I ran Charles and I an episode from the Lux Video Theatre 1950’s TV program, an offshoot of the Lux Radio Theatre that ran from 1935 to 1950 and presented hour-long digest versions of famous movies. It was originally hosted by Cecil B. DeMille, but he was replaced in 1943 after the American Federation of Radio Artists insisted that everyone involved in the program be unionized — and the fanatically Right-wing DeMille refused to join the union even when they reduced the dues to $1 and offered to pay them for him. So he was replaced by the Warner Bros. contract director William Keighley (and it was through a record of one of his shows, a 1946 dramatization of the film To Have and Have Not with the original’s stars, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, blessedly repeating their roles, that I finally learned that his last name, a typical Celtic jumble of silent and sounded letters, is pronounced “Keeley”). By the time it made it to TV it didn’t have a fixed host — they ended the drama about 10 minutes before the finish of their time slot and used the remaining airtime to promote some studio’s big new movie — in this case, Margaret O’Brien’s first starring role as an adult, Glory, a rather soapy-looking movie from the last days of RKO Studios (which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, seems to have gone into a sort of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder — maybe corporations are people, after all! — between the time Howard Hughes sold it in 1955 after seven years of wretched mismanagement and the time it finally expired in 1958, leaving a backlog of unreleased films they sold to Warner Bros. and Universal) about a young farm girl who attends to the birth of a new colt and determines to train her to run in the Kentucky Derby even though they usually only let boy horses, not girl horses, into the race. (An equine Victor/Victoria?) The show they were actually presenting was called Holiday Affair, a remake of an 87-minute RKO feature crammed into a running time of about half that (this was from an archive.org download and they erased some of the commercials but not all of them, and left in that awfully ponderous conclusion with Margaret O’Brien and Walter Brennan introducing a clip from Glory and promoting it on camera with host Otto Kruger), though there didn’t seem to be any lacunae in the story.
It begins on Christmas Eve — actually
the day before Christmas Eve — in
a department store in which a clerk, Steve Mason (Scott Brady), is warned by
his immediate supervisor, floorwalker Mr. Gow (George Baxter, who looked enough
like fellow actor Jerome Cowan I thought it might be he) that he must strictly
enforce the store’s rules. Steve waits on a female customer, Connie Ennis
(Phyllis Thaxter), who comes in to order a specific sort of electric-train set
and knows exactly the model she
wants, including its precise cost. She pays for it with the exact amount of
money it costs, and Gow witnesses the transaction and deduces she’s a so-called
“comparison shopper” — someone sent out by a rival department store to check on
the competition and its merchandise. Gow tells Steve she’ll be back the next
day to return the train set, and when she does Steve is to report her to the
police. (Why? Since she paid for the item it’s not clear that she broke any
law.) Then we see Connie return to her apartment, where she’s raising a
seven-year-old son, Timmy (Christopher Olsen), as a single mom. Given that this
was 1950’s Hollywood we suspect that she’s a war widow even before director Earl Ebi has his cameraman pan over to an
end table where she’s displayed pictures of a man in a uniform, one of him solo
and one of the two of them together. The man is Timmy’s father, as if we
couldn’t guess, and Connie says he was “killed in the war” (in 1949, when the
original movie was made, audiences would have thought World War II; by 1955,
given Timmy’s age, they were probably thinking Korea). Connie has been dating
attorney Carl Davis (Elliott Reed) for two years but has drawn back from
marrying him — he’s strong, steady, stable and makes enough money that he’d
clearly be a “good provider” and prevent Connie from needing to hold that tacky
job to support them, but Timmy just plain doesn’t like him. It gets even more
tense when Carl grabs Timmy at one point and he yells back, “Let go of me! You’re not my dad!”
Connie brought the electric train set
to her home and Timmy is excited to see it, but she explains to him that she
just bought it as part of her “comparison shopper” gig and she can’t possibly
afford to hold on to it. She duly returns it and Steve is about to turn her in,
as ordered, when she tells him that if he reports her she’ll lose her job and
she and her seven-year-old child will have no way to live. Steve takes pity on
them but Mr. Gow sees him do so, and so it’s Steve who’s fired just before Christmas — though that
doesn’t stop him from buying the train set and giving it to Timmy anonymously.
Steve ends up spending Christmas Eve at Connie’s apartment with Carl also there
— and the writers, Isobel Lennart (who wrote the 1949 film) and Harry Kronman (who
adapted it for the TV version), do a good job of portraying the tension between
the two men who have, somewhat to their surprise, become rivals for Connie’s
hand. Carl has a steady job and a responsible position, as well as enough
income for Connie to raise Timmy in comfort, while all Steve has is a vague
desire to go to San Pedro, California and take a job building boats.
Nonetheless, after a lot of back-and-forth and a noble gesture on Timmy’s part
— he returns the train set and seeks out Steve to give him the money to help
finance his trip — Connie not only picks Steve but buys him his ticket and goes
out with him to California. The writers, Lennart, Kronman and John D. Weaver
(author of the original story, “The Christmas Gift,” on which the film and TV
show were based), never quite grasp the moral dilemmas of pulling not only
yourself but a young boy all the way across the country to be with someone you
barely know. The pairing of Steve and Connie is presented as a coupling of free
spirits something along the lines of Philip Barry’s Holiday, but quite frankly the dilemma seems more
complicated (and involves complexities the writers really didn’t tackle) when a
child is involved and you’re planning to take him all the way across country on
what’s essentially a romantic whim.
I’ve never seen the 1949 film, which was
made at RKO, directed by Don Hartman, written by Lennart solo from Weaver’s
story, but though it might have made more of the story’s potential complexities
it didn’t seem to have as strong a cast. The film version cast Robert Mitchum
as Steve — he’s one of my favorite actors but I can’t imagine him playing a
comic role as an irrepressible free spirit (let’s face it, the actor it cried
out for was Cary Grant!) — along with Janet Leigh as Connie and Wendell Corey
as Carl. It might seem heresy to Janet Leigh fans out there but I’m convinced
Phyllis Thaxter was better in the part in 1955 than Leigh would have been in
1949 (or 1955, for that matter) — stronger, more authoritative, better able to
bring this character to life — and I also liked Christopher Olsen’s (mostly)
unsentimental performance as her son, a far cry from the gooey sweetness child
actors of both genders were drowned in for the next five decades or so after
the huge success of Shirley Temple in the 1930’s. Scott Brady and Elliott Reed
are also quite good as the two men in Connie’s life, and though they’re similar
physical “types” they manage through posture and overall bearing to distinguish
between the two characters: Carl’s gestures and stances are more harsh and
overbearing, and it’s easy to see why Timmy’s affections and hopes for his
mom’s future are with Steve, not Carl. Though suffering from the tackiness of
most live TV production of the time — the set depicting New York’s Central Park
(where Steve likes to hang out a lot) is all too obviously a soundstage
interior with a bunch of prop trees spread around to establish “parkicity” — Holiday
Affair is actually a well-made piece of
live TV typical of the time, unpretentious entertainment that tells a simple
and moving (if rather predictable) story and goes for romance and sentiment
(there are comedy bits but they’re more comic relief than the main course)
without either draining the tale in tearjerking glucose or yukking it up with cheap
laughs. One’s curiosity is piqued by the list of other films Lux
Video Theatre took on that year, including
versions of Casablanca (with Paul
Douglas, of all people, in Bogart’s role!) and Sunset Boulevard (with Miriam Hopkins in Gloria Swanson’s — and,
given all the stories about Hopkins and her diva behavior on set, that was probably quite good
casting!).
