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.

I’ll start by laying out the movie’s essential premise: everything revolves around the fact that Michael O’Connor, “the second richest man in the world”, every year leaves his opulent New York mansion behind for an estate in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia for a solid four months and everyone in the world knows it.  This means that an enterprising yet sweet-tempered old street bum named McKeever can slip in with his adorable dog via the coal chute and live like a king for four months, as long as he’s not caught by the nightly patrolmen.  It means that when McKeever meets a down-on-his-luck veteran, Jim Bullock, he can afford the compassion of taking him in and lending him one of the house’s umpteen bedrooms.  It means that when O’Connor’s scallywag daughter Trudy runs away from her finishing school, she can expect to slip into an empty mansion to get her things…and that, when caught by McKeever and Jim, she can pretend to be an innocent farm girl all alone in a big city and in need of lodging (in part to see if she can win Jim’s affections).  It means that when Jim meets some old friends from his Army days…well, maybe you get the picture.  We can pack a LOT of humans into this mansion, and since Michael isn’t coming home, we’re gonna.  Except that Michael does come home.

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.

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.

Review Essay

Some of my favorite holiday movies make the list because of the depth of their ideas: they make me think the way I want to think at this time of year.  But others make the grade purely because of the power of their feelings: they just evoke an emotional response in me that feels like the holidays, regardless of what the underlying film intends to convey.  The latter category is, I think, the best way for me to broadly characterize White Christmas, a motion picture that surely most if not all of you are very familiar with: I love this movie, I watch it every Christmas, and if I think about it too much, I start to wonder why I have such a deep connection to it.  Let’s try to unpack both sides of that, shall we?

First, the basic premise, in case somehow this movie’s missed you in the past: the movie opens on Christmas Eve, 1944, with two soldiers (one an already-famous entertainer named Bob Wallace; the other an ambitious but green up-and-comer named Phil Davis) putting on a show in honor of their general and Christmas (seemingly in that order) before an artillery assault breaks out and Davis saves Wallace’s life.  Having done so, he extracts a series of promises from Wallace — to sing a duet together, to become partners, to start producing big musical revues — before they cross paths with the singing Haynes sisters, Betty and Judy, and find themselves (through a mishap or two) following the girls to Pine Tree, Vermont.  There, they discover their old general is a down-on-his-luck hotel owner in a snowless and therefore guestless December, and the boys spring into action to come to his aid (while Phil and Judy try to steer Betty and Bob into each other’s arms).  Along the way, there’s a lot of singing and dancing from some of the most talented folks in Hollywood at midcentury: there’s a reason this film endures.

One of the things I noticed on this latest viewing is how the film repeatedly has these men make a promise with mostly good intentions but lacking in a little sincerity…and then that promise turns out to be really meaningful to them in unexpected ways.  Wallace promises Davis to sing a song with him out of guilt more than enthusiasm, and his whole life changes.  The two of them decide to keep faith with a weird dude they knew in the Army out of obligation, and that’s how they meet the Haynes sisters.  Davis’s promise to find Wallace a girl is motivated by a selfish desire for a little leisure time, but, well, other good things come of it for him.  I don’t think the film’s message is “do the right thing for the wrong reasons and you’ll succeed” but there’s definitely something going on there, under the surface.

Another element that’s definitely going on under the surface is social and cultural conservatism — this movie is fully locked into the moral landscape of mainstream America in the 1950s, and the “boy, girl, boy, girl” lineup of romance and matrimony fits a little too neatly.  The implication that marriage is the most central meaning in life is pretty clear.  The valorizing of the army is understandable for the era, but it’s over the top nevertheless: the movie’s absolutely not interested in a depiction of war or its aftermath that feels genuine (unlike say, The Holly and the Ivy, which I wrote about here just two days ago).  And not one but two musical numbers take swings at modern entertainment — “Choreography” memorably parodies modern dance (I think specifically the Martha Graham Dance Company) in making an argument that the old tap dancers and soft-shoers were obviously superior.  And, of course, the medley that ends with “Mandy” repeatedly reminds us that the performers REALLY miss those old-fashioned minstrel shows — weren’t those the good days?  For my part, I think MGDC is fine as a target — yes, there’s something a little sneering about that number, but it’s also pretty funny, and I am unaware of any weird bigotry associated with Martha Graham’s particular style of modern dance.  Minstrel shows, on the other hand, were a real blight on American entertainment — Bing Crosby, of course (who plays Wallace here), had appeared in blackface in a minstrel number in an earlier film, Holiday Inn, so he’s only thinking back about a decade as he yearns in song.  And of course the thing that’s ridiculous about both numbers here in White Christmas is that they are self-refuting — sure, the modern dance in “Choreography” is intentionally goofy in ways that make me laugh, but doesn’t that suggest that in fact the new modern dance style was capable of pretty evocative communication and therefore artistry?  And more importantly, doesn’t the fact that Clooney and Kaye and Crosby can joke around in song on stage, before Vera-Ellen comes out and dazzles us all with her skill as a dancer, prove that you can have all the old vaudeville fun you want on stage or screen without burdening it with awful racist caricatures?  We do not need “Georgie Primrose”, as the song here suggests, to have a good time: far from it, in fact.

