Scarier than “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “Who Killed Santa Claus?” is scarcely less creepy than “Bad Santa.” At once bizarrely lighthearted and grimly sentimental, the 1941 French film may be the strangest seasonal fare since noir-master Robert Siodmak’s “Christmas Holiday” materialized midsummer 1944 with America’s sweetheart songbird Deanna Durbin playing a prostitute.
“Who Killed Santa Claus?” first reviewed (and possibly last seen) in New York in May 1948, arrives Friday in a sparkling 4K restoration for a week at Film Forum. As the first feature made in occupied France by the German-controlled production company Continental Films, it provides an ambiguous Joyeux Noël.
Directed by the veteran Christian-Jaque from a novel by the screenwriter Pierre Véry, and filmed largely in the French Alps, the comic murder mystery is a vehicle for the beloved character actor Harry Baur, here the bibulous mapmaker Gaspard Cornusse.
Although he has never left town, Cornusse assumes each Christmas the role of a globe-circling Père Noël — one eccentric among many. Fellow villagers include an abrasive schoolteacher (Robert Le Vigan, later convicted of collaboration with the Germans); a mad woman in search of her lost cat (the future theater director Marie Hélène Dasté); Cornusse’s somnolent daughter Catherine (Renée Faure, a neophyte who made her next film with Robert Bresson) and the local baron (the Belgian actor Raymond Rouleau).
Having returned to his chateau after a decade abroad, the Byronic young nobleman may or may not be Catherine’s Prince Charming. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure resembling Mickey Mouse’s nemesis the Phantom Blot haunts the town, casting long shadows on the pristine snowy blanket.
Events come to a head on Christmas Eve. Cornusse pastes on his beard. Catherine applies lipstick. Everyone gathers in church although half the congregation races out before the service concludes to participate in the schoolteacher’s raucous anticlerical procession. Mid-revelry, news spreads that the town’s sacred ring has gone missing from the church and Santa has been found face down in the snow.
Do things work out? “From the way the story is happily resolved it would appear that it was intended as a reaffirmation of faith, yet there is a satirical quality about the work that suggests derision of simple beliefs,” a New York Times critic wrote, citing the teacher’s disruptive parade and wondering if this muddle “may perhaps be indicative of the confusion” that then existed in France.
Evidently intended as a prestige film, “Who Killed Santa Claus?” seems to have been a hit in France. While later critics have posited it as an allegory of reawakening suitable for life under occupation, it also appears a premonition of disaster. Baur’s obit notes that having subsequently traveled to the Reich to make a movie in Berlin, he was arrested by the Gestapo under suspicion of being a Jew and that he died shortly after his return to France.
Indeed, in its inchoate sense of dread, “Who Killed Santa?” anticipates a darker Continental production, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 “Le Corbeau,” which, also set in rural France, details a village’s moral disintegration when terrorized by a series of anonymous poison-pen letters. These alarming missives cannot be confused with Christmas cards.
Who Killed Santa Claus?
Friday through Dec. 25 at Film Forum in Manhattan, filmforum.org.
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