The space between Christmas and New Year’s is a bizarre week, lying tonally between extreme closeness and an incredible absence. Most have work off, while those of us in the service industry have to work two, three times as hard. Half the city has skipped town while a new (old) half has moved in. With or without family and friends, there’s loneliness in the quiet nights where so few are going anywhere at all. Time moves differently in the post-climax space of the long buildup to the 25th, and final raucous goodbye to the year. It’s a great temporal location for cinema, with the likes of The Apartment driving a dull knife into the wound of the time, or “Orgy Week” in Metropolitan laying out a strict, debauched timeframe for the film’s college-aged “Urban Haut Bourgeois” to maintain their temporary friendships before shipping back off to their normal lives.
Most stunning is how this space is used by Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love, following the night club singer Petey (Ida Lupino) as she travels from New York back to stay with her sisters and brother in Long Beach from Christmas Eve through to the new year. She quickly gets swept up in the familial drama—her one sister’s struggle with her husband’s PTSD from the war and advances from her scuzzy, pseudo-mobster boss, Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda) or the next door neighbor’s marriage strained by a husband oblivious to how his wife feels like she’s wasting her life raising kids instead of getting taken out. This ensemble drama swirls around Lupino’s Petey before she gets herself a job singing for Toresca, fiddling him around like she’s the only person in the world who knows the game he’s playing and how to beat him.
These orbiting plot elements all wind themselves up in the first 30 of the film’s tight 96-minute runtime. I’ve written before about Walsh’s pacing, but I was taken aback on a recent holiday rewatch not just how much he packs in, but how much the film slows down when Petey’s love interest—the washed-up, alcoholic pianist who’s now daylighting as a merchant marine, Sand Thomas (Bruce Bennett)—shows up via a New Year’s Eve jail bailout. Suddenly, as we leave that holiday interim, things are slow; conversations drag themselves out lest someone might decide to run off to some other digs. Petey watches as Sand plays “The Man I Love” on her piano with delicate fingers that crash down on the keys just when they need to, the emotion raging through Bennett’s hands, into the ivory, and right through the screen. Petey’s whirlwind romance with Sand is immediate for the same reason it's doomed: they’re both alike, and they’re gonna keep running.
When Petey goes back to her sister’s house, it’s commented on how she’s been missing for a week, and the audience is reminded that we practically ran off to a different movie for a spell and are now thrust back into the real world of everyday life, or at least life that exists outside of Petey’s world of nightclubs, wannabe gangsters, and bad liquor. Petey, Lupino, and Walsh all excel in their ability to navigate this switch—Petey through her ability to move between street talk and domesticity, Lupino by way of her performance in doing so, and Walsh with his directly contrasting rhythms. While taking place after the holidays have concluded, Petey’s lost week of romance feels like that time which slips away between the last two points of the year.