In short: Who Killed Santa Claus? (1941)

aka The Killing of Santa Claus

Original title: L'assassinat du Père Noël

I am usually pretty good coping with the idiosyncrasies of older films and their stylistic and tonal peculiarities (being rather peculiar and of my time myself), but Christian-Jaque’s film about a small, Christmas-related crime wave in a quaint French mountain village full of shitty, yet intensely melodramatic people has me beat. How ever much of a classic it may be in its native country, to me, it turns out to be the movie equivalent of Christmas shaped chalk on my mental blackboard.

However, before I start complaining, I do have to lead with the simple fact that the film is utterly beautiful to look at, full of moody, yet clear shots of the snowy village by night, spirited camera moves and many a picturesquely staged scene.

It is more than just a bit of a shame that all this beauty is only ever in service to most bad clichés about classic French movies come to life. Apart from the supposed perpetual horniness of French cinema, nearly every prejudice against the country’s cinema, like most prejudices usually not coming up at all in French films, is there and accounted for. So the film is full of strained, stilted and absurdly melodramatic acting by a horde of camera hogs, too enchanted by the bloviating, full of itself dialogue to show restraint when it is actually asked for. Every single character seems to be permanently teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, only a bad morning away from breaking out into operatic “mad” behaviour on the slightest provocation. Everybody is also a total asshole, though the film itself really doesn’t seem to notice. Children are either insufferable brats or the source of the kind of mawkish sentimentality which makes the Lassie films look subtle. Why anybody should care for anyone here, the film never deigns to explain.

But then, the film itself does feel very much in love with its own intellect and importance, telling its simple and not terribly interesting nor well-constructed tale of crime and village life with grand gestures and in a tone that suggests we are indeed witnessing important insights concerning the human condition. What exactly there is to be so proud about, the film alas never deigns to explain to the lowly viewer.


Some of this is clearly meant as comedy but it’s really rather difficult to find anything of what’s going on here funny in anything else but the inadvertent way. Though, frankly, the only way to make this one funny to me would probably be a final scene that sees the damn village burned to the ground.