It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947)

Review Essay

There’s a way in which It Happened on 5th Avenue is just about the perfect distillation of so many elements in the holiday genre I’ve been thinking about all month long (as have you, if you’ve been along for the ride here, and thank you for your readership if so).  This is a midcentury movie set in bustling New York City (like Remember the Night or Beyond Tomorrow) featuring a romance with a semi-painful age gap (like Bell, Book and Candle or, let’s face it folks, White Christmas if we think too long about Bing and Rosemary).  The acting is generally hammy (see half the films I’ve covered) and the actual amount of Christmas content is surprisingly small for a movie that shows up this often on lists of forgotten holiday “classics” (again, see half the films I’ve covered).  What’s distinctive, here, then — distinctive enough that I would want to write about it?  Well, to me, this may be one of the movies that has the most capacity for moral conscience…but it loses its nerve a little bit, and I think that’s interesting.  In that way, I think It Happened sidles up next to works like Tokyo Godfathers or any good adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and I am interested in the ways it can’t quite pull off those moves.

When I say that this movie has the capacity for moral conscience, I mean it — I think the underlying ideas here are honestly a lot deeper than the Jim and Trudy rom-com the film leans into becoming.  This movie was nominated for an Oscar for its story, an award they only handed out for a few years in the 1940s — actually, it loses out to another holiday film in Miracle on 34th Street — which I honestly think it halfway deserves.  The politics of the story it’s telling are pretty stark — Jim’s a veteran but he’s being made homeless by the wealthy O’Connor.  It’s nothing personal — O’Connor is just tearing down old, cheap housing to build some incredible skyscraper that won’t have any room in it for the likes of Jim.  The movie’s pretty clear about the dire straits here, too — Jim’s terrible apartment, which he attempts to defend from the Bekins movers and the cops, is a testament to how little he has.  He winds up sleeping on a park bench.  Later on, but still early in the story, Jim runs into two old Army buddies — their wives and children are traveling with them as they sleep in their station wagon on the streets of New York City.  The only apartment they can find refuses to rent to anyone with children, which is an astonishing policy to have here, two years into the baby boom, but I bet it wasn’t unheard of in the 1940s, which is not exactly a decade known for its progressive civil rights.  All of these people are scrambling to find a home for themselves while billionaire Michael O’Connor leaves a huge piece of New York real estate, full of enough bedrooms to house a hundred people, totally empty through the bitter cold of a New York winter.  In the hands of a Satoshi Kon or a Todd Haynes, I think this could have become a really searing look at the values of a society that creates such profound inequalities and treats them as normal.

The way the film loses its nerve, unfortunately, is by bringing Michael O’Connor into the romantic comedy as a potential foil — his return home (in disguise) allows us to watch him sputter as a young woman hangs her baby’s laundry in the parlor to dry or as McKeever doles out food from O’Connor’s pantry with lavish generosity.  Michael, as “Mike”, is treated pretty discourteously by most of the main cast, generally because they can’t understand why this old drifter is so sour-faced and grim about the prospect of free lodging and therefore treat him as someone who needs a bit of riling up.  I can’t deny that there’s a laugh or two to be had in all this, but it totally defangs the situation — O’Connor won’t ever be confronted about the injustice of leaving these people on the street because he’s too busy getting embroiled in more than one kind of romantic subplot.  The movie ultimately, I think, believes it can tell a Scrooge story here with O’Connor, and to the extent it does, I do like it — there’s a sense in which his heart grows three sizes in close proximity to Christmas, and ultimately he decides to look with kindness on the folks we’ve met.  I just rankle a little at the fact that O’Connor’s open heart seems limited to things like letting his daughter run her own life or being gracious to McKeever — New York City is full of McKeevers, not to mention full of young women down on their luck in the real ways that rich, spoiled Trudy O’Connor was only pretending to be.  A more fully rehabilitated Michael O’Connor could have taken responsibility on a larger scale for them — Scrooge was a wealthy moneylender, but he wasn’t richer than God, as O’Connor is presented as being here.  If you’ve decided to write a script featuring Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg as a character who’s about to reform, I think you’re obligated to talk about what someone that incredibly, astoundingly moneyed could really do for the sake of humanity.

I should move away from criticizing the film for what it doesn’t do, though, and address what it does.  There are some fun and sweet moments in the movie, but I have to say, I spend a little too much time rolling my eyes: a lot of the actors are a little overmatched by what’s being asked of them, and the result is that they recite the script more than they act it.  When a character actor as experienced as Victor Moore (McKeever) is reduced to saying things like, “Well, I feel I must admit the truth to you although I had hoped to avoid it,” I become conscious, at least, of how a movie with more confidence in its cast would have simply had him admit the truth in a way that conveyed reluctance.  You know, by acting?  With apologies to Moore and the rest of the cast, I find their fumbling takes me out of the experience a little.  And while I’ve critiqued plenty of midcentury films for their gender politics, it does feel particularly rough here, with a lot of weird off-hand remarks from Jim especially that grate more than a little — I’m not sure if it felt clever in 1947 to make jokes about domestic abuse to the teenage girl you’ve just met, but it does not feel clever to me now.  His relationship to Trudy, too, feels odd — in real life, Don DeFore is only about 33-34 here, and Gale Storm is about 24-25.  But Don looks and acts like he’s easily 40, an impression reinforced by some of the writing for his lines, and Gale’s being made up and costumed to look a lot closer to 17 — the net effect is weird, and when the script keeps having Jim put his arm around Trudy while Trudy complains to other characters that “he barely knows I exist” and asking “how can I get him to notice me” the whole enterprise feels a lot creepier than I’d like it to.

