No Affair Like a Holiday Affair

I’m resisting the impulse to add Hallmark movies to the list. I’m already considering doing this again next year, and it would be trivially easy to fill this up with “woman breaks up with nice-but-boring man for exciting stranger” movies. The fact that the genre goes back to 1949 and features someone trying to rehabilitate his image from a pot bust and the scream queen mother of a scream queen is a little startling. To be fair, no one has to return to their small-town home, and she’s even actually the war-widowed mother of a child, but it’s deeply strange nonetheless.

Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) is a comparison shopper and single mother to Timmy (Gordon Gebert). She buys an extremely expensive train set—it works out to about a thousand dollars today—without asking questions and with the exact dollar amount, including, tax, in hand in cash. (To be fair, credit cards were less of a thing then.) Toy salesman Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum) knows she’s a comparison shopper, is supposed to turn her in, doesn’t, and gets fired over it the next day when she comes to return the train. He ends up entangled in her life, making things complicated with her boyfriend, attorney Carl Davis (Wendell Corey).

I feel kind of bad for Timmy, honestly. He says at one point that all his mother ever gets him for Christmas is clothing, and that’s lousy. No, he shouldn’t think she’ll buy him a thousand-dollar train set, sure. And I can’t find out how much widows’ and orphans’ benefits were after World War II, and I can’t imagine comparison shoppers made a ton in those days. But come on, lady, his grandparents bought him a ball, a bat, and a catchers mitt, and it wouldn’t hurt you to buy him a teddy bear or a set of blocks or something. Something fun!

I don’t like Steve. I didn’t the first time I watched this movie, and I don’t now. The movie as a whole isn’t bad, but it would be better if Steve were more likable. I like that he has a life goal. He wants to build boats in California with a friend who’s got a company there. That’s great. But he’s creepy leading up to that. I don’t like that Carl disciplines Timmy before having a conversation with Connie about what their co-parenting would look like, but I find it creepy that Steve feels free with putting his hands on Timmy in an affectionate way.

The best scene in the movie is when Steve, for reasons, gets arrested and calls Connie to explain to the judge how he ended up with a set of salt and pepper shakers that were stolen from someone. The police lieutenant is Harry, still credited as Henry, Morgan. The explanation barely makes sense if you’ve been watching the movie, and of course he hasn’t. I do wish they’d explained to him that the reason the little girl is wearing roller skates is that she didn’t get ice skates for Christmas, because that’s absolutely adorable and actually reasonable in kid-logic.