonder if it was detrimental to his career–I recently saw Thunder Bay for the first time, and although his Johnny Gambi turns out to be a perfectly decent person, I kept waiting for him to do something horrible, which was incredibly distracting! The distinctively out-of-style hat he dons in Scarlet Street is practically a character in its own right, as evinced by these two different close-ups:

And as documented by Mike Grost, the rest of Johnny’s wardrobe is interesting, too. Other things to love or hate include the masterful use of practical effects to make studio lot exterior scenes look like they were shot on location:

And the dirty dishes in Kitty’s kitchen sink, aka my worst nightmare:

What makes this one of the most unforgettable movies ever made, though, is the way it ends. In a shocking plot twist, Johnny is sent to the electric chair for the murder committed by Chris.

Unable to shake the vision of Johnny and Kitty happily together in the afterlife, Chris tries to commit suicide, but is unsuccessful.

Years pass in an instant and now he is a derelict shuffling down the street to the tune of the Christmas carol “O Come All Ye Faithful,” which as Robert B. Pippin notes in Fatalism in American Film Noir “is a hymn to the baby Jesus”:

The soundtrack then shifts to “Melancholy Baby,” which is utilized throughout the film in a variety of versions for a wide range of purposes. One way to look at this is as simply a logical accompaniment to the painting which two men are carrying out of the gallery he’s passing by, which is of course his/Kitty March’s aforementioned “Self-Portrait.”

But Pippin has another interpretation:

The Christian notion of eschatological time suggests both that there is this radical revolutionary possibility in historical time, such that everything is different, full of new possibilities, after the Incarnation, and that an individual can be born again, decisively become almost literally a different person, free of the burden of the past, forgiven, after having been saved. Lang’s irony about this assumption is absolutely withering. The ‘baby’ of real relevance is not the baby Jesus, but, the music reveals, our melancholy baby. The aspiration for such revolutionary change is paired musically with the reality of the stuck-in-time, repetitive melancholy baby. And that means not only ‘melancholy’ because this tempting Christian way of thinking about time is naïve, but because melancholy is melancholy, not mourning in Freud’s famous sense. It is the impossibility of ‘moving on’ from a traumatic event, a compulsive need to suffer it all again and again, a refusal of the liberating work of mourning (a fate, in other words).

Wow! The soundtrack then shifts back to a Christmas carol, this time “Jingle Bells.” There is, again, an obvious explanation: the gallery owner Dellarowe (Arthur Loft) is saying to his customer (Constance Purdy), “well, there goes her masterpiece. I really hate to part with it.” To which she replies, “for ten thousand dollars, I shouldn’t think you’d mind!” So the jingling bells are those of the cash register.

But Pippin’s reading does this one better: “[t]he fate that Christianity naïvely believes can be mastered is not cosmic or divine fate but a socioeconomic, drastic restriction of possibilities, and it appears here as all powerful.” Whichever view you subscribe to, Scarlet Street‘s final images are independently shattering. Chris beholds the painting, but his expression barely changes. He puts his head down and resumes his slow walk:

Suddenly, all the people disappear:

It is, as Gunning describes it, “[a]s if a neutron bomb had exploded.” We hear Kitty’s voice whisper “jeepers I love you Johnny” one final time, and with that it’s all over.

Brrr. Typically I recommend mixing up the drinks in these posts before the movie I’m pairing them with starts, but it in this case you might want to save it for the end because you’re going to need something to warm you up afterward!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

About a decade ago I started watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation more often each December than any other holiday movie. I’ve been meaning to explore why this is ever since I started this blog in 2018, which is right around the same time I discovered food writer Michael Ruhlman’s aged eggnog recipe. And this, dear reader, is how a Drink & a Movie pairing is born! To begin with the former, this is the specific eggnog that I make every year as one of our family’s holiday traditions. I don’t remember where I first came across it, but considering that planning ahead and preserved foods are two of my favorite things in the world, I imagine it was love at first sight! It also allows plenty of room for variation, so it never becomes boring, and someday if I come into a pile of money at just the right time I’m totally going to try it with a single malt from Oban as suggested in the notes section of Ruhlman’s blog post. The toasted sugar Tennessee whiskey meringue (which is a fantastic way to utilize the egg whites that don’t go into the nog) is a twist on the brown sugar bourbon meringue published on the blog Proportional Plate a few years ago, with toasted sugar a la Stella Parks (cooked for three hours to a light ivory color) replacing the brown and a little “help from Jack Daniels.” Here’s how we made the batch pictured below:

