Los hombres las prefieren viudas

Christmas is six months away from now, but I felt to comment on this film now. Holiday Affair is one of the best holiday films out there. Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum are perfect as the widow and unemployed store clerk, plus the boy who plays Leigh's son performance in the picture is excellent. This film shows the true spirit of Christmas during the holidays. A film not to pass up during any time of the year especially on Christmas.

This really is a nice, little Christmas movie that gets very little airplay. Still waiting for it to make it to DVD. No big musical numbers or production standards, just a simple story about a young widow (Janet Leigh) and her son and how their lives turn upside down once Christmas season when a rather aimless drifter (Robert Mitchum) enters the picture. Some very good supporting actors throughout. Skip the remake. It does play from time to time (Turner Classics), so if you get a chance, watch it...don't expect that much, just a warm little picture, like a nice hot cup of coffee on a cold winter night. With all the crap that has become annual Xmas "Classics"...this one is just patiently sitting on the shelves...waiting. It really deserves it.

World War II widow Janet Leigh supports herself and her son Gordon Gebbert with a job as a comparison shopper who runs afoul of salesman Robert Mitchum. Mitch is a rather footloose character who's got a temporary job at the Christmas buying season in New York so he can earn enough money to buy a ticket back to California where he wants to spend time building boats and living carefree.

Of course Leigh's interested, but not enough to give up the stability for herself and her son that lawyer Wendell Corey could provide and he's most interested in matrimony. So will she take Mitchum or Corey?

A Holiday Affair is one of those gazillions of films about war widows and their romances that Hollywood made for about 10 years after V-J Day. Janet Leigh is certainly a bright addition to the rolls, in her youth she had a nice innocent charm to her which in fact got her the film.

She was loaned out to RKO and Howard Hughes for a three picture deal and A Holiday Affair was the one Hughes interfered the least with. Her other two films in the package were Two Tickets to Broadway and Jet Pilot. Of course the reason she was at RKO was because Howard Hughes had his hormones in overdrive over her. She had a couple of dates with him and she was less than impressed, but Hughes took a while to get the message she wasn't interested.

She did enjoy working with both Mitchum and Corey. According to Lee Server's book on Mitchum, the set was a relaxed and happy one, but that Mitchum and Corey were full of all kinds of practical jokes. Never a dull moment.

Mitchum had some good chemistry with Leigh and with young Gordon Gebbert. Best scene in the film was at a police station where Mitchum is arrested on Christmas Day and Leigh and Corey go to straighten out a mistake. There's a droll performance by Harry Morgan as the patient police sergeant who's always up for a new story.

A Holiday Affair is a nice unpretentious little film about Christmas in New York and hopefully people will catch it TCM in December.

Janet Leigh, playing a young war widow with a small child, meets Robert Mitchum in a department store - where he contributes to her losing her job. From then on he's on the chase to get Leigh away from her nice but boring boyfriend (played with a bit more life than usual by Wendell Corey).

Through this admittedly thin plot, there are lots of opportunities for Mitchum to be both charming and irritating, and long before the end you can see where Leigh is going to be by the end. But as a Christmas movie, with the atmosphere and the sheer class of Mitchum and Leigh, this really is a pearl and not to be missed.

I've only seen this a couple of times on television as it's one of those forgotten Christmas classics that didn't get that much airplay over the years. It's not a traditional sentimental Christmas film but it's setting is during the Christmas season. Robert Mitchum stars as a department store sales clerk who falls for a WWII war widow who is the mother of a boy and engaged to be married. Janet Leigh co-stars with Wendell Corey as her fiancé. Harry Morgan is among the supporting cast. Janet Leigh had made almost a dozen films since her screen debut a couple two years before A Holiday Affair was made but this was only her second film in a lead actress role. The whole cast is great in this adaptation of a story called Christmas Gift by magazine writer John D. Weaver. Don Hartman only directed five films in his career including this but was a busy guy in Hollywood as a screenwriter, producer, director and composer. Veteran cinematographer Milton Krasner whose career extended from the 30's into the 70's photographs this film. His excellent work included The Farmer's Daughter, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop and The Sterile Cukoo. Harry Marker whose film career began in the silents and went into the sixties is the film's editor. It's a good story with a good script and I would give it an 8.0 out of 10.