I know, I know — none of this sounds like me being in love with this movie enough to watch it every Christmas.  Well, I haven’t really dealt yet with the four stars of this movie, and I have to say, each one of them is basically ideal casting, simply ideal.  Bing Crosby is just coming down from his apex of fame and talent here in the early 1950s: the film needs a proud but affable crooner and that fits Bing to a T.  His ability to work as a straight man had been pretty carefully honed, and for my money he is JUST young enough to still be playing a romantic lead in this film.  His comic foil, Danny Kaye, is a personal favorite of mine — Danny’s effortless and energetic presence on screen really never fails to make me laugh or hold my attention.  Everyone’s tastes are different of course — I complained back in my review of The Holiday about Jack Black dialing it up to 11 a little too often, and I’m sure there are folks who would feel the same about some of Kaye’s goofiness here, but for my money he can dial it up as high as he likes, I’m here for it.  As young Judy Haynes, Vera-Ellen is startlingly talented in every kind of dance she’s asked to perform — so good, in fact, that Kaye couldn’t keep up with her (if you’ve ever wondered why that one semi-anonymous dude is suddenly dancing with Judy in a couple of big numbers, it’s because he was a top-tier studio dancer covering the parts that Kaye, despite all his talent, just couldn’t do himself).  And I love the way she very subtly breaks the fourth wall — the next time you watch this film, pay attention to how many times Vera-Ellen makes direct eye contact with the camera, and flashes us a little conspiratorial smile as if to say, “God, I’m good.  Watch this next bit.”  Finally, Rosemary Clooney as Betty Haynes is, in my purely subjective opinion, just about perfect: she takes a role that, on the page, might be a bit stiff or stick-in-the-mud, and presents a woman who’s warm and guarded and winning.  Plus she’s got the voice of an angel and she’s a vision in Technicolor in basically every perfectly chosen Edith Head costume — maybe you can take your eyes off her, but I can’t.  And the end result of all four of them basically firing on every cylinder in every scene means that the film is always bursting with charisma, no matter how I feel about the writing or the pacing or the underlying message of any given moment.

And White Christmas is such a lush viewing experience too: I don’t know if any film’s color is more saturated than the reds and greens of this movie’s opening titles, and it’s paired with a really effusive orchestral overture.  The heightened theatricality of everything about the film somehow works to its advantage, for me: there’s no question that every outdoor setting looks like a sound stage, from the “war zone” in 1944 to the “boat dock” where Davis and Judy first dance to the “parking lot” outside the Pine Tree Inn.  But something about the artificial quality of those spaces just makes the whole thing feel slightly dreamlike to me in a way that’s really calming and satisfying.  Add in a few incredibly catchy Irving Berlin songs and some scintillating Robert Alton choreography and I just fall in love with the film every time.

Am I falling in love with a holiday movie, though?  For a film that opens and closes with two stirring renditions of “White Christmas”, the best selling single song of all time, I think there’s no question that this film is not all that connected to the holidays as far as its running time goes.  We get about 10 minutes at Christmas Eve in 1944 (more than half of it about General Waverly and not the holiday at all).  Then, while there’s some talk about the Christmas Eve looming at the film’s end, it’s not until the very last segment of the film that we get the holiday tableau you might remember, full of children in costume and Santa hats and the world’s largest Christmas tree.  But what a tableau it is.  Thematically…well, I’ve talked about this movie’s theme already, a little.  The more I think about what I think this film wants to say, the less comfortable I am with it — I don’t think it’s a harmful film, to be clear, but I think it just has a different sense of what’s important and in need of defense than what I believe in.  I have a hard time connecting most of the themes I do see to anything I would associate with Christmas in particular.  In the end, though, I can’t deny that the power of the movie’s full force being directed at the Christmas holiday really connects for those brief stretches where it’s doing that.  I come away fully washed in the VistaVision spectacle of the idealized midcentury holiday.  There’s a reason a ton of us watch this film every year and feel Christmassy about it.

