Holiday Affair *** (1949, Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey) – Classic Movie Review 10,952

Director Don Hartman’s 1949 RKO black and white film Holiday Affair, set during the Christmas season, stars Janet Leigh as World War Two war widow Connie Ennis, who is courted by affable department store sales clerk Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum) and solemn attorney Carl Davis (Wendell Corey).

Steve meets big-spending customer Connie, who turns out to be a commercial spy, but he lets her go, which gets him fired and he goes back to being a boat builder. Still, they end up on a date, upsetting Carl, who is expecting to marry Connie. But Mitchum plays dirty by spending his last few bucks on a Christmas gift of a train set for Leigh’s gap-toothed little boy Timmy (Gordon Gebert), who isn’t a big fan of Carl.

Holiday Affair is a sentimental, amusing romantic comedy, a minor Christmas classic, engagingly played and neatly told by director Hartman, though Isobel Lennart’s script, based on the story Christmas Gift by John D Weaver, loads on the sugar and the sharp screen bad boy Mitchum is hardly ideal casting as Santa.

However, the young Leigh and Mitchum have a lot of appeal and are quite charming, and, over the years, the film has acquired a special aura.

It was premiered in New York 23 November 1949 and released in the US 21 December 1949 just in time for the Christmas season, but oddly, it flopped, resulting in a loss of $300,000 for RKO Radio Pictures.

There is also a computer-colorized version.

Remade as a TV movie in 1996, with Cynthia Gibb, David James Elliott and Tom Irwin.

Also in the cast are Griff Barnett, Esther Dale, Gordon Gebert, Harry Morgan, Helen Brown, James Griffith, Henry O’Neill, Larry J Blake, Chick Chandler, George Eldgredge, Pat Hall, Al Murphy, Theodore Rand, Joey Ray and Sammy Shack.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,952

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