The Under 700 Club: Reviews in under 700 words for movies with less than 700 logs on Letterboxd (log count as of this publication: 30)
The Under 700 Club started three years ago with a holiday recommendation, Edward Burns’ story of familial forgiveness, The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. The next year, a Christmas entry became an annual tradition with a review of the CW’s 2021 version of The Waltons’ Homecoming, a remake that was much better than I expected it to be. Last year, I reviewed another television film, BET’s ridiculous comedy Christmas Party Crashers. My annual gift to you, an underseen and underrated holiday film, returns this year with another offering, 2024’s noir Blue Christmas.
Marley was dead, to begin with. It’s Christmas Eve in 1941, and Jake Marley (Chris Causey) was murdered one year ago tonight. His private dick partner, Richard Stone (Rob Merritt), never bothered to solve the murder because, well, he’s just kind of an asshole - a draft dodger who didn’t choose the most noble of careers. In this take on Charles Dickens’ immortal A Christmas Carol, Stone is visited by Marley, as well as the ensuing three ghosts, in his Chicago office after everyone else has cleared out for the holidays. Unlike the top review on Letterboxd, I wouldn’t spoil anything about the ghosts, so I’ll just say that two of them are recognizable historical figures, and the title does reference something specific about one of them.
The film is written and directed by Max Allan Collins, one of the finest writers of crime fiction over the past few decades. Carrying the torch from the likes of writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett (Collins’ next book is a sequel to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon), Mickey Spillane (the two collaborated toward the end of Spillane’s life, and Spillane chose Collins to finish his incomplete manuscripts after his death), Collins was of the next generation of hardboiled storytellers. With a career that has lasted five decades, he’s written over 100 novels (I’m working my way through his Quarry series), comics (Ms. Tree and Dick Tracy, though he’s probably best known for Road to Perdition), and screenplays, both produced and unproduced.
But low-budget filmmaking is the great equalizer, and Blue Christmas is as micro-budget as it gets. It does look and feel like it was shot for roughly $10,000 in six days in a community college’s black box theatre, and that’s because it was. However, that’s what I find so impressive about it. Very few people understand how hard that is to pull off, and it’s a shame that so many folks are unable to look past that, as several of the reviews have been harsh and unfair. After all, the movie’s most recognizable actor is Alisabeth Von Presley, a golden ticket recipient on American Idol ten years ago and a competitor on the short-lived American Song Contest, but I think you’d have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of reality competition shows to pull those out. The rest of the cast is populated with actors local to Collins’ home state of Iowa.
But when I see a play or musical at a community theatre, I don’t expect Broadway quality. When one of those amateur troupes does Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s still a play by William freaking Shakespeare. And made by amateurs, this is not. A Chicago crime version of A Christmas Carol is still just that, and Collins, adapting his own short story “A Wreath for Marley,” writes dime novel dialogue with the best of ‘em. Hell, he’s one of the best of ‘em. He slings the lingo. The one-liners are quick and witty. I mean, come on, the movie features the phrase “ho-ho-ho-homicide, and it doesn’t get any better than that. And the credits roll at the 73-minute mark - it really doesn’t get any better than that.
You can watch this one for free in all of the usual free movie places (which is how I watched it), but I’d like to check out the special edition Blu-ray, which features over two hours of bonus materials, as well as a commentary with Collins and producer/editor Chad Bishop. If you wanted to get me a present this year...
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