Let me admit right off the bat that I prefer to watch movies that have happy endings. Sure, there are exceptions. My favorite film is one and so is my next favorite.
Ikiru, in English “To Live” and directed by Akira Kurosawa, is the story of a man confronted with his own imminent mortality and how he chooses to spend his remaining time on earth and Citizen Kane is Orson Wells’ tour de force that chronicles the rise and fall of an egomaniac— Neither pass for feel good movies. Neither would be a likely choice to snuggle up with Christmas eve.
Since my wife Jo and I have moved to Maine in 2010 Holiday Affair has been the movie I’ve asked her to watch with me every December 24th. The night before Christmas is my favorite night of the year actually. Nobody’s out and nothing is open. I sense a stillness and peace like at no other time.
Holiday Affair is, no surprise, a Christmas movie and Turner Classic Movies has to be the reason it pops up now on some lists of favorites in the genre. Come December it’s shown a number of times but when it was released in 1949 it was less than a success. In fact it lost $300,000 for its studio, RKO, which in today’s dollars is over three million.
The plot is cute and uncomplicated. A war widow with a young son played by Janet Leigh, a decade before her shocking demise in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, has not been able to move forward with her life. Wendell Corey plays a lawyer who wants to marry her but can’t get past being the patient boyfriend who is unable to exorcize the ghost of her dead husband. Robert Mitchum in an role twist for him isn’t the tough guy but a nice guy also trying to make his way after the war and when he and Leigh meet in the deparmaent store toy department where he works the sparks fly and you know what’s going to happen.
I’ve never teared up watching Holiday Affair. The end of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life does that for me. It hasn’t ever caused me to laugh out loud like Jean Shepard’s A Christmas Movie. But what it does do is make me think that in the post war years of the 40s and early 50s America must have been full of hope and optimism and as well as the desire to get back to normal. There seemed to be a bright future and it was possible to chase dreams.
Corey’s character wanted to take Leigh and her son from the big city to the suburbs and a house with a yard. It would have been a safe life. Mitchum on the other hand wanted to take a risk. He was saving his money with a goal of designing and building boats.
I grew up in one of those newly minted suburbs. The houses weren’t Pete Seeger’s “Little Boxes.” They were well built and are still standing. The neighborhood was full of kids and parents never supervised our pickup games of whatever sport was in season.
My father, unhappy that with his Harvard Business School education his father and uncle still wouldn’t listen to him, bought into and then bought outright someone else’s business and grew it. My mother volunteered and became the county head of the March of Dimes. I wasn’t coerced into eating TV Diners and watching Ozzie and Harriet, I wanted to.
If I sound guilty of romanticizing so be it. I was lucky to be a kid then. I’ve been pretty lucky all along. Most of my generation has. Did I chase my dreams? Yes, I think I did.
The final scene of Holiday Affair is on a train leaving the east coast for the west with Mitchum, Leigh and the boy on board on their way to the future to pursue their dreams. That was a happy ending. That’s maybe why I love the movie because I got to have one and wish the world were really like that for everyone else.
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