I Know That Face: Mary Wickes, who plays Emma here (the hotel’s housekeeper and professional busybody), has a couple of other holiday turns under her belt: she plays Henrietta Sawyer in The Christmas Gift, a TV movie starring John Denver and Jane Kaczmarek (what an eclectic cast, eh?), and near the end of her career, she plays Aunt March in the 1994 edition of Little Women, another one of those movies that feels like Christmas far more than it is actually set at Christmas.  And Bing Crosby, here playing the seasoned entertainer and mogul Bob Wallace, is Father Chuck O’Malley in The Bells of St. Mary’s, a film that has a long enough sequence set at Christmas that it tends to make lists of holiday movies (and would certainly be eligible for this blog).  Bing, too, sang in that famous televised “Little Drummer Boy” duet with David Bowie that I alluded to when I reviewed Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

That Takes Me Back: Man, as a long-time happy Amtrak traveler (in the days when I could sleep sitting up overnight in coach: ah, youth), the vision of trains full of sleeper cars rolling through the night is nearly irresistible.  I loved, too, that in their conversation about whether to take the train or the plane, it’s clear that the train is luxury travel (since you can sleep), whereas on the airplane you’ll wind up sitting up all night.  No kidding, Bing.  It is fun to see the Haynes sisters have to fuss about their phonograph records (and phonograph) they travel with: technology has changed our relationship to music in so many ways.  And I know that I will never in my life get to say, as Bob Wallace does, “Young lady, get me the New York operator.”  And that’s okay, you know?  But I do kind of wish I’d gotten to do it.  

I Understood That Reference: The only Christmas story I heard them alluding to was a quick throwaway line when Ed Harrison tells Wallace he wants to show them off “playing Santa Claus to the old man,” right before Bob says to knock it off…though not in time to keep Emma from getting entirely the wrong idea about the situation.

Holiday Vibes (5.5/10): There is absolutely no way to score this film.  For those of us who watch this with religious attention every single year, it would seem ridiculous to set this any lower than a 9.5: when I hear the conductor calling out “Pine Tree” and the gang starts riffing on how they must be in California and not Vermont, it feels like Christmas to me and a few million other people, but that’s pretty silly, isn’t it?  And for those of you new to the film, I can easily imagine you, ⅔ of the way through, wondering if Christmas will matter to it at all other than that one opening scene you’ve already forgotten.  5.5 feels like the most honest middle ground I can offer to a movie that’s not about Christmas at all for all but about a half an hour, but those 30 minutes (distributed around the film a little) are incredibly evocative.

Actual Quality (9/10): Again, this is not a measure of how much I love it, but of how good the film is in my opinion.  And I would say that I think the screenplay’s pretty wobbly here, in terms of actually pacing things out, delivering the scenes characters need, etc.  But everything else — the aforementioned costumes and music and choreography and acting, and I didn’t even mention the really successful direction (from my perspective) by Michael Curtiz whose name you may recognize from little films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and something called Casablanca?  There’s a reason the film works despite having a plot that’s kind of barely there, and it’s because the creatives in every other capacity are bringing their A game.

Party Mood-Setter? You mean, is this a perfect background for your holiday festivities?  100%, as long as you don’t find the minstrel number too weird — again, my only quibbles here are with the writing, but if you want to be baking or decorating or hanging with family while occasionally tuning into a fun song or a sweet dance number or just marveling at a perfect outfit, this movie has your back.  

Plucked Heart Strings? I’ll be honest: I find Betty and Bob’s connection emotionally investing, but I definitely don’t get choked up here.  I get a smile out of seeing the positive resolutions later in the movie for multiple characters, but there are never tears in my eyes.

