Christmas in the company of people we call friends and/or those with whom we share a last name can often feel like Christmas in isolation or alongside strangers. We keep so much about our true selves to ourselves as our communication skills collectively devolve that growing apart becomes likelier, regardless of our desires or what’s best for us. A day meant to be a celebration instead turns into a day to be gotten through before we’re alone again, which may also be like spending time with a stranger. Isn’t that why people ask Santa for wine and sleeping pills? No? Must have gotten that wrong.
In Harry Horner’s 1952 Christmastime thriller, Beware, My Lovely, Helen Gordon (Ida Lupino) is a war widow wishing to do a stranger a kind turn by giving him much-needed employment cleaning her house while her boarder is away on his seasonal travels. In other words, she’s alone. Robert Ryan plays Howard Wilton, he of the new gig, which, like all his jobs, isn’t one that’s going to last. Helen wants to make Christmas as painless as possible. She has her tree as well as her commitment to keeping up appearances. There’s a void in this woman’s life, and our sense is that this portion of the year is something she tries to endure and put behind her. She’s generous to her niece and the neighborhood children—a person trying to share small, but notable, parcels of joy, but whose sorrow is constant.
When we first meet Howard, he’s in another city as his previous cleaning job wraps up in a most unceremonious fashion. He legs it to the rail yard—shades of the ill-fated cutting in Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man”—and it’s on to what feels like the latest in a long string of locales for this man without a home. We know something is off with Howard, and that he’s dangerous, but at no point do we think he’s wicked or sadistic. His problem is one of mental illness. He does what he does without the knowledge—or the recollection—of what he’s done. If anything, he’s lamblike.
Helen realizes that Howard isn’t quite right, and she tries to help him. They share several real moments of connection, and you think they’re the first of their kind in a long time for each person. Ryan is among the most believable of actors. You never doubt him as his characters. Lupino isn’t far behind; it’s no wonder she was also a successful director. Beware, My Lovely is itself suggestive of a sedentary exploration—albeit by another director—of some of the ideas that would later be brought to bear by Lupino in the ambulatory The Hitch-Hiker (1953). That film, though, featured a villain of hideous, focused intent, whereas both leads in Beware, My Lovely are victims.
Not that Helen would immediately share this belief after Howard imprisons her in her own home, with murder very much a possibility; after all, we’ve seen that before from Howard. Sort of. But presumably. Howard is by turns terrifying, to the viewer—and Helen—having no idea what he’s capable of, and then meek as can be, as vulnerable as a baby in its crib, or a manger, if you prefer.
The phone rings, and people come to the door. Life goes on just as life seems to stop, literally and figuratively, for Helen, the same as it feels like it has never started for Howard—a potent reminder that just because you see someone at Christmas, or hear their voice over the phone, and they look and sound as you expect them to, doesn’t mean they aren’t in real pain. A pain that they may think they can’t share.
The film’s ending is open. It’s a deathless picture—once the main action gets going, anyway—and a bloodless one, but real emotional guts are spilled. Historians try to shoehorn Beware, My Lovely into the noir category, but it’s a daylight film. There’s precious little night. It’s mostly a bad morning and early afternoon. We want these people to be okay and also to get the hell away from each other. The Christmas wish is granted, but it’s akin to that third wish in the old monkey’s paw trope—with things going back to what they were, which, of course, isn’t the same as what they had been. A hard truth and an all-too-common trick of the Christmas light. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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