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No time is wasted that makes two people friends
Holiday Affair (1949) is a screwball comedy that tripped and fell into three dimensions; it's great.
The premise plays like a foregone conclusion. In the tinsel crush before another Manhattan Christmas, Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) has her life on track as sure and circular as the ones on which the snow-dusted streamliner of the opening credits is running round and round the toy department at Crowley's. War-widowed young, she's worked hard to keep herself and her now six-and-a-half-year-old son Timmy (Gordon Gebert) in their two-bedroom on East 75th Street and while their finances may not stretch to the $79.50 of red-and-silver electric train Timmy deliriously mistakes for his Christmas present, in return for her long hours shopping for nylons and union suits and other items of competitive interest to her department store, the gap-toothed kid and his pet turtles are thriving; she doesn't discourage the attentions of Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), an amenable lawyer whose professional experience of divorce hasn't soured him personally on matrimony, but thus far the man of the house remains the son she greets and affectionately introduces as "Mr. Ennis." When she's clocked as a comparison shopper by Christmas temp Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum), however, we can feel the tracks jump a little under her daily routine, even more when this complete stranger of straitened means and slow-burning charm covers for her job at the expense of his own and then lets her make it up to him by sharing his lunch of hot dogs and peanuts with the seals at the Central Park Zoo, and before long the status quo is threatening to come off the rails entirely through nothing more than a ring of the doorbell, a secret Santa, a courtroom wind-up, a telltale necktie. As the days peel off toward New Year's when Connie has agreed to marry Carl, do I even need to finish this sentence? Everybody knows the three-cornered drill.
The reason I need to finish the sentence is that even while it conforms in general outline, Holiday Affair has almost as little interest in the three-cornered drill as Mary Renault in the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. It may be a truism of the genre that when love goes up against security, security is going to be left holding the bag, but whatever the men in this movie represent to its heroine, they never reduce to cartoons of it. Playing Mitchum's cool jazz less fatalistically, more pragmatically than his noirs, Steve has overtones of a demon lover, a sloe-eyed Christmas gift from the universe that always pitches curveballs—everything the heroine wants and can't make herself reach out for, so that a kiss out of the blue or a counter-proposal that explosively depressurizes a Christmas dinner feels more like sexual fantasy than chauvinist presumption—and the immediacy of his connection with Connie is established through a conversation that neither of them realizes has lasted two hours until she catches sight of her watch. "You always make people talk this much?" Steve marvels as they head off to clean out the housewares department at Gimbels. "No," she answers truthfully, "and I don't always like listening this much." His sketch-tacked room on Christopher Street and the dream of building boats for which he dropped out of the executive rat race he was funneled into direct from demob make him an attractive exponent of the counterculture, but he's not some footloose free spirit rolling with life as it comes; he's quietly, startlingly hardheaded, living hand to mouth if he has to while his odd jobs pay down into a share in a boatyard in Balboa, California. His interest in Connie is expressed as directly as his philosophy of always shooting higher than the moon and when she darts an uncertain glance at the door he just closed on his landlady's suspicions, he gently folds up the Murphy bed, most un-demon-like. "Let's worry her, huh? But let's not worry you." However narratively foreordained their union, Steve doesn't take it for granted. For his part, as the man whose bald purpose in the plot is not to marry Janet Leigh, Carl is blessedly neither written nor played as a Ralph Bellamy second banana. Apart from his actor's gift for the wry and woundable, the character isn't dull or dutiful or even just the mild case of stuffed shirt for which his profession is so often Hollywood shorthand, he's funny and supportive and unexpectedly sensitive to the dissonances in Connie's volte-face acceptance of his long-understood proposal. It isn't obvious that their marriage would be a misalliance from the easy good humor with which he's introduced helping wash the dishes of a dinner he finished work too late to share, coaxing a laugh out of Connie at the end of the long day as he ties on an apron to tackle the pots: "You know, I'll never forget the day you hired me. There I was, sitting at the agency with all the other girls—I was afraid you were going to take Evelyn." He's genuinely fond of Timmy, who regards the prospect of a stepfather ambivalently from inside the accustomed dyad of Mr. and Mrs. Ennis. He isn't saintly—a sharply insecure overstep on his part touches off an early, telling temblor in the Ennis household—but he is an adult and as the realignment of Connie's romantic loyalties assumes a neon unignorability, Carl doesn't respond like the other man in a screwball comedy, complacently oblivious or indignantly territorial. Hurt and clear-eyed, he doesn't lose his head or his dignity, only his "wishful thinking."
