Last year at this time I posted a list of my favorite ten Christmas movies of all time. You can read it by clicking here. This year I thought I might make a list of the Ten Worst Christmas movies. But there are far too many for such a short list, including about a dozen recent holiday pictures starring such lackluster TV personalities as Tim Allen. Instead this year I want to showcase a picture I think just might qualify as the worst Christmas movie ever: MGM’s 1947 film noir fiasco, Lady in the Lake, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler? What could a legendary, ground-breaking novel by the American master of hardboiled mysteries have to do with Christmas? That’s a good question. The answer is, nothing at all. And yet MGM in marketing the film based on it first packaged it as a holiday flick, as if it were some nice family picture. How did this happen? Well, blame it on Robert Montgomery, the actor who directed it. He chose to restyle the story giving it a nonsensical Christmas twist, below.

Chandler’s novel is set in the summer when Californians are basking in the sun-drenched lakes up in the mountains. The Lady in the Lake, which came after The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, is one of Chandler’s best novels. In it Chandler delved deeper than ever into the dark depths of grief, despair and corruption. It evokes Dashiell Hammett’s earlier thriller Red Harvest except it relies more on stylish “set-piece” murders and oozes a ghoulish Grand Guignol glamour all its own. Chandler’s rendering of the discovery of the eponymous “Lady in the Lake”’s corpse is one of the most gruesome depictions in American literature. It sent shivers up and down my spine when I first read it.

But the 1947 MGM flick turned the seasons upside down and set the story at holiday time in Los Angeles. The opening credits are played over a sickly sweet carol. The initial scenes transpire on Christmas Eve with garish holiday ornaments and badly-decorated Christmas trees thrown in to give the whole movie a cheesy Yuletide festive mood. Throughout the film choirs can be heard singing on the soundtrack, giving the movie a clumsy, sardonic edge.

No doubt the producers thought it a clever marketing tool but the end result is that the entire picture feels like a bad joke. And I’m not even talking yet about the ultimate gimmick of the film which was Montgomery’s directorial choice to film the entire thing from a first-person perspective. We never see the actor’s face, except occasionally when it shows up in a mirror. This “break-through” camera technique also appeared in Humphrey Bogart’s Dark Passage, later that year, to greater effect. In Montgomery’s picture, it’s interesting for about five minutes, but then becomes about as enjoyable for the viewer as wearing those silly paper glasses at a 3-D picture.

It’s a device that simply doesn’t work in telling a mystery story since there’s no suspense and we don’t care about any of the characters because we only see them through the narrator’s eyes. It’s flat, two-dimensional and ultimately boxes-in the story in cheap sets designed to accommodate the film technique. On top of this, Audrey Totter, who is always a hoot, gives one of the most over-the-top performances I’ve ever seen. She seems to be mocking Montgomery with her stylized camp line readings and facial mugging. (Audrey Totter, below, courtesy of Life.)

Worst of all, the centerpiece of the novel, the discovery of the bloated water-sogged cadaver in the lake, is glossed over in expository dialogue. We never even see Marlowe up at the lake. Small wonder considering it would have been frozen solid at Christmastime. That just underscores how appalling the script changes were. There are a few good scenes. I can’t deny that. The car accident, in which Marlowe crawls his way across the screen, has a certain ingenuity to it. And the way in which the brutally murdered body of the gigolo is revealed slumped in the shower is pretty innovative and daring for its day. But the fact that this gigolo is played by Chris Lavery as an effete Southern dandy, with a phony accent, rather than as the muscle-bound Italian Stallion in the novel further proves how wrong-headed and bizarrely off-base this adaptation is. Why all these changes? They took a brilliant novel that exposed the underbelly of corruption in California society and turned it into a schlocky whodunnit with all the subtlety of a Dick Tracy comic strip.

I’m not surprised that Raymond Chandler, above, a notorious curmudgeon who was hired to write the screenplay based on his novel, was disgusted by it and took his name off the picture. Very little of his original screenplay seems to have been used. The dialogue is beyond second rate. And the wisecracks and forced similes, which were Chandler’s calling card, are several grades below his usual amusing level.

I’ve always found Robert Montgomery to be a creepy actor. He often comes across as stiff and mannered, as if he had a crick in his neck, smelly oily hair and stale cigarette breath. He seems just barely able to hold back his contempt for his fellow actors. He was notoriously right wing in real life and it’s a miracle his daughter Elizabeth Montgomery turned out as “bewitching” as she did. He was a very lazy actor. There are some films where he seems to be sleep-walking his way through the part (sometimes, I heard, because he hated the script or the director). Well, he can’t use that excuse here. He is simply awful as Philip Marlowe. (Adding insult to injury, the character’s name is erroneously spelled “Phillip Marlowe” on the window of his office: see below).

Of all the bad Philip Marlowes on screen, and there have been several (Powers Booth anyone?) Montgomery’s is the absolute nadir. He makes Elliott Gould, who mumbled his way through Altman’s quirky yet unwisely revisionist The Long Goodbye, look like a genius in comparison. Ironically Chandler was a big fan of Montgomery’s work in Night Must Fall, a grim serial killer film set in England with Rosalind Russell in an against-type, non-humorous part. It’s a nifty little suspense thriller but Montgomery is the weakest link in it.

If Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I’d have to say a lavish remake of The Lady in the Lake starring George Clooney as Philip Marlowe. (Keep in mind that Chandler himself said he always envisioned Cary Grant in the role). Charlize Theron perhaps as Adrienne Fromsett. Mark Ruffalo as Lt. DeGarmot. And Nicole Kidman as Mildred Haveland, the cold-blooded femme fatale who knows more than she lets on about “the Lady in the Lake”.