Grade: C-
Synopsis: During the Christmas season, a widow with a son delays a lawyer’s offer of marriage while finding herself drawn to an unemployed man (Robert Mitchum).
Holiday Affair didn’t go over well upon its initial release in 1949 and, as a result, Robert Mitchum found himself regulated to noir-ish melodramas for the next several years. It’s a real shame since Mitchum is pretty damn good as a romantic lead.
Mitchum aside, the film isn’t half-bad either. Janet Leigh is suitably mousey as a widow unable to let go of the past, though perhaps not exactly alluring enough to convince the audience of exactly what Mitchum’s character sees in her. Come to think of it, the movie does send a pretty strange message, namely: when you’ve got a kid to support and you’re barely making ends meet as comparison shopper, ditch your warm, caring, patient lawyer boyfriend for the unemployed vagabond you just met –provided he’s more handsome.
But perhaps it’s the oddness of it all that makes the movie work. Instead of going with the traditional Hollywood formula of having the lawyer boyfriend turn out to be a real jerk, he turns out to be exactly what you thought. A warm, caring, patient man who’s not quite the stud Mitchum is, but does what he can and won’t stand to be taken for granted. Hard to root against him. In fact, it’s hard to root against any of the characters.
Well, almost.
Leigh’s character’s kid, played by Gordon Gebert is a whiny brat who gets progressively more annoying as the story unwinds. He takes what would have been an overlooked holiday gem and regulates it to barely passable with his incessant whining. A real shame, and probably the real reason the movie failed.
Bottom Line: A whiny kid trumps both a great performance by Robert Mitchum and a script that eschews the Hollywood clichés to drag Holiday Affair down.