Most importantly, as Steve eventually spells out for viewers who may not have caught up to the maturity of the script, the story isn't a contest of "two fellows and a girl. This is two fellows, a girl, and her husband . . . I can't fight a shadow." The crux of Holiday Affair is not which of her two suitors Connie is going to choose, but whether she will be able to allow herself to choose her own life, which we come to realize has been on some deep and unacknowledged level suspended since it was shattered by a telegram from the War Department in 1942. Leigh's too efficiently, defensively intelligent in the part to calcify into a New York Miss Havisham, but Connie has enshrined herself in the memory of her marriage, talismanically combing her son's hair over in imitation of the photographs of his father which can be found everywhere in their apartment, memorializing herself so protectively as "Mrs. Ennis" that even after two years with a devoted beau, the introduction of sexual desire feels like infidelity to a ghost. The fate of an eye-watering tie hangs the lampshade on it, but even without such expressive symbols the film does a remarkably frank job of detailing that she finds Steve so destabilizing precisely because of his combustible potential, whereas she could have safely married Carl because he just doesn't ring her bell that hard. Their most categorically romantic moment shows up their unequal affections: kissed by Connie in front of their half-decorated tree, Carl twists on the string of Christmas lights around his shoulders with the shy innuendo, "See what you do to me?" Even before her answering grin is wiped off by her son's disapproving stare and the subsequent appearance of Steve with his arms full of packages from Gimbels KO's any chance of reviving the mood, it's sweet, sad, and conspicuous that she planted one on Carl with the rather less incendiary, "Oh, you're a very pleasant man." He would never have threatened the primacy of the idealized Guy Ennis, solidified readymade into the kind of nuclear family placeholder who could offer a house in the suburbs, a dog for Timmy, stability for a woman who doesn't want to find a "wild and fiery love" just to lose it as searingly. Steve who presents himself to her with go-for-broke emotional honesty and expects her to return the courtesy whether yes or no can't be so easily ticky-tackied; he would make her risk the kind of all-in commitment that pairs this film so well with Sondheim's "Being Alive." Someone to need you too much, someone to know you too well, someone to pull you up short, to put you through hell . . . and give me support for being alive. The cleverest and most adult part of this process, so characteristic of Christmas stories, stories of regeneration, of the sun coming back out of the dark, is that it doesn't happen because of Steve. If Connie hadn't already been coming back to life on her own time, she wouldn't have spent those two hours talking in the park with an ex-sales clerk from a rival store, wouldn't have let him accompany her on her rounds of commercial espionage, wouldn't have sought him out on Christmas morning or yielded to her son's pleas to bring him home for Christmas dinner or fought with him about her future as if it mattered to both of them: "Anything can change a life that's ready to be changed." She's never really grieved the young soldier with his arms around her in the happiest of their photos, his serviceman's cap cocked jauntily on her head; she's never really allowed him to be dead. Now she can either force herself to stay married to a ghost or she can recognize the reality that she's alive and her husband, however important a part of her past that no one who loves her would want her to forget, isn't. Regardless of what she does about either living man, she has to reckon with her own solstice. "All anybody wants is for you to live in the present and not be afraid of the future."
