I impartial discovered this gem from 1949 and am I joyful. It has all the ingredients critical to win a situation in my Christmas movies Hall of Fame: an adorable slight boy who wants a instruct spot his widowed mom can’t afford; Janet Leigh as the WWII widow struggling to provide for her son; Wendell Corey as the kind and decent man who wants to marry her; and Robert Mitchum, as the drifter on his draw to California who changes everything. It has charm without being schmaltzy, humor without being too cutesie, and an ending that has you standing up to cheer. Launch stringing the popcorn and belief to peek this every Christmas season.

Holiday affair is never mentioned when the roster of Christmas cinema classics is read, which is dismal because it’s actually a very advantageous movie. It would be unfair to compare this with It’s A Extraordinary Life which came out three years earlier, or even Miracle on 34th Street (two years before) . But the similarities in style and tone are there, this being a feel-good Christmas family movie made with intelligence. The studios must have realised they were on to a profitable thing.

Underneath the layer of seasonal schmaltz is a sage with its roots in the then favorite obsession with psychoanalysis. The jilted fiancé makes references to subconscious desires of Janet Leigh’s character, and the whole myth is based around a Freudian-Oedipus procedure with the son taking the dwelling of a listless father. But this is all (honest) under the surface of the fable of tiny boy who Santa Claus forgot, whose Christmas is made special by a selfless eccentric played by Mitchum. Mitchum is an actor who could be approved in almost any character – his face gives so miniature away that he is often described as ‘laconic’, but it’s obvious that here he is a noble guy who is so fair he even cuckolds awful weak Wendell Corey’s character in front of him rather than be deceitful. Corey’s character of `the other man’ is so doomed from the open to be a bad runner up to Mitchum that it must have been a thankless role for him, but he tackles it well. Witness out too for future M*A*S*H* star Harry Morgan (credited as Henry Morgan) who steals one microscopic scene as a bemused police lieutenant. If you want a change from Frank Capra or James Bond, try this with your turkey and Brussels sprouts.
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