Holiday Affair (1949)

3/5

Holiday Affair is a sentimental Hollywood holiday story with enough cute kids and Christmas cheer to pull at your heartstrings and make you swoon. Janet Leigh plays an indiscreet "comparison shopper" who gets caught by a kind and generous salesman named Steve (Mitchum) when she tries to return a toy train set the day after she buys it. Instead of turning her in, Steve gives her a pass and ends up getting fired. He quickly falls in love with her and her young son (Gebert), but soon discovers that she's already engaged to a perfectly adequate lawyer named Carl (Corey) with plans to get married several days later on New Year's.

The movie is fairly straightforward with a very simple premise: how will these two lovebirds end up together? But it challenges us to find a solution to the love triangle and it somehow surprises us with the only solution possible. It seems to hurdle toward an impossibility, but deftly twists around the curve at a steady pace. Just thinking about it makes me smile even now. It's not the best shot, the best edited, or the best acted movie of its day. Not even close. But its story has charm and its actors have electricity. And while it's an enjoyable enough holiday movie, I'm not sure it's good enough to make the yearly Christmas roster.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041473/