Holiday Affair was designed to be a rehabilitation of Robert Mitchum’s screen image. It failed -both within the movie as I will get to, but also outside of it. Mitchum, from early in his career had been a tough guy, ideally suited for dispassionate or morally ambiguous anti-heroes, making him a staple of film noir alongside Humphrey Bogart. In 1947, he made Out of the Past -one of the darkest films to come out of that era, so two years later his studio RKO decided to try and break him out of that mould, and since Christmas movies were trending in the aftermath of Miracle on 34th Street, they gave him a holiday romance for maximum appeal. But afterwards, Mitchum was put right back into his slot and he went on in the same kinds of roles across crime movies, war films, and westerns that he became successful on -and arguably his most famous role, in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, was another six years away. History remembers Robert Mitchum as the rough, and it even plays into this movie attempting to cleanse his reputation of that. He is as forceful, as direct, and as un-charming as in any other part he played -and here it is not a strength.
He plays Steve Mason, a department store salesman at a fictional chain called Crowley’s; a war veteran having a bit of a hard time getting back on his feet financially in civilian life. Crossing his path in her job as a comparative shopper is Connie Ennis, played by Janet Leigh, a young widow herself trying to get by with her son after her husband died in the war, and in a steady two-year relationship with lawyer Carl Davis (Wendel Corey), a nice supportive guy just a touch impatient over her hesitance to get remarried. It’s late in the Christmas season, and Steve -who suspected Connie’s real role- is let go for not turning her in at the same time he pays for an expensive train set for her son that she can’t in good conscience accept. In the process of returning it and explanations and conversation, they become more intertwined, as does Carl and the young Timmy (Gordon Gebert) who instantly prefers Steve to Carl, the former’s romantic inclinations towards Connie becoming less and less subtle.
Through all of this though, Mitchum does not much gain your endearment. Perhaps it’s those tired eyes, but he never seems particularly earnest -which is pretty essential for a character meant to pull a woman away from a solid, sincere relationship. It would be a tough call for even the Henry Fondas or Jimmy Stewarts of the era, let alone a man the audience is predisposed based on his prior work to view as untrustworthy. The character does not do any favours to Mitchum’s efforts to appear romantic -he’s extremely presumptuous and judgemental and there’s only so far his demoralizing war experience can be chalked up as an excuse. After knowing Connie for barely two days, he criticizes her ostensibly hands-off mothering of Timmy who should not be the “man of the house”. And though he is cordial to Carl, including in a funny scene between the two of them of increasingly awkward small talk, he also in an instant goes from subtle to overt in his inclinations towards Connie, who has just finally agreed to marry Carl, by proposing at Christmas dinner in front of Carl that she marry him instead -after her own feelings for Steve have never once risen beyond a curious interest.
Leigh of course fares better, she still being a very new movie star at the time this was filmed (nothing is made of the fact this twenty-one year old woman has a six or seven year old son). Her screen presence is more apparent, her performance more interesting, her chemistry with Corey slightly more believable. But she acts out the one side of that romance with Steve quite aptly -you can see the conflict between her opinion of the man’s attitude and the slight ways she feels drawn to him -even if we can’t see what would possibly draw her to him. Of course it only makes the romance feel more uneven, as she reacts to a sense of charisma that is not there and he, though not nearly as much older than her as many a male romantic lead of this era, can feel in his attitude like her father more than her love interest at times.
Some of this is not the fault of Mitchum, but rather the limitations of dealing with the subject matter of an affair in 1940s Hollywood. In fact it’s funny to see the ways in which the movie twists itself around this material in order to acquiesce to the censors, and it directly effects how each of the three leads are written. Connie is not allowed to have an affair with Steve, even if she’s not yet married to Carl, and so she has to be entirely subtle in her feelings so as to remain likeable. Even depicting her as a single mother was pretty taboo -prevailing society at the time agreed with Steve’s sentiment that her son needs a male role model. And perhaps Steve is drawn so harshly so as not to seem like a seducer himself -therefore the plainness with which he makes clear his affections, affections that again have to be completely unexpressed in anything but the most chaste terms. Carl probably gets the shortest end of the stick in regards to these rules, as he can neither be a toxic or abusive partner to Connie nor can he be the man she should be in love with. There can be no messiness, no real affair -and so he has to be made to let Connie go willingly; give his consent that she leave him for another man. All so this movie can avoid depicting the fairly common thing of married people engaging in sexual affairs with others.
The script does not make a compelling argument against Carl, and especially through the prism of the decades and removed from what the star designation for Mitchum represents, he is very clearly the better man for Connie, in spite of his own ultimate view on the matter. Even Steve has to attest a little to that in the preface to his request Connie marry him. Carl is generous and patient, he’s got fatherly affection for Timmy, no pretensions of wanting to control Connie or change her life as Steve implies, and he’s clearly more than capable of supporting Connie -something which Steve, a bit of a drifter, cannot immediately do as he contemplates going out to California in search of new work. Carl’s only crime is being a little boring and not being the man Connie is fully in love with, much as she is endeared towards him. But certainly he demonstrates more attractive qualities than his rival, who the movie suggests Connie is so afraid of her feelings for she lunges into a marriage she had put off for years simply to convince herself out of them. This is what Carl deduces in the scene he lets her go in, not moved in any real way by the disintegration of a two year relationship that he had high hopes for.
There is another message though behind this ultimatum beyond the formula needing to be adhered to and Mitchum being the leading man. In his attitude, he represents way more the era’s encouraged image of masculine patriarchy. He is a veteran and ergo a patriot, with gusto and ambition, an immediately pleasing role model for his eventual stepson, but clearly a man who values “discipline” as a way of raising him right. And he feels it’s his right to assert at least some of his own influence on Connie in their relationship, be the “man of the house” that she and her son apparently desperately need. He doesn’t say it directly, but he seems to disapprove of her working, and the movie itself frames this as mere necessity by her circumstance and not the ideal place for a young woman. Connie ending up with him leaves the movie almost feeling tragic. Seeing her on a train kissing Steve at the end, you can’t help see the repressed 1950s future ahead for them -at worst the shadow of Night of the Hunter.
The movie isn’t all bad though; it has some nice Christmas imagery and some good moments of light humour particularly from Leigh and Corey (young Gebert though is fairly bad in his role, up until he needs to cry). Perhaps the most delightful bit comes when a misunderstanding leads to Steve being arrested for mugging, and the police officer who hears their case is played by Harry Morgan of Dragnet and M*A*S*H, and though twenty-five years removed, interrogates and receive them charmingly in the manner of Colonel Potter. It is however the last time the movie is able to delight. Conceptually, Holiday Affair isn’t so bad an idea, but it was made in the least appropriate time. The early 1930s would have suited it better or the 1970s, where it would have become something like Same Time, Next Year. But the Hollywood Golden Age did not allow it the licence it needed to make the story work, and fundamentally it craters itself by giving Janet Leigh too competing love interests, one of whom is entirely too likeable for his ultimate fate, the other successful suitor nowhere near likeable enough. And I would venture that’s part of the reason this isn’t considered a holiday classic like Miracle on 34th Street. Is it any wonder that even Robert Mitchum quickly put it behind him?
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