Recommended Frequency: I can’t tell you it has to be in your annual rotation, but it’s sure in mine and permanently.  And honestly, if you’re an appreciater of the genre of holiday movie (to the extent that there’s a good definition of such a genre), I just think this is going to be on your list already.  It’s too beautiful to look at, with too much talent to watch and listen to.  If somehow you’ve never seen it, I sure think watching it these holidays would be the right thing to do: I hope you enjoy it, if so.

To watch this holiday classic on streaming, Amazon Prime members have access via that subscription; it looks like if you’ve got some premium add-on subscription at places like Sling or Roku or AMC+, you might have access also.  You can rent it, also, from all the usual places.  Amazon will sell you the movie on disc — and with this year being the 60th “diamond” anniversary, let me tell you, there’s a sweet deal on a three disc combo pack that adds in some TV appearances by cast members, along with commentaries, etc.  Worldcat says every library on the planet has this movie on DVD (okay, they say it’s close to 1,500 libraries, but that’s huge when compared with literally every other movie I’ve checked there for this blog).

Review Essay

So much great art arises from a confrontation with our deepest fears and senses of unease about being human, and I feel like that’s the force that propels The Shop Around the Corner every year into being a film where the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.  When I try to sketch out the plot, it feels like a simple (if clever) premise for a film I would watch and smile at but quickly forget.  And yet, it’s more than that for me.  In watching it multiple times in the last year, with this blog in the back of my mind and beginning to loom larger, I think what I’ve worked out is that this is a film about how hard it is to know yourself or other people — how easy it is to mistake and misdiagnose matters of human interaction — and yet how thrilling it is to finally see someone else or be seen.

Again, the premise of this movie, if you don’t know it, is simple enough: we are concerned with the people who work at Matuschek & Co., a leather goods retailer trying to keep afloat in Budapest amid the Great Depression.  Specifically, we’re most concerned with Matuschek’s star employee, the brilliant if brittle Alfred Kralik, and the young woman who slips through the door early in the movie’s first act hoping for a job at Matuschek, the effervescent Klara Novak who seems never to have had an unexpressed thought.  Sparks fly immediately and Novak’s success in securing a position via her moxie don’t reduce the tension — he’s bothered by her frankness and she by his reserve.  And what neither of them know is that, by an extraordinary chance, they’ve come into contact with their secret, romantic pen pal, since Kralik and Novak have been sending impassioned, elaborately written letters to each other via a postal box with pseudonyms, along with an express agreement not to sully the intellectual beauty of their conversation with such mundane details as where they live and work.  Yeah, yeah, it feels like a premise cooked up in a lab to support a romantic comedy — if the movie wasn’t working well, I guarantee it would feel creaky.  Yet, to me, it never does.

One reason this secret pen pal structure survives scrutiny, I think, is that the movie is about other things too — for instance, a major subplot involves the strange and steady rise in tensions between Kralik and his employer, Mr. Matuschek, for no reason Kralik can fully understand.  And in almost every conversation, we hear the backdrop hum of these people clawing their way towards what they think of as stability or respectability — the right living situation, the right clothes, the right opinion from the boss.  There are moments that can feel almost like an Austen or a Wharton novel, as the rigid formalities of conversation among genteel shop clerks threaten to bubble over with the tensions that characters feel under the surface.  As a result, watching Kralik and Novak’s romance progressing feels less like a singular event about which I need full understanding, and more like another chess piece in an elaborate game: what will become of any of these people when they finally start speaking plainly to each other?  How safe is it to say what you mean — or to have someone else understand what you mean when you say it?

So much of how it works, too, is in the incredible performances of the whole cast: sure, a lot of this hangs on Jimmy Stewart, who in the 1940s was at a peak few performers achieve of knowing just how far he could take an audience without losing its affection.  That charisma enables him to exhibit anger or pride or any number of other destabilizing emotions on screen and remain the film’s comfortable protagonist — he creates depth in a character that wasn’t going to have it automatically.  And opposite his frosty Kralik, Margaret Sullavan is the perfect Novak: Sullavan had brought Stewart into the limelight, requesting him as a lead opposite herself in the mid-30s and coaching Stewart (then more of a character actor) into stardom, and there’s a kind of music in every dialogue between them.  Sullavan, too, knows how to deploy her charisma perfectly, so that no matter how many abrupt and slightly cruel things Novak says in her filterless monologues, we never find ourselves turning away from her.  

