In the social media age, ironic Christmas movies are losing their jingle almost as quickly as we can meme them into existence. Die Hard is old hat. Batman Returns is a snore. Eyes Wide Shut remains too topical. Dial Code Santa Claus (alternatively titled Deadly Games, Hide and Creep and 3615 Pere Noel) is one of the newer entries into the Jaded Millennial Christmas canon, debuting in France in 1989, but languishing in ubercult status for years before finally getting an American release in 2018. This would probably have never happened had the movie’s premise not strongly resembled an already-long established Christmas movie: Dial Code Santa Claus features a precocious child forced to defend his massive house against a burglar with a litany of improvised traps. If that last sentence led you to Google to check the release date of Home Alone, you have the same idea as Dial Code Santa Claus writer-director Rene Manzour had: he threatened legal action against John Hughes for plagiarism, but could nothing ever came of it. It worked out for him later on, though: “A more violent Home Alone” was an easy sell.
Though the plagiarism accusations didn’t stick, it’s still worth thinking about because it highlights what a fluid and referential art form film is. While the basic plot of Dial Code Santa Claus sounds like a carbon copy of Home Alone, the former goes in a much less family-friendly direction. The home invader is a psychotic drifter who surreptitiously contacts the main character Thomas via the Minitel (a pre-World Wide Web telecommunications service popular in France) claiming to be Santa Claus. Thomas, a brilliant but isolated kid obsessed with action movies and technology, outfits his house with surveillance to try to catch Santa in the act, despite his grandfather’s warning that Santa turns into a bloodthirsty goblin when kids spot him; when the burglar turns violent, Thomas assumes that this is what must’ve happened. There’s explicit stabbing, gunplay, and yes, the dog dies; in addition there’s chilling blue Carpenterian cinematography, Rambo-inspired booby traps, action set pieces pulled from Die Hard, and slasher-movie camerawork. Manzour readily acknowledges his influences in interviews: “I didn’t want to do a serious copy of those big action movies,” he says. “I wanted to tell the story from the kid’s perspective, to wink at the audience and break the fourth wall like Deadpool.” What is ironic about that is that Home Alone, the American movie that swindled its plot, ends up owing just as much to French cinema as Dial Code Santa Claus owes to American cinema.
Of course, when we talk about French influences in a movie, we’re probably talking about the so-called “French New Wave”, the most widely seen and extensively copied vein of cinematic art to ever come out of that country; and when we talk about that, we run into the same problem as we when we talk about Citizen Kane: the innovations that the French New Wave introduced were so influential and so widely adopted that it’s hard for a modern viewer to appreciate how radical they really were; today, they just look like “a movie”. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the innovations were technological in themselves, or enabled by technology innovations: cameras got smaller, lighter, easier to move around, and in turn this made it possible to shoot a movie on location, to turn the camera more easily and to dolly it further, or even carry it if necessary. These technical innovations necessarily came to be widely adopted, in no small part because movies in a world post-French New Wave necessitated them. But on the other innovations were products of political and material circumstances not to be repeated: for example, when Godard had to cut half an hour from Breathless, the exorbitant cost of film stock in economically depressed France led him to cut not entire scenes, but little bits and pieces from the middle of scenes, creating the jittery jump-cut that dominated the movie’s visual style and influenced countless other productions not similarly afflicted.
The obvious candidate for French influence on Home Alone would be Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. The subject of the disaffected and lonely child, surprisingly worldly in some ways, yet still tethered to a few childhood fixations and fantasies, draw inspiration for Truffaut’s stand-in Antoine. The two boys have similar taste in sweaters and a similar shuffling way of carrying themselves. Kevin talks to adults in the same tone as Antoine talks to his teacher, his psychologist at the juvenile detention camp, and the man he tries to sell a stolen typewriter to. He rattles off above-his-pay-grade snark with the same nonchalance. And the camera makes environment around both Kevin and Antoine expands and contracts to suit their moods. When Antoine runs away to spend the night in a derelict factory, the dead machines around him loom monsterlike in the semidarkness just like the wrought-iron furnace that so terrifies Kevin.
One of the French New Wave’s major stylistic innovations is the use of editing to drive the narrative, and many of the techniques Home Alone uses to convey its emotional effects wouldn’t be legible to us if French films hadn’t inserted them into our corpus of visual grammar. The sped-up scene where the whole family frantically rushes around after missing their alarm clocks is one example. The giddy montage of Kevin running around the house enjoying his freedom is another. Later on in the movie, Kevin’s mom, trying to get back home to Chicago, appears in a scene at an airport counter in what we learn is Scranton. The scene starts with her in front of the desk, violating the pre-New Wave rules of continuity editing, which would’ve necessitated some sort of scene transition and establishing shot, but by dropping her right in, the movie is a able to visually portray the sleepless, anxiety-hangover wrongfootedness the character is experiencing. And it never would’ve been possible if not for Godard.