12 egg yolks
2 cups granulated sugar
1 liter bourbon (Maker’s Mark)
4 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup Cognac or brandy (Pierre Ferrand 1840)
1/2 cup dark rum (Goslings Black Seal)

Whisk egg yolks and sugar together in a large bowl until well-blended and creamy using a stand mixer or by hand, then add remaining ingredients and stir or whisk to combine. Transfer mixture to a one-gallon glass jar or multiple smaller jars and place in the refrigerator for 30 days. Serve in a moose-shaped glass topped with a dollop of toasted sugar Tennessee whiskey meringue and garnished with freshly-ground nutmeg.

Ruhlman correctly observes that this is a boozy concoction and it’s also quite rich, so you’ll want to go easy, but this is a feature not a bug as far as I’m concerned: if something takes up space in my fridge for a month, I want it to last awhile! Dark rum adds the molasses notes that I’m looking for in a winter beverage, but you could substitute Smith & Cross if you want to highlight the funkiness which I otherwise find surprisingly mild: the real benefit of aging is that it allows all the flavors to marry. You could also, of course, use Jack as your primary base spirit if you wanted to forgo the meringue but maintain the Christmas Vacation connection.

Speaking of which, here’s a picture of the Warner Home Video Special Edition DVD release which hangs out in a box in a basement with all of our other Christmas movies for most of the year:

It can also be streamed via Max with a subscription or Apple TV and Prime Video for a rental fee.

On June 21, 1987 the New York Times published an interview with Stanley Kubrick by Francis X. Clines which began with the legendary auteur praising a series of recent Michelob beer commercials: “they’re just boy-girl, night-fun, leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and photographed.” The person who directed them was one Jeremiah S. Chechik, and according to a 2016 Slash Film oral history by Blake Harris, his phone started ringing off the hook the next day. Less than two years later he was directing his first feature film. “Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for,” Kubrick went on to tell Clines, and Christmas Vacation is no exception, but as Dave Kehr noted in a contemporary review for the Chicago Tribune, it definitely does exhibit a “fine sense of timing.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in my favorite scene. Hapless patriarch Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) has found himself trapped in a cold attic while his family goes shopping:

While searching for warm clothing, he finds a box of home movies:

The scene which follows is a smidge under two minutes long and begins with a 37-second lateral tracking shot which brings Clark into the right third of the frame with a film projector in the foreground:

Then swings around to show us what he’s watching from over his shoulder:

There’s a cut to a head-on shot of Clark occupying the left two-thirds of the screen and the light from the projector filling the rest which lasts about three seconds:

Then a cut to a title card followed by approximately twelve seconds of home movie footage starring people identifiable as younger versions of characters from Christmas Vacation:

This sequence repeats itself with very similar timing, but this time the camera also tracks in on Clark slightly:

Cut to an exterior shot of the rest of the Griswolds arriving home:

Then back to twelve more seconds of home movie footage followed by another ten seconds spent tracking in to an even tighter close-up of Clark’s face:

Cut to a shot of Clark’s wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) coming up the stairs with an armful of presents which ends with a close-up of her gloved handing grasping for the chain one pulls to open the attic:

Followed by one last close-up of Clark which holds for just a second or two before the music abruptly ends and he falls through the floor:

Considered against the entire sweep of film history, Chechik and crew aren’t doing anything original in this scene, but it stands out within the realm of holiday movies because it finds a perfect balance between sentimentality and slapstick. The pratfall at the end of this scene is funny because it’s surprising: we know something is coming, but not what, since we have no way of knowing that Clark set his projector up right on top of the attic door. Meanwhile, the 2:1 (after the initial tracking shot) ratio of documentary evidence of what the “fun, old-fashioned family Christmas” that he’s trying to recreate looked like to his emotional responses to it helps us understand what he’s struggling to achieve elsewhere in the film and why. Last but not least, the marriage of these images to Ray Charles’s “That Spirit of Christmas” is absolutely perfect.