So much of the film is interested in the balance between bravado and insecurity.  In the leads, we get to see both sides — Kralik’s assured manner in assessing the value of a cigarette box that plays Ochi Chërnye (almost zero) is juxtaposed against his fretting about his intellect as he discusses with a coworker the acquiring and reading of an encyclopedia volume.  Novak’s brassy sales pitch for that terrible cigarette box before she’s even secured a job for Matuschek stands in contrast against the nearly immobilizing despair she feels when she thinks her beau took one look at her and skipped their dinner without introducing himself.  Among the secondary cast, we get types — the self-effacing but sweet-tempered loveliness of Pirovitch; the self-promoting, cheeky chutzpah of Pepi Katona, the delivery boy — that build out these ways of responding to the fundamentally unsettling challenge of being a human who both wants and does not want to be seen, who both wants and does not want to see.

Christmas, James, I hear you say: what the heck does this have to do with Christmas?  Well, as the film progresses through its year, we approach the busy shopping season of Christmas and all the pressures descend even more severely on the shop’s employees.  More than that, Christmas itself as a festival having some connections with marriage — at least in this era, Christmastime engagements and weddings were pretty common, in my experience researching family histories anyway — means that the pressure rises on Kralik and Novak’s pen pal romance.  Will the truth be revealed?  Is an engagement in the offing?  Especially once we reach the point where one of them knows the truth (and isn’t revealing it) while the other is in the dark, there’s a way in which we as an audience know that Christmas will raise the final curtain and at last allow us to exhale with relief and delight.

This is a strange film to try to classify — for a romantic comedy, there’s very little romance (at least, very little romance where both characters on screen know they are romancing each other) and not a lot of comedy (though the moments that are funny are, to me, very funny).  Instead, it pulls as much as it can out of the tensions that build before the release that either a successful romance or a good joke brings — out of conversations where one thing is said and another meant, or where a character stops a phrase short of actually bringing the clarity they could supply.  It’s strange that this is one of two ‘40s Christmas movies starring Jimmy Stewart that involve a thwarted suicide, but at least I’ll note that this suicide has nothing to do with Kralik and Novak’s romance — the film isn’t interested in the overwrought tragedy of love, only in the tragicomedy of trying to know one’s self, and to know what one actually thinks about the people around them.  

I find a lot of delight, too, in the fact that this is by definition a romantic comedy that’s not about falling in love with someone because you have the hots for them.  I mean, Margaret Sullavan is an attractive woman, no question, but also, we know that Kralik doesn’t get hung up on Novak’s looks — to the contrary, he barely thinks about her at all, at first.  What appeals to him are the quick and lively thoughts of the woman he corresponds with compulsively, the woman who fills his dreams.  Similarly, if Novak’s attention is caught at all by Kralik (who, as a youngish Jimmy Stewart, is no slouch in the looks department either), we don’t learn much about it up front.  Sure, both parties are evidently a little anxious about whether or not they’ll be attracted to their pen pals when they meet, but I think the movie really hits its stride in exploring how delightful it is to love someone’s mind, and to discover how beautiful the mind of a person standing right next to you has been, this whole time.  It’s sure helped, I think, by the fact that maybe nobody’s voice in 20th Century film is more evocatively intimate and passionate than Jimmy Stewart when he’s just slightly hushed — reading a letter aloud to Pirovitch, say, or talking with Novak about what a wallet can mean to a man in love.

The movie, too, says so much by not saying things — it is a movie in 1940 set in Budapest but Europe’s rising political and military tensions don’t take the stage.  The closest we get to a mention of the Depression is when, at one point, someone says “that’s the biggest day since ‘28!” about the store’s one day profit total.  And the ending — which I have, I hope you’ve noticed, been rigorous in avoiding anything that might spoil you — is fast and understated, too.  I think Lubitsch, the film’s director, knows that we can fill in the gaps around and between these people very capably, if he makes them human enough.  Even when they’re playing games with each other, or devastating each other with little comments (both harsh truths and devious lies), they feel like people — heightened, brilliant people with screenwriters composing their dialogue, maybe, but people — and they’re people I love to watch every Christmas.  I hope you do too.