Produced and directed by Don Hartman with a screenplay adapted by Isobel Lennart from John D. Weaver's "The Man Who Played Santa Claus" (1948), Holiday Affair must have looked like the most wholesome property on the RKO lot, especially as a change of pace for its recently marijuana-busted star. It's an even nicer change of pace that it turned out so perceptive, melancholy and astringent: its sweetness is earned, not drizzled on. Imagine the fondant if it had been made at MGM or 20th Century Fox, or even if it had been cast as announced with Cary Grant, or James Stewart, or Teresa Wright, all of whom I like. There's a real-sized quality to the picture that keeps it out of the soap of Hallmark cards and social messages; even its most conventionally screwball developments, such as the intricately awkward triolet of explanations drawn out by the sarcastically bemused police lieutenant (Harry Morgan) who's stuck on the desk for Christmas, are played more for their emotional impact than their situational absurdities and without that protective layer of anarchy can be actually quite painful. Timmy makes a miniature odyssey to the top of a department store to return his beloved Red Rocket Express like he's just been watching Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and in one keenly observed and executed scene melts down like a real six-year-old from his own emotional overload and the tensions of the adults around him. Carl who might be archetypally expected to take either a gallant bow or a humiliated pratfall instead takes eleven o'clock center stage for a break-up so affirming it alloys a friendship, the polar opposite of the friend zone—when he rests his case with the "sneaking suspicion that I ought to see if somewhere there isn't a girl who might be in love with me," one can only hope there were volunteers from the audience. Even Steve doesn't pursue Connie at the last, leaving the choice up to her. Everyone in this movie has to make the decision for themselves, taking chances without certainty. It's a screwball moral; it's a dangerous genre, so often riding the edge of tragedy. Holiday Affair ends as it began, with a model train clacking its way to a dream destination. It could be watched just as appropriately for New Year's.
Naturally, TCM has been running this movie as a staple of its Christmas programming for decades and because I have a mediocre affinity for Christmas movies and romance, I just missed it. My thanks to Gwynne Garfinkle for the encouragement to correct this oversight last week on TCM, even if their one-line summary does commit character assassination on both Carl and Steve. I am fascinated by Corey's sideline in romantically sympathetic also-rans, the kind who deserve someone who lights up like a Christmas tree for them in return. James Agee once legendarily slated Mitchum's romantic appeal as "Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates" and I wish I knew if he had ever revised his opinion after exposure to Holiday Affair or even The Big Steal (1949). I have an active aversion to love triangles and I endorse this picture—a romantic comedy where conversations decide more than kisses. It can be watched variously streaming including on the Internet Archive and the Warner Archive still seems to offer it on Blu-Ray/DVD. As this spring rains steadily through the smoke of international wildfires, it's hard not to feel a little retro-punched when Carl and Steve, musing on the decline in white Christmases since their childhood, agree that it's "probably got something to do with the atomic bomb." I happen to believe in the pull quote of this review, which is possibly the movie's best line and Carl's. This present brought to you by my pleasant backers at Patreon.
The premise plays like a foregone conclusion. In the tinsel crush before another Manhattan Christmas, Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) has her life on track as sure and circular as the ones on which the snow-dusted streamliner of the opening credits is running round and round the toy department at Crowley's. War-widowed young, she's worked hard to keep herself and her now six-and-a-half-year-old son Timmy (Gordon Gebert) in their two-bedroom on East 75th Street and while their finances may not stretch to the $79.50 of red-and-silver electric train Timmy deliriously mistakes for his Christmas present, in return for her long hours shopping for nylons and union suits and other items of competitive interest to her department store, the gap-toothed kid and his pet turtles are thriving; she doesn't discourage the attentions of Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), an amenable lawyer whose professional experience of divorce hasn't soured him personally on matrimony, but thus far the man of the house remains the son she greets and affectionately introduces as "Mr. Ennis." When she's clocked as a comparison shopper by Christmas temp Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum), however, we can feel the tracks jump a little under her daily routine, even more when this complete stranger of straitened means and slow-burning charm covers for her job at the expense of his own and then lets her make it up to him by sharing his lunch of hot dogs and peanuts with the seals at the Central Park Zoo, and before long the status quo is threatening to come off the rails entirely through nothing more than a ring of the doorbell, a secret Santa, a courtroom wind-up, a telltale necktie. As the days peel off toward New Year's when Connie has agreed to marry Carl, do I even need to finish this sentence? Everybody knows the three-cornered drill.
