Starlight Night

Starlight Night (1939)

* (out of 4)

I know absolutely nothing about this 30-minute short other than it came from the U.K.. Outside of that, I had never heard of this thing until it was featured on a "Holiday Favorites" collection viewable on Netflix streaming. What we basically have is a story set in 1811 as Napoleon is gathering men to go into war. Eight years later Father Joseph Mohr sits down and writes the song Silent Night. Pretty much it takes 30-minutes for us to get to a scene where the actor playing Mohr sits down, says a few lines of the song and then we flash to other kids singing the song. Again, I don't know anything about the cast or who directed this as even the IMDb has no info but this film was really, really bad. To say it ran too long would be an understatement because I was pretty much bored at the one-minute mark. There wasn't any sort of pace, the performances were bad and there just wasn't anything interesting going on. Even the added bits of stock footage were just embarrassing. However, this thing does reach a "so bad it's laughable" level and that happens when it comes time for Mohr to write the song. Just watch how horrible the performance is as the actor tries to "think" the words of the song.