This month, I watched Holiday Affair, a 1949 Christmas romantic comedy that starred Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh. I watched it because it seemed weird to see Robert Mitchum in a romantic comedy, and IMDB trivia stated this was a PR move to clean up his image after he got arrested for something, which makes way more sense.
It’s a love triangle story where Robert Mitchum works at a department store (like Gimbel’s or Macy’s) and Janet Leigh works as a spy for a competitor, buying items as “comparative shopping” to return later. Mitchum calls her out on it, but he gets fired when he doesn’t kick her out, and he’s got two weeks left until he starts a new job lined up in California. She’s a WWII widow still mourning her late husband, caring for her talkative young son, and is soon to be engaged to a straightlaced dork lawyer.
Mitchum and Leigh keep running into each other, in part because he overhears that her son wants a train set for Christmas and he buys him one for $80 (which the trivia said is equivalent to $900 today, Jesus), and it gets to be these mixups where the fiancé is jealous and annoyed and Mitchum is blunt about wanting Leigh (who was cast at a very young 22 years old) and she’s just caught in the middle of all this.
It’s a lot of contrived plot conveniences, and the kid can be a little annoying (though the actor grew up to be a respected architecture professor and is 80 years old today), but I enjoyed this as a light comedy and the oddness of seeing Mitchum in a holiday romcom.
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