All these editing techniques are products of a postmodernist theory of film which, in defiance to traditional continuity editing, which aimed to immerse the viewer and buoy them through the narrative without drawing attention to itself, wanted to draw attention to the artificial nature of what is being watched: in a few words, to be self-referential. One of the other big ways this effect was achieved, particularly by Godard, was to have characters break the fourth wall and engage the viewer directly, sometimes with just a penetrating glance (like Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie) or directly in words (as characters do in Pierrot le Fou and Breathless). Kevin in Home Alone treads a weird sort of middle ground between these two: sometimes he mugs right at the camera and says something that wouldn’t make any sense if there weren’t anybody there (“Pack my suitcase?”). Sometimes he goes on long expository monologues to himself in the bathroom mirror. And, of course, there are all the times he bizarrely runs to the attic stair landing just to scream into the camera there. The movie keeps it vague whether he’s just talking to imaginary friends or directly addressing the viewer.
Another thing that Home Alone captures is the French penchant for satire and genre pastiche, along with the French New Wave’s obsession with American film noir. Crime flicks, from America or other areas of the English-speaking world, were extremely popular in France even before the war; postwar, the French economy was ashambles and the Marshall Plan flooded European kinos with all the genre dreck the Americans were able to film in their not-bombed cities and finance with their non-looted banks. So it should come as little surprise that Breathless features a young criminal obsessed with Humphrey Bogart, Vivre Sa Vie ends with an incongruous shootout, Alphaville transplants a character already popular from spy movies (along with the American who plays him) into a cryptic sci-fi setting, and Le Samourai took the then-unprecedented step of combining the gangster flick with those all those funny swordfight movies coming out of Japan. Home Alone features several stylistic hallmarks of film noir: the dark slushy nighttime streets evoking the rain-soaked blacktops of an exterior noir setpiece, the use of sound design as a narrative device as in Kevin’s mother’s echoing scream and church bells ringing to toll the countdown of the imminent attack on Kevin’s house. It also features an 8-year-old kid improbably obsessed with black-and-white noir movies. The film-within-a-film Angels With Dirty Faces (which Kevin watches in a scene itself reminiscent of Antoine sneaking into the movie theater to watch overly-adult movies in 400 Blows,) becomes a plot device, as Kevin keeps the movie in the kitchen TV/VCR, cued up to that scene, to prank intruders with. Rene Manzour’s comment about the premise of Dial Code Santa Claus comes to mind here: given Kevin’s obvious appreciation for onscreen violence, it opens the door for Kevin’s fight against home invaders to stand in as a parody of a Hollywood actioner, whose absurdities are highlighted by virtue of being acted out by a kid too young to shave. But the whole plot could also be read as a winking, farcical take on the story of The 400 Blows: after all, that kid wanted to make his family disappear, too.
Home Alone’s comedic sensibility also owes a lot to French movies of the period, specifically the broad physical comedy of Jacques Tati. The opening sequence of people rushing in and out of doors and up and down stairs, chattering and carelessly piling their luggage into immense mountains; the family pizza dinner that descends into plot-foreboding chaos; the rush of the oversleeping family out the door, into the shuttles, and through the airport – these are all iterations of one of the main type of Tati comedy setpieces: Jeez Would You Look At All These Hustling People, Something’s About To Go Very Wrong. The crowd of self-involved, distracted people, the introduction of a slight mishap, which engenders another mishap and three more, eventually spiraling into complete pandemonium: this is the dining room scene from Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, the showroom scene from Playtime, the driving scenes from Trafic. Home Alone builds an entire plot out of these comic mishaps that click together like tumblers in a lock – Kevin’s passport is accidentally thrown away in a flash, the stocking cap of a nosey neighbor kid is taken for Kevin’s head during a last-minute head count, and the cousin who would have noticed Kevin missing is sleeping elsewhere due to drinking too much delicious Pepsi. Additionally, there’s something distinctly Hulot like about the Wet Bandit’s movements – bug-eyed, bandy-armed, careless with where their feet and arms go. When they slip and slide on the stairs Kevin has wet down, they look just like Hulot slipping in a puddle of spilled whiskey in Playtime.
All this is very interesting, but the question lingers whether any of these were intended as direct homages. As previously noted, none of these elements are really “French” anymore in any meaningful sense – they’ve been transplanted into American movies through New Wave admirers like Scorsese and Coppola, and imitated and disseminated so thoroughly as to be effectively in common use. Perhaps what is most instructive is what Home Alone does differently than the French would: the movie habitually uses the type of low-angled, wide shots that Godard favored, but instead of a self-conscious and alienating effect, what it accomplishes is portraying the events through the eyes of a small child: it draws in rather than pushes away. And one of the biggest departures from the New Wave tradition is Home Alone’s crowd-pleasing, conventionally Hollywood ending – not to be found in Dial Code Santa Claus, which ends with the traumatized Thomas forced to gun down his home’s invader and sobbing that he just wanted to see Santa. What a holiday treat. ★