The reason I need to finish the sentence is that even while it conforms in general outline, Holiday Affair has almost as little interest in the three-cornered drill as Mary Renault in the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. It may be a truism of the genre that when love goes up against security, security is going to be left holding the bag, but whatever the men in this movie represent to its heroine, they never reduce to cartoons of it. Playing Mitchum's cool jazz less fatalistically, more pragmatically than his noirs, Steve has overtones of a demon lover, a sloe-eyed Christmas gift from the universe that always pitches curveballs—everything the heroine wants and can't make herself reach out for, so that a kiss out of the blue or a counter-proposal that explosively depressurizes a Christmas dinner feels more like sexual fantasy than chauvinist presumption—and the immediacy of his connection with Connie is established through a conversation that neither of them realizes has lasted two hours until she catches sight of her watch. "You always make people talk this much?" Steve marvels as they head off to clean out the housewares department at Gimbels. "No," she answers truthfully, "and I don't always like listening this much." His sketch-tacked room on Christopher Street and the dream of building boats for which he dropped out of the executive rat race he was funneled into direct from demob make him an attractive exponent of the counterculture, but he's not some footloose free spirit rolling with life as it comes; he's quietly, startlingly hardheaded, living hand to mouth if he has to while his odd jobs pay down into a share in a boatyard in Balboa, California. His interest in Connie is expressed as directly as his philosophy of always shooting higher than the moon and when she darts an uncertain glance at the door he just closed on his landlady's suspicions, he gently folds up the Murphy bed, most un-demon-like. "Let's worry her, huh? But let's not worry you." However narratively foreordained their union, Steve doesn't take it for granted. For his part, as the man whose bald purpose in the plot is not to marry Janet Leigh, Carl is blessedly neither written nor played as a Ralph Bellamy second banana. Apart from his actor's gift for the wry and woundable, the character isn't dull or dutiful or even just the mild case of stuffed shirt for which his profession is so often Hollywood shorthand, he's funny and supportive and unexpectedly sensitive to the dissonances in Connie's volte-face acceptance of his long-understood proposal. It isn't obvious that their marriage would be a misalliance from the easy good humor with which he's introduced helping wash the dishes of a dinner he finished work too late to share, coaxing a laugh out of Connie at the end of the long day as he ties on an apron to tackle the pots: "You know, I'll never forget the day you hired me. There I was, sitting at the agency with all the other girls—I was afraid you were going to take Evelyn." He's genuinely fond of Timmy, who regards the prospect of a stepfather ambivalently from inside the accustomed dyad of Mr. and Mrs. Ennis. He isn't saintly—a sharply insecure overstep on his part touches off an early, telling temblor in the Ennis household—but he is an adult and as the realignment of Connie's romantic loyalties assumes a neon unignorability, Carl doesn't respond like the other man in a screwball comedy, complacently oblivious or indignantly territorial. Hurt and clear-eyed, he doesn't lose his head or his dignity, only his "wishful thinking."
Most importantly, as Steve eventually spells out for viewers who may not have caught up to the maturity of the script, the story isn't a contest of "two fellows and a girl. This is two fellows, a girl, and her husband . . . I can't fight a shadow." The crux of Holiday Affair is not which of her two suitors Connie is going to choose, but whether she will be able to allow herself to choose her own life, which we come to realize has been on some deep and unacknowledged level suspended since it was shattered by a telegram from the War Department in 1942. Leigh's too efficiently, defensively intelligent in the part to calcify into a New York Miss Havisham, but Connie has enshrined herself in the memory of her marriage, talismanically combing her son's hair over in imitation of the photographs of his father which can be found everywhere in their apartment, memorializing herself so protectively as "Mrs. Ennis" that even after two years with a devoted beau, the introduction of sexual desire feels like infidelity to a ghost. The fate of an eye-watering tie hangs the lampshade on it, but even without such expressive symbols the film does a remarkably frank job of detailing that she finds Steve so destabilizing precisely because of his combustible potential, whereas she could have safely married Carl because