Review of Holiday Affair (1949) by Bradley H — 12 May 2009

Small children in movies are so often squeaky and annoying. I mean, I understand when Timmy (Gordon Gebert) makes his displeasure at the idea that his mother's marrying someone he doesn't like known. I understand his making his preference known. I understand most of what he does. What I do not understand is why he does it all in that slightly higher-pitched-than-necessary, definitely too loud voice. It's possible, I think, that directors who don't know how to handle children (director Don Martin only made five movies) think that the only way children can be made to speak clearly is to speak loudly and shrilly. Or maybe they think it's how children sound. Now, it's true that children [i]can[/i] be loud and shrill. However, when in serious conversation--as Timmy is shown several times here--they tend to lower the pitch of their voice as if they know (and maybe they do) that lower voices sound more adult and therefore more convincing. Maybe it's yet more evidence of adults who don't really pay attention to children.

Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) is a comparison shopper. For some reason, this actually entails buying and then returning products, surely a thing that would make the unwanted comparison shoppers awfully noticeable to store employees whose job partially entails noticing them, but never mind. At any rate, she buys a very large and elaborate electric train from Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum), which she must then convince her son isn't for him. At any rate, she returns the train the next day. Mitchum tells her that he won't turn her in provided she never returns to his department again. A floorwalker notices this, and he is fired. He spends the rest of the film trying to win over Connie from her boyfriend, Carl Davis (Wendell Corey) before she marries him on New Year's Day. This even entails giving Timmy a train that costs $78 [i]in 1949 dollars[/i].

I don't really like Steve. Carl's main failing seems to be that he is bland, though there are a few moments that show something a little less pleasant. On the other hand, he freely declares that he has no family, so maybe he's just not used to dealing with one. Certainly he doesn't know how to deal with Timmy, but really, that's something any stepparent must work out. On the other hand, Steve doesn't consult with Connie about whether it's okay with her if he gives her kid such an enormously expensive gift. He proposes to her in front of her fiancé, son, and the parents of her late husband. (He was killed in the War; Timmy does not and could not remember him.) He works a bit on justifying it, but oh, come on. This is just after several people have expressed their good wishes for the upcoming wedding. There were so many better ways of handling that. He says that any man has the right to propose to the woman he loves, but it simply isn't true. And even if it were, there are times and places, and that wasn't one of them.

It's kind of impressive, really, how clear Timmy's sense of economics turns out to me. Steve doesn't have money, he finds out. The train, he knows, was expensive. Ergo, the solution to the problem is to return the train--oh, he knew that you could return things; his mom does all the time--and give Steve the money. This is quite sensible, especially for a boy of six. (It's listed, on the page for the remake, as being a goof that a woman calls him six before he says how old he is, but anyone who spends any time around kids could work out an approximate age fairly easily.) He really wants the train. He really loves having gotten a gift from Steve. But he knows that Steve needs the money more than he needs the train.

My heart just isn't as warmed as they want it to be. Oh, I'm sure an argument could be made that this is because I am watching a Christmas movie in May, and it might even be a good one. But for one thing, I think a good movie is a good movie no matter what time of year you're watching. (It can depend on your mood, of course.) There are movies I only watch in the summer, but this is because they are movies that do not require me to exert myself thinking; this is assuredly not an indication that they're good. Better to say that the emotional impact of a movie shouldn't depend on whether it's December or May, given that it's not much warmer here and now than it is in December back home. For another thing, most of the release dates listed for [i]It's a Wonderful Life[/i], a dozen or so of the European ones, stretch from March to September. So.