I Know That Face: It’s wild how many performers from It’s a Wonderful Life show up in this fairly small cast, six years earlier — Jimmy Stewart, of course, is Alfred Kralik here and George Bailey in that film.  But we can add in Charles Halton, who is the police detective in this film and Mr. Carter, the bank examiner, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as well as William Edmunds, who plays the waiter at the restaurant in this movie and who is unforgettable as Mr. Martini in the 1946 classic.  Moving on from Capra’s iconic movie, I can’t leave out a mention of the delightful Sara Haden (Flora, another of Mr. Matuschek’s shop employees), who will later play Mildred Cassaway, the secretary to the titular bishop in The Bishop’s Wife, a movie about an angel hitting on a married woman while building a cathedral, and the judgmental Mrs. Katie Dingle in The Great Rupert, a movie about a squirrel redistributing a miser’s wealth in answer to a Christmas prayer. Both of those movies sound made up (okay, I may be having a little fun with how to describe them), but I’ve watched them both with at least interest and sometimes delight, and I bet they’ll make this blog if it persists into next year.

That Takes Me Back: It’s funny: the internet should make it easier than ever to have anonymous pen pals, and yet it feels so old-fashioned here?  I guess there was a sense in which half the people you talked to on Twitter were anonymous pen pals, but let me tell you, there was precious little that was intellectually elevating about those conversations.  I have commented on this before, of course, but it remains wild how many plots in the pre-cellphone era consist of having arrangements for dinner that can’t be changed, since characters have no way to contact each other, and therefore hijinks ensue.  Oh, and though we certainly still have all sorts of weird dieting habits as a nation, when Novak tells the customer that, after gaining a few pounds from candy, you need massages and electric cabinets, I did smile to think of what on earth that was like.  Electric cabinets?

I Understood That Reference: We don’t get much here, but late in the movie at one point Pepi tells Mr. Matuschek that he’s going to be “Santa Claus” to the girl standing on the street corner.  Creepy, Pepi.  Take it down a notch.

Holiday Vibes (4/10): I mean, as I acknowledge above, Christmas only really comes in at the hour mark.  I would argue that, from there, it slowly zooms to fill the whole space as retailers and potential fiancees get immersed in the holiday.  And even if I turn away from the central relationship in the movie, there’s plenty of talk about Christmas between characters in ways that feel like the build up to the holiday to me.  Not enough to make this overwhelmingly a Christmassy vibe, but enough to earn its 4, I think.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): I love this movie, and I’m not alone in that — the American Film Institute put it in their top hundred love stories of all time, and of course it’s been memorably remade (more than once, though the one most of us think of is You’ve Got Mail).  I think in terms of what a romantic comedy can achieve, it really does almost everything it ought to do — it avoids most of the clumsy hurdles that such films often throw in the way of their protagonists (there’s no external threat from an attractive man or woman, there’s no real obstacle at all between them other than the fact that their correspondence is a secret and it remains that way for some time due to the insecurity both of them seem to feel) in ways that I find really satisfying.  It is just a very successful ‘40s romance that’ll sweep you off your feet if you let it.  I hope you will.

Party Mood-Setter? This one depends enough on rapid fire dialogue, or subtext and pretexts when it comes to these interactions, that I doubt it’s one you could pay attention to while painting an ornament.  It’s good enough (and brisk enough) though that I think you could make it a “let’s get together and watch this” event this December pretty successfully.

Plucked Heart Strings? My heart sure soars as some of these passages unfold — I don’t know if I’m just a sucker for Jimmy Stewart in this setting or if there really is a deeper emotional connection available from these characters, but yeah, I think it’s there.

Recommended Frequency: I mean, as far as, what am I going to do?  I’m going to watch it every single year.  No question.  I think for you, it will have to depend on how much this feels like a Christmas movie to you.  I’d love it if you gave it a try, though — here’s hoping it resonates for you as it does for me.

You can watch this movie on Max (which some of us subscribe to via their Amazon Prime channel) or rent it from Amazon, Fandango, Google, or Apple.  It looks to me like it’s available via a premium add-on at lots of services too, though I won’t try to game all those out.  If you want to be like me (in this one respect) you can own it on Blu-ray or DVD from someplace like Amazon.  And Worldcat says it’s in over 1,000 libraries on disc, so don’t forget about that wonderful resource.