he just doesn't ring her bell that hard. Their most categorically romantic moment shows up their unequal affections: kissed by Connie in front of their half-decorated tree, Carl twists on the string of Christmas lights around his shoulders with the shy innuendo, "See what you do to me?" Even before her answering grin is wiped off by her son's disapproving stare and the subsequent appearance of Steve with his arms full of packages from Gimbels KO's any chance of reviving the mood, it's sweet, sad, and conspicuous that she planted one on Carl with the rather less incendiary, "Oh, you're a very pleasant man." He would never have threatened the primacy of the idealized Guy Ennis, solidified readymade into the kind of nuclear family placeholder who could offer a house in the suburbs, a dog for Timmy, stability for a woman who doesn't want to find a "wild and fiery love" just to lose it as searingly. Steve who presents himself to her with go-for-broke emotional honesty and expects her to return the courtesy whether yes or no can't be so easily ticky-tackied; he would make her risk the kind of all-in commitment that pairs this film so well with Sondheim's "Being Alive." Someone to need you too much, someone to know you too well, someone to pull you up short, to put you through hell . . . and give me support for being alive. The cleverest and most adult part of this process, so characteristic of Christmas stories, stories of regeneration, of the sun coming back out of the dark, is that it doesn't happen because of Steve. If Connie hadn't already been coming back to life on her own time, she wouldn't have spent those two hours talking in the park with an ex-sales clerk from a rival store, wouldn't have let him accompany her on her rounds of commercial espionage, wouldn't have sought him out on Christmas morning or yielded to her son's pleas to bring him home for Christmas dinner or fought with him about her future as if it mattered to both of them: "Anything can change a life that's ready to be changed." She's never really grieved the young soldier with his arms around her in the happiest of their photos, his serviceman's cap cocked jauntily on her head; she's never really allowed him to be dead. Now she can either force herself to stay married to a ghost or she can recognize the reality that she's alive and her husband, however important a part of her past that no one who loves her would want her to forget, isn't. Regardless of what she does about either living man, she has to reckon with her own solstice. "All anybody wants is for you to live in the present and not be afraid of the future."
Produced and directed by Don Hartman with a screenplay adapted by Isobel Lennart from John D. Weaver's "The Man Who Played Santa Claus" (1948), Holiday Affair must have looked like the most wholesome property on the RKO lot, especially as a change of pace for its recently marijuana-busted star. It's an even nicer change of pace that it turned out so perceptive, melancholy and astringent: its sweetness is earned, not drizzled on. Imagine the fondant if it had been made at MGM or 20th Century Fox, or even if it had been cast as announced with Cary Grant, or James Stewart, or Teresa Wright, all of whom I like. There's a real-sized quality to the picture that keeps it out of the soap of Hallmark cards and social messages; even its most conventionally screwball developments, such as the intricately awkward triolet of explanations drawn out by the sarcastically bemused police lieutenant (Harry Morgan) who's stuck on the desk for Christmas, are played more for their emotional impact than their situational absurdities and without that protective layer of anarchy can be actually quite painful. Timmy makes a miniature odyssey to the top of a department store to return his beloved Red Rocket Express like he's just been watching Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and in one keenly observed and executed scene melts down like a real six-year-old from his own emotional overload and the tensions of the adults around him. Carl who might be archetypally expected to take either a gallant bow or a humiliated pratfall instead takes eleven o'clock center stage for a break-up so affirming it alloys a friendship, the polar opposite of the friend zone—when he rests his case with the "sneaking suspicion that I ought to see if somewhere there isn't a girl who might be in love with me," one can only hope there were volunteers from the audience. Even Steve doesn't pursue Connie at the last, leaving the choice up to her. Everyone in this movie has to make the decision for themselves, taking chances without certainty. It's a screwball moral; it's a dangerous genre, so often riding the edge of tragedy. Holiday Affair ends as it began, with a model train clacking its way to a dream destination. It could be watched just as appropriately for New Year's.
