Star in the Night (Warner Bros., 1944, released 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Christmas in Connecticut Charles and I watched an intriguing little bonus item on the same DVD, a 20-minute short called Star in the Night made by Warners’ shorts department and the directorial debut of Don Siegel. Like Christmas in Connecticut its copyright date is 1944 but it wasn’t released until 1945 (October 13, closer to the expected release date of a Christmas-themed film than the August release of Christmas in Connecticut), and it’s a modern-day retelling of the Nativity story. It begins with three cowboys riding across the Southwestern desert with armloads of oddball stuff they just bought at a souvenir shop because they wanted an excuse to cruise the hot young salesgirl. They come across a huge star in the sky that blinks on and off and turns out to be the emblem of the Star Auto Court (an “auto court” was 1930’s and 1940’s speak for “motel”). The star isn’t supposed to blink; the auto court’s owner, Nick Catapoli (J. Carrol Naish -- film historian Tom Weaver noted the irony that Naish played every conceivable ethnicity on screen except his real one, which was Irish), acquired it from a now-defunct movie theatre and is trying to rewire it so it will stay on continuously.

He’s also dealing with a tramp character (Donald Woods) who’s come in and talked Nick into letting him stay in the office and have a cup of coffee while he makes cynical comments about the motel’s guests, including a woman who complains that her neighbors are singing Christmas songs and keeping her awake, and a shirt salesman who says the laundry Nick sent his clothes to tore them up and ruined them. The tramp tells Nick that he doesn’t believe in all that peace-on-earth-good-will-to-men stuff and offers Nick’s customers as proof that it’s all the bunk. Then, just after Nick has rented out the last room he has available, a young Mexican couple, Jose and Maria Santos (Anthony Caruso and Lynn Baggett) show up and, though there’s no room at the inn (where have we heard that before?), he’ll let them stay in the barn on his property, especially since Maria is “with child” and about to give birth. With no one with any medical training on hand to help (though writers Robert Finch and Saul Elkins briefly give us the impression that the tall woman who worried about being kept awake had some experience as a midwife), the hotel guests suddenly grow hearts and start helping out with the birth, carrying big bowls of boiling water, while the shirt salesman tears up his shirts to make bandages as needed.

Just in case we missed the point, Siegel ends the film with a dissolve from a calendar on Nick’s wall with a Nativity painting to the scene of the birth of Maria Santos’s child (I think they say in the dialogue somewhere that it’s a boy instead of just leaving us to assume that given the origins of this tale), with the three cowboys showing up as the Wise Men led there by the star to give their souvenir junk to the newborn babe. Don Siegel and Byron Haskin, who also later became a full-fledged director, had headed Warner Bros.’ montage department for years -- it was Siegel’s idea to have images of giant ticker-tape machines melting over a scene of Wall Street to indicate the 1929 stock market crash in the 1939 gangster film The Roaring Twenties -- and for years he’d pestered Jack Warner for permission to direct a film. As Siegel told Stuart Kaminsky in a book-length interview in 1971, Warner finally gave him the assignment to direct two shorts, and for Star in the Night he deliberately avoided montage sequences because he wanted to show Jack Warner he could do something else.

Siegel’s second short was quite the opposite -- a documentary (his only one) called Hitler Lives which was basically one long montage sequence based mostly on Warners newsreels and U.S. government footage of World War II to argue that though Hitler was dead, the spirit of authoritarianism was still very much alive in the world -- and so were the social forces that had brought Hitler to power in the first place. (When your first two films are about Christ and Hitler, respectively, you’ve covered just about the entire spectrum of human behavior between the opposite poles of good and evil.) Then Jack Warner finally gave Siegel a feature assignment with the 1946 film The Verdict, co-starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (who jointly gave their starts to three famous directors -- Siegel, John Huston in The Maltese Falcon and Jean Negulesco in The Mask of Dimitrios), only to fire him after his very next feature, Night Unto Night, a heavy-breathing soap opera with intellectual pretensions with Swedish actress Vivica Lindfors (whom Siegel fall in love with while making the film, which he admitted screwed up his objectivity about her performance and the film as a whole) and Ronald Reagan miles out of his depth.