Review Essay

As it opens, it’s not entirely clear what kind of film you’re watching in Fitzwilly – a jaunty, peppy score bounds along as we take in a perfectly professional and focused household staff at work in maintaining a grand New York mansion.  Sure, it seems a little strange at moments: the 1960s aren’t exactly the hey-day of old money socialites, and there’s something weirdly knowing, almost conspiratorial about the way our title character, the household’s butler, addresses us straight to camera.  But it takes a few minutes for the premise to emerge…it also takes a few minutes for it to become clear that it’s the Christmas season, but by now I hope readers at Film for the Holidays are accustomed to my broadly inclusive take on the holiday film.

What is Fitzwilly about, you might ask?  Well, there really are two films here, one of which makes sense commercially and one of which really doesn’t.  The commercial film is a light-hearted romantic comedy starring two well-known and loved television performers: Dick Van Dyke (overflowing, as always, with charm and a kind of spry delight) as Fitzwilly, a bright young butler, meets Miss Juliet Nowell (a Christmas pun, I suspect), a graduate student and recently hired secretary to Fitzwilly’s employer, Miss Vickie.  Juliet, played by Barbara Feldon (better known as the knockout member of the spy tandem in a sitcom called Get Smart), quickly finds herself at odds with Fitzwilly – some of it has to do with the other half of this film (which I’ll get to), but some of it is pretty standard rom-com fare.  She finds him overbearing, he finds her impertinent; they both come to realize the other is pretty special; she thinks he should aim higher in life than being a butler and he takes offense.  Their dialogue isn’t Shakespeare (Beatrice and Benedick they ain’t), but it’s lively and sometimes pointed, and there’s a real spark between the two of them.  Feldon and Van Dyke are both fun to just watch in action, and there’s a world in which they made a very by-the-numbers romantic comedy that has nothing at all to do with Christmas and I never saw it.

Here in the real world, though, a very different thing is happening, as we realize before the film is ten minutes old: Fitzwilly is the story of how an efficient brigade of servants in an upper class household operate a secret and successful thieving ring, right under the noses of their employer, the local constabulary, and the New York City elite social scene.  Fitzwilly himself is the ringleader and mastermind – when he was a child, Miss Vickie took him under her wing, and when her father died and Fitzwilly discovered the aging socialite was left destitute (unbeknownst to her), he decided the knowledge of it would kill the woman.  Instead, far simpler (ha!) for him to coordinate an elaborate black market operation out of the house’s basement, ripping off major retailers and funneling the profits into Miss Vickie’s accounts just in time to ensure her bills are always paid.  They funnel the hottest items in their hands to an outlet in Philadelphia – St. Dismas Thrift Shoppe, to be precise, named cheekily for the “good thief” who was crucified next to Christ in the gospels.  They have to keep Miss Vickie in the dark, so he encourages her every eccentricity, especially if it either takes her out of the house (leading her absurd Platypus Troop of knock-off Boy Scouts) or sequesters her upstairs in her office (composing Inquire Within, her demented dictionary for people who cannot spell – as Miss Vickie herself says to Juliet, “when it is done, children and illiterates like you will rise from ignorance”).  Such a criminal conspiracy clearly can’t last forever without discovery…and it is, more to the point, badly imperiled by the arrival of a nosy young secretary who realizes early on that something doesn’t smell right about the situation in the house.  Hijinks ensue.

And in the background of all this, Christmas is under way – wreaths are on doors and trees are being set up.  An elaborate side scheme emerges in which Fitzwilly and the servants agree to lavishly furnish another family’s vacation home, skimming the profits for their own purposes, just in time for a good old-fashioned Florida Christmas.  The glitz of a technicolor red and green mid-60s holiday really pops on the screen, whenever it gets the chance, even if none of these people are really thinking much about Christmas.  Much, that is, until a series of setbacks makes a highwire Christmas Eve robbery – a heist that requires the speed and secrecy we associate with Santa Claus himself – more or less mandatory.  What a truly, truly bizarre plot.

For the sake of you, a potential viewer, I have to acknowledge that the plot really does strain the audience’s confidence (if not patience) throughout.  Money is coming in and out so often – with so many dollar amounts in the air – that it is very hard to understand how far ahead or behind they are: this is a problem in the third act, since the whole explanation for a high risk robbery sequence rests on the servants having their backs to the wall, financially.  Some capers are problematic (I understand that in 1967 they might still have been making weirdly racist mannequins of African tribal people for shopping displays, but maybe they didn’t need to be in the film) and others are just incredible in the oldest sense of that word (in no bar in America at any time could you get wildly enthusiastic men betting large sums of money on their certainty that Delilah cut Samson’s hair in the Bible’s book of Judges, let alone so widely and reliably that it was a guaranteed money-making endeavor).  But I have to acknowledge also that in some ways it doesn’t matter all that much – we’re watching because we want to see the main characters canoodle a little; we want to see if their elaborate, Ocean’s-Eleven-with-a-heart-of-gold heist can actually work; we want to see how they’ll all get out of this without going to jail.  And it’s not like I’m going to tell you how it all ends, but I think I can tell you that the film’s third act is consistent with the rest of it – if you’re liking it you’ll like it, I’m guessing, and if you aren’t it’s not going to salvage itself.

