Star in the Night (Warner Bros., 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

tLast Sunday night, November 27, after they showed two Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle comedies, the feature Leap Year (1921) and the short Love (1919), as part of TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” they showed the 1945 short Star in the Night. It was an intriguing reworking of the Nativity story that was the first directorial credit for Don Siegel, Siegel had worked his way through the ranks at Warner Bros. and had become the head of their montage department – in which capacity he worked out the brilliant sequence of giant ticker-tape machines literally melting over Wall Street to signify the advent of the Great Depression in the film The Roaring Twenties (1939). For years he had begged Jack Warner for a chance to direct, and for years Warner had turned him down until he offered him this short. Siegel grabbed the assignment and deliberately avoided montage sequences because he wanted to prove he could do other sorts of filmmaking. Written by Robert Finch and Saul Engel (though according to imdb.com, Slegel took an uncredited hand in the writing himself), Star in the Night begins with three cowboys traveling through the American Southwest when they see a giant star blinking on the horizon.

tThe star is an electrically lit sign for the Star Auto Court, owned by Nick Catapoli (J. Carrol Naish, top-billed and once again, as Tom Weaver noted, playing every ethnicity except his real one, which was Irish) and his wife Rosa (Rosina Galli). A hitchhiker (Donald Woods) shows up and he and Nick get into an argument, with Nick saying that people are basically good and the hitchhiker maintaining that people are only out for themselves. Naturally, this being a Nativity allegory, this is all taking place on Christmas eve. The cowboys (Dick Erdman, Johnny Miles and Cactus Mack) bought a lot of junk from a trading post just before the film begins, and they’re wondering what they’re going to do with it since they don’t need any of it themselves and don’t know anybody to give it to. A shirt salesman named Mr. Dilson (Irving Bacon) complains toNich that the shirts he sent out to be laundered came back wrinkled and (in one case) torn, and he demands that Nick pay for the damaged goods.

tA woman named Miss Roberts (Virginia Sale) complains that the people in the next room are keeping her awake singing Christmas carols and she needs to get up at 5 the next morning. An older couple (Dick Elliott and Claire Du Brey) show up and take the ;ast room in Nick’s motel, so there’s no room at the inn when a young Mexican-American couple named José and Maria Santos (Anthony Caruso and Lynn Baggett) show up and need a place to stay. Nick tells them that they can stay in the shed in back of the property along with the animals, which they accept. Then Maria, who’s pregnant, goes into labor and all the assorted guests of the motel pitch in to help her deliver her baby. Mr. Dilson even rips up his shirts when Maria needs bandages (though one wonders why her giving birth was so bloody they were needed), the traveling couple donate the extra blankets they’d asked for, and in the end the baby enters the world on Christmas morning and Siegel dissolves to a painting of the real Nativity on the wall calendar of Nick’s office. (Fortunately the writers avoided the obvious gimmick of having the Santoses name their baby “Jesús.”)

tStar in the Night is a film of real charm, occasionally it gets a bit treacly but for the most part it avoids the cheap sentimentality the overall concept would have invited (and achieved in lesser hands than Siegel’s). >tStar in the Night was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Subject – as was Siegel’s follow-up film, Hitler Lives, which was full of montage sequences and whose message was that even though America and the Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, Adolf Hitler’s spirit still lived and his ideas lurked around the corner just waiting to be re-activated. (That sounds like an all too contemporary concept for our time; the horrors of the Holocaust inoculated the world against the most vile, evil manifestations of hatred in general and anti-Semitism in particular, but it’s clear that tne vaccination has worn off and the anti-Semiitc prejudices that gave rise to the Holocaust have flared up and become epidemic again.) In his early-1970’s book-length interview with film historian Stuart M. Kaminsky, Siegel rather bitterly lamented that he’d received Academy Award nominations for his two shorts but never for any of his features.