I watch this movie, though — for lots of reasons.  For McKeever and his little dog.  For the admittedly funny reactions of “Mike” as he watches his swank New York society house descend into tenement-style chaos.  For the optimism and energy of immediately post-war New York, and the sense from basically everybody on screen that big things are possible and that America may figure out every problem the world has without too much trouble.  Even the corny writing and slightly hammy acting feels safe and inviting (when it’s not weird about gender issues), like I’m sitting with my grandparents watching some old TV program they like.  The Christmas Eve celebration we get on screen really does feel like a found family, even if most of the characters in attendance are paper thin.  It Happened on 5th Avenue disappeared from the public eye for a long stretch of my childhood and early adulthood, so I didn’t know it at all until a few years ago, but I’m glad it’s resurfaced.  I just think the collection of ideas this script contained from the beginning is deserving of a stronger film and a better guiding principle to help this particular plane land.

I Know That Face:  Edward Brophy, who plays Patrolman Felton, had previously appeared as Morelli in The Thin Man, another one of those movies that’s got enough Christmas in it to make a list of holiday films but is also not really a holiday film by a lot of people’s standards.  Florence Auer, who’s briefly on screen as Miss Parker, the headmistress at the school Trudy runs away from, later appears as the unimaginatively named Third Lady in The Bishop’s Wife, a better late 1940s holiday movie than this one, in my opinion, though it’s probably no less weird.  And Charles Ruggles (who here plays the industrial titan, Michael O’Connor and whom we’re likeliest to know as the crusty yet twinkly-eyed grandfather in The Parent Trap) appears in a couple of holiday TV movies in the 1950s; he’s the Mayor in Once Upon a Christmas Time, and he’s Horace Bogardus in The Bells of St. Mary’s (the TV movie version, though, as I said), neither of which I can find anywhere to view, on stream or on disc.

That Takes Me Back: The idea that a music store would hire an enthusiastic and attractive young person to play the piano and sing in order to help sell sheet music is so fantastically old-fashioned, I can hardly believe it was a job even in 1947.  This movie also takes place in an era when outrageously rich people still had consciences, if you can imagine such a world.

I Understood That Reference: If there’s a reference here to another work of holiday media, it slipped by me.

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Holiday Vibes (5/10): There’s a lot of busy energy in this movie as the various layers overlap, and it’s hard for me to gauge afterwards how much of the holidays we really got.  I think the movie’s reputation in this category is bolstered by having a couple of big moments take place at the mansion’s Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve celebrations — there’s no question that the gaggle of people living there by that point in the story adds to the sense of festivity, too.  And I never know how much to lean on the “vibes” part of this section, but as I noted initially, this movie feels a lot like a lot of other movies in the loosely understood holiday genre: it will make you think of them often, and that boosts this score a point or two, I think.

Actual Quality (6/10): It Happened on 5th Avenue is an expensive bid for respectability from a low-budget film studio that wanted to rebrand itself, and I think it kind of shows.  Despite their dropping about ten times as much cash on this motion picture as they’d been accustomed to spending, I think there are limits to what everyone involved here could really pull off, artistically — the two romantic leads, DeFore and Storm, would go on to find their particular talents a lot better suited to the small screen than the silver screen, and everything else about the film is, to me, suggestive of a production team that was hoping to mimic the holiday classics of this decade rather than say something authentic of their own.  There are whole scenes I couldn’t tell you the point of, and the longer the movie runs, the less invested I become in many of its characters and their lives, which is the opposite of what ought to happen.  Maybe that’s too harsh: I do enjoy some key performances and themes in this film.  It’s no Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (or Jack Frost, for that matter).  Ultimately, though, I want to spend my 1940s holiday rom-com time with other films more than with this one…your mileage may, of course, vary!

Party Mood-Setter? The complicated plot here doesn’t really lend itself to inattentiveness, but I do think that if you’re in some cookie baking or wrapping marathon and you’ve already gone to a couple of ‘40s classics and just want to maintain that feeling in the background, it would accomplish that.  I’d steer you elsewhere, though.

Plucked Heart Strings? The only person who really gets my emotional investment here is McKeever, the best reason to watch this film.  Victor Moore, who plays the role of the aging hobo taking occupancy of the O’Connor estate, had been a comic star on the Broadway stage in the 1920s and 1930s (as well as getting at least a little screen time with some big stars in both the silent and talkie eras), and he imbues McKeever with a sweetness and an optimism that saves the movie for me from some of its less successful dialogue and plot contrivances.  I’m still not getting choked up about anything related to him in particular, but he’ll put a smile on your face, I can almost guarantee it.

Recommended Frequency: As you can by now tell from the roster here at Film for the Holidays, I’m a sucker for 1940s holiday movies, both classic and less-so.  If you’re in that same boat with me, yes, you should watch this at least once: good and bad, it evokes that historical moment and the beats of that particular kind of romantic comedy enough that it’s interesting to connect it to whichever others are your favorites.  Beyond that, I really can’t project how often you would return — I think I’ve watched it three times in six years, and at this point I’ve gotten about all the fun out of it I want to have.  I will come back to it someday for McKeever, but maybe not for many years, I suspect.

If you’re someone who wants to see the unimaginatively titled It Happened on 5th Avenue for yourself, Tubi and Plex are happy to give you ad-supported free access to the film, as is Sling TV, allegedly. Hulu and YouTube both identify it as available via some premium add-on subscription tier, and it’s rentable from all the places you might think to rent a streaming movie.  Barnes & Noble will gladly sell you the film on Blu-ray or DVD (as will Amazon, but this union household wouldn’t recommend crossing a picket line, and it’s looking like there are quite a few of those around Amazon facilities this December).  And Worldcat, of course, will remind you to check your public library for this movie on disc, since it’s available from several hundred library systems, according to their records.