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/

The Third Man (1949)

5/5

The plot of Carol Reed's The Third Man follows Holly Martins (Cotten), an American author who goes to post-war Vienna at the behest of his friend Harry Lime (Welles). When he arrives, he finds out that Harry has died in a bizarre car accident filled with coincidence, suspects foul play, and tries to get to the bottom of it. The police are reluctant to help him and are in fact glad he's dead. They believe he was a racketeer who profited on the misery and suffering of children in need of penicillin. Harry's lover Anna Schmidt (Valli) disregards their opinions; even if it is true, it doesn't change who he was to her and the love between them. The plot brings up unique viewpoints on betrayal vs. friendship, love to one person vs. duty to all mankind--all very ripe for discussion about your own beliefs.

In fact, I find the characters surprisingly deep. When Martins tells the police that Harry was the best friend he ever had, the police responds that it sounds like something from a cheap novelette. Martins writes cheap novelettes. Perhaps he's written so many he becomes the cheap novelette himself. We later find out they hadn't talked in ten years; is that really the best friend he ever had?

The Third Man is a striking film in many aspects. From its off-kilter camera angles to its all-zither score, the film makes an impression both visually and aurally. And this impression stays with you, even if the techniques are too over-the-top or just not as successful as they could have been. While they are few long takes or moving cameras, the well-envisioned, well-lit compositions more than make up for it. The editing is lean and sharp, with hardly a single unnecessary frame to be found. And Harry Lime's entrance just 30 minutes before the ending is still as memorable and nerve-wracking as the first time it came out. This is a richly-textured film that should be watched, discussed, rewatched, and remembered.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041959/