I had seen this TV movie back when it was first telecast, and basically remembered it for starring John Houseman as a (surprise) cantankerous choir director. The real star of the film, though, is Michael Learned, who at the time was a pretty well-known TV actress, having appeared for seven years on The Waltons.
Seeing the film again was moderately interesting, but mostly because it was so strangely put together. Learned plays Zoe Jensen, a recent divorcee who has just moved from Nebraska to San Francisco to, you know, find herself. She left her young son behind with her mom, who calls regular to hector her about coming back home and finding a job there and another husband.
Zoe is a teacher, but has to take office work, blah blah, but most of the film is about the church choir she is a member of. The church’s pastor, a young James Cromwell playing his patented semi-ineffectual nice guy, has secured the services of recently retired autocratic choir director John Houseman. Houseman comes in to whip the choir into shape, with the main objective being a performance of Handel’s Messiah for Christmas.
Actually, Houseman plays a much smaller part in the proceedings than I recalled, and basically dominated my memories of the film mostly because he’s the best thing in it. Frankly, the film’s very strangely structured. It plays like ten hours of TV pared down to an hour and a half, with characters we’ve never met suddenly interacting with already established characters, as well as suddenly introduced situations that we often seem to come in on the middle on.
I guess the idea is to come across as novelistic and realistically low-key, but the film is so low-key that it’s often sort of uninteresting. The choppiness becomes a bit less bewildering later on when at least most of the large cast has been introduced. Indeed, so many characters are introduced that you wonder if the film was meant to be a series pilot for a new Lerner show.
However, most of the characters are so slight that Houseman’s absence, even though he’s just playing a minor riff on his trademark role of Charles Kingsfield, is felt whenever he’s offscreen. Which is often. Oddly, he and Lerner don’t even really have a relationship between them. If there was a scene where they even talked to each other, I don’t remember it. I’m not sure whatever to make of that.
The set-up mostly recalls Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Martin Scorsese’s film about a divorcee and her young son living a very blue collar life as a waitress. The film spawned the horrible sitcom Alice, which hopefully Scorsese never had to watch.
Not a horrible film, but mostly watchable for Houseman, and you may be tempted to hit the fast forward button when he’s not around. Even the end of the film is strange. They of course end with their triumphant performance of The Messiah, although of necessity we get but snippits of it. And then…the movie just ends. It’s one of those “I guess they ran out of film endings,” where there is no character resolution or anything.
The film tries so hard to be ‘naturalistic’ that frankly although it’s kind of boring. It’s still watchable, mostly for Houseman, but I can’t imagine this is on many people favorite Christmas movies list. I guess I would say it’s the kind of movie one would buy for a generic grandmother, the kind who mostly want something innocuous.
The DVD our library owned is the Echo Bridge one, and it’s pretty lame. The film is available in a ton of editions, so clearly it’s fallen into the public domain. This one basically plays like a decent DVD-R you’d buy off of Ioffer, but as a ‘professional’ DVD it’s not that great.
Basically it’s just a ported over VHS copy; at one point you even get a bit of video roll. I could see picking this up as a stocking stuffer from a dollar bin, but otherwise steer clear of the Echo Bridge copy and hope one of the other companies offers a better presentation—although that’s not a sure bet by any means.
