The Holly and the Ivy

Best Christmas film BAR NONE (in my opinion)

I first posted this a year ago. As I had about three subscribers at the time I wanted to release it from behind the paywall, slightly edited, as a celebration of the most exquisite Christmas film ever made: The Holly and the Ivy.

Unfortunately I can’t seem to find anywhere broadcasting it this year (at least not on terrestrial TV - Talking Pictures really letting the side down, unless I’m missing something - do let me know) but it is absolutely worth renting from YouTube.

I remember the first time I saw it, one mid-December afternoon, about fifteen years ago. I was wrapping presents with the telly on in the background, and found myself gradually listening… eventually the Sellotape rolled away and I simply watched. Every year since. It has become my cinematic Nutcracker: Christmas won’t be Christmas without any sturm und drang in a Norfolk vicarage.

And usually I am not good with Christmas films. Channels like GREAT! Movies have been broadcasting the cinematic equivalents of Chris Rea and his bloody drive home since July (WHY?) but even when such films are legitimately broadcast I avoid them…. It’s a Wonderful Life is saved by being a masterpiece. But certain allegedly widely popular films, naming love no actually names, have a deeply negative effect upon my Christmas spirit, rather like drinking from a half-empty pre-lockdown bottle of Bailey’s Strawberry & Cream.

The Holly and the Ivy, which could be atrociously sentimental with its family-gathering Christmas story, its themes of forgiveness and redemption, resists that easy hit. It is about a tough kind of rebirth. It always reminds me of Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, my favourite of his poems. The Christmas it celebrates is, uncompromisingly, a Christian Christmas. I am an atheist but something deep in me responds to that; in fact at Christmas I always wish that I were a believer - for reasons that a true believer would perhaps view as hopelessly facile - or perhaps not, given that this is the season of goodwill.

So: The Holly and the Ivy, a blessedly short black-and-white British film from 1952, centres upon a family Christmas at a rural vicarage. It is deep as traditional snow in talent: the vicar is played by Ralph Richardson (plus random Irish accent), his children by Celia Johnson, Denholm Elliott and Margaret Leighton. A couple of aunts also appear, sweet spiritual Aunt Lydia (whose lonely hotel-dwelling life is conveyed in a handful of seconds at the start of the film) and the sharp, somehow deeply moving, Irish Aunt Bridget. Although finely directed by George More O’Ferrall (shot at Shepperton, but the sense of place is acute) it is also, very obviously, a play - by a man named Wynyard Browne, about whom there is only a limited amount of information. He died aged 52 in Norfolk, where The Holly and the Ivy is set.

I am fascinated by the West End theatrical world of the years between the Second World War and Look Back in Anger (which is really very old-style in its structure), when actors emerged from the stage door looking like gods and smoking du Mauriers and had flats in Hay Hill. I rather crave the notion of a night out in that atmosphere: cab to The Aldwych, dressed to the nines, the scent of Je Reviens in the foyer, no plastic cups of warm wine in the auditorium and the guaranteed pleasure of a Well-Made Play. A play like The Holly and the Ivy, which would offer no directorial coups but would do the thing that matters: entertain.

The story is beautifully simple. Celia Johnson, who spends a good part of her time draping the vicarage in paper chains (the innocence!), wants to get married to John Gregson but feels that she can’t abandon her father, the benignly tyrannical Ralph Richardson. Her vast Cavalier spaniel eyes and strangulated voice could not have been better designed to express a passionate desire for joy held back by terminal anxiety, nor the mid-century well-behaved Englishwoman’s dilemma of duty v love; her role is, indeed, a distilled reprise of the tour de force in Brief Encounter. And her little homage to Christmas morning… magical. Truly magical.

Meanwhile her young brother - Denholm Elliott - has turned against religion and his upbringing (the cri de coeur hurled at his father’s implacable complacency has an intriguing note of Jimmy Porter); but the most anguished of the three is Margaret Leighton, whose smart-as-paint London demeanour conceals personal tragedy, and whose arrival at the vicarage sparks the drama into life.

Margaret Leighton! What a star, what a sublime elegant star - not just with the elegance of clothes (although I crave her little snow boots) nor even of appearance (although that nonchalant mannequin physique, which looks to be fuelled on gin not built in gyms; and that fabulous face, which knocks mere prettiness into a box marked boring)… Margaret’s sophistication - again, a very mid-century English iteration of that quality - seems to run through her marrow, informing her sometimes desperate clinging to the immaculate facade (you feel that she might shatter at the slightest touch) and her high-speed brittle delivery (it really is a Christmas game as to which woman can swallow the most vowels when she and Celia get together over the washing-up).

On my fantasy West End visits I would have been quite likely to see Margaret Leighton, playing Yelena in Uncle Vanya with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier (IMAGINE) - she was a member of that legendary Old Vic company - or in Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, or Rattigan’s Separate Tables (a part played in the film by Rita Hayworth) for which she also won a Tony. She had begun in theatre, joining her local Birmingham Rep aged just fifteen, and there is nothing quite like that firm repertory training. But of course her looks, her singular style, took her into film: starting with The Winslow Boy, taking in Carrington V. C. (written by Agatha Christie’s brother-in-law), Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn and - in an Oscar-nominated performance as Julie Christie’s mother - The Go-Between, which she arguably steals from some very serious competition. That was in 1971, the year that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Like the writer of The Holly and the Ivy Margaret Leighton died at what seems (as with Wynyard Browne) an unfeasibly young age: fifty-three.

But here she is, forever, aged thirty, in her astonishing prime. She doesn’t exactly steal The Holly and the Ivy - the climactic scene between her and Ralph Richardson, her frequent stage co-star, shows two very different talents working together as equals - but she drives it and stokes it and is a dangerous, sad, unpredictable presence, like an impossibly highly-bred Siamese cat stalking a house full of slightly bewildered dogs. She didn’t play the part on the stage (only the two aunts were imported, as is rather touchingly obvious) but it is HERS.

And yes, there is something stubbornly retrograde about a film built upon the premise that somebody has to be at home to look after the vicar, because God forbid he should employ a housekeeper…. This is 1952 and no mistake, a society in which unmarried mothers are a hushed secret and a woman can genuinely contemplate turning down a marriage proposal because a parent can stake a prior claim.

But to paraphrase what Ralph Richardson says to Margaret Leighton. there’s truth in the film. There’s the cold coming, the hard and bitter agony, the death and the birth. I love it and I hope you do too.