Naturally, TCM has been running this movie as a staple of its Christmas programming for decades and because I have a mediocre affinity for Christmas movies and romance, I just missed it. My thanks to Gwynne Garfinkle for the encouragement to correct this oversight last week on TCM, even if their one-line summary does commit character assassination on both Carl and Steve. I am fascinated by Corey's sideline in romantically sympathetic also-rans, the kind who deserve someone who lights up like a Christmas tree for them in return. James Agee once legendarily slated Mitchum's romantic appeal as "Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates" and I wish I knew if he had ever revised his opinion after exposure to Holiday Affair or even The Big Steal (1949). I have an active aversion to love triangles and I endorse this picture—a romantic comedy where conversations decide more than kisses. It can be watched variously streaming including on the Internet Archive and the Warner Archive still seems to offer it on Blu-Ray/DVD. As this spring rains steadily through the smoke of international wildfires, it's hard not to feel a little retro-punched when Carl and Steve, musing on the decline in white Christmases since their childhood, agree that it's "probably got something to do with the atomic bomb." I happen to believe in the pull quote of this review, which is possibly the movie's best line and Carl's. This present brought to you by my pleasant backers at Patreon.
Is that so?
That's right.
I suspect the grown-up-ness is the unicorn of this movie, but Mitchum and Corey are close seconds and I'm so glad of them. I really don't want to feel grateful to any of this country's drug laws, so I'll just thank the pot.
No mustache-twirling, no irrational jealous tangents, just people trying to get around relationship problems as people do, with some post-war processing and a bit of You Can't Take It With You on the side (Moss Hart's name drop somewhere in this film was definitely not a coincidence).
I loved your reaction to the line about Moss Hart's new show.
I was so taken with the story and characters of this movie that I overlooked the crew, but Holiday Affair's DP was Milton R. Krasner and its composer was Roy Webb and both of them are better known to me for their work in film noir, which is fun, too. About the only thing in this production I am less than one hundred per cent for is Leigh's tight-sweatered bullet-bra and that was all Howard Hughes.
I would happily have lunch with a seal who's never going to be bank president.
I think we should plan on it. We've got a harbor.
Re: Is that so?
Re: Is that so?
This makes me so happy.
no subject
("Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates" is a great line, albeit an unfair assessment.)
no subject
Thank you! It truly did. I would watch a lot more romantic comedies if they were all so intelligent about the people in them.
("Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates" is a great line, albeit an unfair assessment.)
I am beginning to think of Agee as an important forerunner of snark criticism such as specialized in these days by Anthony Lane.
no subject
Everyone in this movie has to make the decision for themselves, taking chances without certainty. So scary. But the fact is that actually nothing is certain, so...
I really like what you say about the guy who isn't chosen, too, about how he behaves and how he'd treated. I hope there were volunteers from the audience too.
no subject
Thank you. It turned out to be such a more interestingly adult and haunted movie than its premise required and yet not even as bittersweet as that description necessarily makes it sound. Whatever decisions they make, I don't worry about anyone in this story after it ends.
I really like what you say about the guy who isn't chosen, too, about how he behaves and how he'd treated. I hope there were volunteers from the audience too.
I love that there's nothing wrong with Carl. He isn't Connie's string of Christmas lights. Doesn't mean he's no one's. (
no subject
OMG
Today Wakanomori said someone had tweeted about an old film, and did I want to see it. Sure, I said. As it started up, I had the strangest sense, very powerful sense, of déjà vu. I said, I know this film. I know the situation. I know the emotional beats. Sovay HAS to have written about it, and I have to have responded. So I searched, and sure enough! MAN you write a memorable review. This was SIX YEARS AGO, but I remembered so powerfully what you said about her not letting go of her husband.
...well, back to the film. We're enjoying it *a lot*
Re: OMG
It's only been six months! 2023 just feels that long! The review didn't have to be that memorable! But I am so glad you are enjoying the movie. Hooray for whoever tweeted about it that Wakanomori saw.
Re: OMG
Okay, that makes more sense. I searched Patreon to find the entry, and then I think I must have misread the date. Somehow I thought it was 2017!
We just finished it. SUCH a smart, funny movie. We laughed and laughed. The scene in the police station was *hilarious*
Re: OMG
Look, time hasn't run right in years, it could have been. 2023 just sort of turned into the year of Wendell Corey.
We just finished it. SUCH a smart, funny movie. We laughed and laughed. The scene in the police station was *hilarious*
Yay! More romances should have the intelligence of Holiday Affair. And I'm so glad you got to watch it for its actual season of Christmas to New Year's!