Music is a crucial aspect of a number of other scenes as well. Angelo Badalamenti’s use of a drum to accompany Clark’s reaction to his son Rusty’s (Johnny Galecki) question “did you bring a saw?”

And then a lone, melancholy (French?) horn playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” over footage of the tree they picked out tied to the top of the Griswold’s “front-wheel drive sleigh” is why this gag works:

And the decision to let the rendition of “Silent Night” which plays over footage of the rest of the family asleep in their beds end before the shot of Clark on his ladder underneath a huge moon re-checking each of the thousands of bulbs which failed to light earlier in the evening makes him seem even more cold and lonely:

Which brings me back to the question I mentioned at the outset of this post: why did I all of a sudden become much more interested in Christmas Vacation about ten years ago? After all, although I wouldn’t say I “grew up” with this film, it is one I watched for the first time as a child, when family lore has it that I started bawling my eyes out after Aunt Bethany’s (Mae Questel) cat meets its demise:

In a contemporary review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington observed that Chechik and screenwriter John Hughes “deliberately mix up horror movies and sentimental family comedies in their imagery.” He’s specifically talking about this scene near the end of the film when Clark “fixes the newel post”:

Which, per Wilmington, “fuses imagery from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ in a single visual gag,” a connection we are prepared to make by an earlier scene in which Clark dons a hockey match before cutting his tree down to size:

Wilmington is dead-on when he notes that point is to underscore the “fiery obsessiveness behind [Clark’s] desire, constantly thwarted, to construct the ideal Christmas.” The key is that the childhood holidays immortalized in film strips Clark finds in his attic weren’t perfect–as he says to his father (John Randolph) a bit later on, “all our holidays were always such a mess.” His desire to improve upon them comes from a good place: he wants to give his family an experience that they’ll still remember fondly 30 years later, just as he was moved to tears by images of “Xmas 1955.” But it’s also at its core a selfish project and thus not one that he necessarily deserves to be celebrated for. The final line of Christmas Vacation is one I think of often when we host holiday get-togethers. As a chaotic Christmas Eve improbably ends with everyone happily singing and dancing:

Clark and Ellen share a kiss outside:

She joins the rest of the family inside, leaving him alone. “I did it,” he says with a smile:

One way to interpret this is as further evidence that Clark is delusional. But another, more charitable explanation is that he has finally realized that the work is the reward, which I think would be enough to make this a movie about hosting Christmas and hospitality in general. It hardly seems like a coincidence that I would really begin appreciating Christmas Vacation at the same time I acquired in-laws and planning seasonal gatherings became a prominent part of my life.

I thought about ending this post with a more in-depth discussion of the eggnog scenes, but although “it’s good, it’s good” is invariably what I say whenever I quaff this particular beverage:

It’s really nothing more than a prop for Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid (who plays Cousin Eddie) and a showcase for the glassware so delightfully cheesy that we just had to have it:

Another option would be to call out the incredible ensemble cast that plays the Griswold grandparents, which in addition to John Randolph as Clark, Sr. also includes Diane Ladd as Clark’s mother, E.G. Marshall as Ellen’s father, and Doris Roberts (who I mentioned in my September, 2022 Drink & a Movie post about Hester Street) as her mother:

Or these ridiculous tracksuits worn by the Griswold’s yuppie neighbors Todd (Nicholas Guest) and Margot (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss):

Or Brian Doyle-Murray’s bad boss for the ages Frank Shirley:

Or one of the other lines we quote over and over again each December like “lotta sap in here. It looks great! Little full, lotta sap.”

Instead, I’ll conclude with a question: what in the world are we supposed to make of the fact that the animated opening credit sequence appears to show that Santa’s hat has a skeleton?

Now *that’s* horrifying. Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.