Holiday Affair (RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I got back from our journey to Balboa Park at 6:30 p.m. last night (Sunday, December 24) and I settled in for the night. We had tamales and steamed carrots and corn for our Christmas Eve dinner and I began the evening with a quirky movie from RKO in 1949, Holiday Affair, produced and directed by Don Hartman from a script by Isobel Lennart (of the original Funny Girl and the quite amusing farce Fitzwilly from 1967) based on a story called “The Christmas Gift” by John D. Weaver. I was especially interested in this one because in March 2019 Charles and I had watched a 1955 Lux Video Theatre presentation of the same story, with Scott Brady, Phyllis Thaxter and Elliott Reid in the roles played here by Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh and Wendell Corey, respectively. When I did a moviemagg blog post on the 1955 TV version (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/03/lux-video-theatre-holiday-affair-j.html) I’d speculated that the TV cast might actually have been better than the movie cast, and that turned out to be partially right. The story begins on Christmas Eve at the Crowley department store, where “comparison shopper” Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) shows up and buys two items. One is for herself – a new suit of clothes for her son Timmy (Gordon Gebert) – and one is for her “comparison shopper” gig, in which she buys items to compare them to the ones her employer, a rival department store, is offering. Then she returns them the next day. Unfortunately, Timmy takes a peek at the comparison item – an elaborate model train set – and thinks that’s his present.

The store clerk she bought the train from, Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum), suspected her of being a comparison shopper right off when she came in and asked for the specific item without having to be “sold” on it, then produced the exact amount of money required. When she returns it the next day, he explains to her that he’s supposed to take a photo of her and send it to the other store departments as a warning that she’s a comparison shopper and is not to be allowed to buy anything there ever again – and he’s also supposed to call the police on her if she refuses to allow herself to be photographed. (As I wrote in my blog post on the 1955 TV remake, why? Since she paid for the item, it doesn’t seem to me like she did anything illegal.) She pleads with him to accept the return and not get her into trouble because that will mean she’ll be fired on Christmas – only a floorwalker spots him letting her go. As a result, he gets fired on Christmas. He helps her walk out of the store with presents she bought with no ulterior motives, and shows up at the apartment where she, a war widow who’s raising Timmy as a single parent, is having Christmas dinner with her fiancé, stuffed-shirt attorney Carl Davis (Wendell Corey). With his last money, Steve bought Timmy the train set but delivered it anonymously. Connie has such an idealized vision of her late husband she wants to remodel her six-year-old son into the spitting image of him and continue living with just the two of them. Carl wants her to marry him and he promises to be a real father to Timmy if she says yes. Only Connie protests that she doesn’t really love Carl “that way” because she’s still in love with Timmy’s dead father. Ultimately, after a few back-and-forth scenes, in which the train set passes back and forth between the principals several times and ultimately Mr. Crowley himself (Henry O’Neill) gives Timmy a refund on it, which he wants so Steve can get a train from Palm Beach, Florida (where the main part of the story takes place) to Balboa, California, where he’s been promised a job helping a war friend of his build boats.

Eventually Steve and Connie light out for California with Timmy in tow because Connie’s decided that he’s really the right man for her. There’s also a great scene in which Steve has been arrested for robbery and he, Connie and Carl are in a combination police station and night court where the cop in charge, played magnificently by Harry Morgan, practically steals the movie as he tries to sort out the various stories he’s told. I had assumed Holiday Affair the movie would be inferior to Holiday Affair the TV show, but I was only partly right. Robert Mitchum was considered miscast at the time because the part seemed to require a debonair romantic lead – as I wrote about the 1955 version, Cary Grant would have been ideal – but he was a good enough actor that he was able to turn the seeming miscasting into an effectively dry performance. Wendell Corey is also quite credible as Carl – there’s real uncertainty as to whether Carl or Steve would be the best mate for Connie, which there wouldn’t have been with Cary Grant as Steve (though the plot has intriguing similarities to Philip Barry’s Holiday, filmed in 1938 with Grant and Katharine Hepburn in their third of four films together, notably in a bit of dialogue cut from the 1955 TV show in which Steve talks about how he got a job in a financial-services firm but walked out on it because it didn’t fulfill his dreams). The principals who really let the side down were Janet Leigh as Connie and especially Gordon Gebert as Timmy. In an early scene Leigh was so overbearing I joked, “Where’s the drag queen with a knife in the shower when we need him?”, and in my comments on the 1955 remake I actually praised the boy who played Timmy, Christopher Olsen, for avoiding the gooey sweetness child actors of both genders displayed for decades after Shirley Temple’s huge success in 1934. Unfortunately, Gordon Gebert here goes all out for “male Shirley Temple” status here, and is so offensively sweet one wishes he’d die or get sick already just to be rid of him, even though such a plot twist would have made this an unabashed tearjerker instead of a bittersweet romance whose ending Charles said disappointed him because he didn’t think any of these people would truly be happy with the denouement.