In a way, the whole film is designed to create a sense of dangerous allure, but defanged in a way that makes it totally safe.  Dick Van Dyke can play a master thief and even scoundrel, except he’s doing it with the best of intentions and hurting almost nobody but insurance companies.  Barbara Feldon can play a slightly slinky, even sexy young woman without the plot ever taking us too close to something that would be uncomfortable to watch with your grandmother in the room.  It’s done something sort of similar to Christmas as a backdrop, I’m afraid – there’s the sense that big Christmas celebrations need to come off with success, but we never really feel them as stakes.  Christmas might have provided an opportunity to explore things like charity or miraculous intervention, but the feast never really touches the key events of the story (other than, for instance, making sure there were many shoppers present on the day they need to knock over the department store and run away with cash).  Even the music is defanged – the peppy score I mentioned earlier?  It’s composed and arranged by a young Johnny Williams…yes, THAT John Williams, whose music memorably and powerfully enlivens pop culture properties from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to Harry Potter.  And, it’s fine.  But not really very special.  With apologies, Fitzwilly, that’s a reasonable assessment of you as a film, holistically.

I Know That Face: This cast is full of holiday performers: Barbara Feldon (the brightly inquisitive Miss Juliet Nowell) voices Patti Bear in The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas.  Dick Van Dyke (the titular Fitzwilly) plays an angel in Buttons: A Christmas Tale and narrates The Town Santa Forgot.  John McGiver (Albert, the servant with a troubled conscience) voices the Mayor in the Rankin-Bass ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.  A very young Sam Waterston (here playing the young chauffeur Oliver – I’m telling you, it’s a stacked cast and crew) appears in Hannah and Her Sisters, a film that is bookended by Thanksgiving celebrations.  Edith Evans (the indomitable Miss Vickie) was of course the Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooge, which I reviewed just last Sunday – she’s far better here.  And John Fiedler (the nervous music store employee, Moron Dunne, who makes a truly inadvisable arrangement with Fitzwilly in disguise) has a long track record as a voice actor in the Hundred Acre Wood: he’s Piglet’s voice in, among other things, Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year and A Winnie the Pooh Thanksgiving, not to mention Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too.  Beyond his voice career, too, Fiedler played the role of Vollenhoven in the first film adaptation of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, a story brimful with allusions to Dutch Christmas customs, as the primary events take place throughout a holiday season.  

That Takes Me Back: This is going to be a little inconsistent, since I rolled my eyes at the drudgery of being a typist for those three old men in Beyond Tomorrow, but something about the vibe of this movie and maybe also Miss Vickie’s energy gave me a certain nostalgia for the era when a typist was someone you needed to hire.  I know it wasn’t actually glamorous, but it still took me back in a way that felt more pleasant this time around.  At one point there’s a significant plot moment centered around an enormous and incredibly expensive Xerox machine: just the sight of that massive brick of an appliance and how they’ll get it to work feels wild to me – what a different era.  Miss Vickie’s dedicated work on Inquire Within does make me long somewhat for a dictionary as a physical book to be consulted – what a lovely time to be alive. Oh, and it was such a sweet return to the simplicity of a society in which someone could be enchanted by the world-altering allure of a color TV set.

I Understood That Reference: In a film this elusive about its Christmas material, there’s less than I would have liked, but we do hear Fitzwilly saying, “On the night before Christmas when all through New York, large lumps of money are bouncing like cork…” as he cooks up their biggest heist, which is a fun parody of A Visit from St. Nicholas.  And then later, mid-heist, we hear someone shout, “Hey, they went thattaway, Scrooge!” to a police officer on the street as misdirection.

Holiday Vibes (3/10): For a film that has Christmas squarely in its sights for almost the whole running time (due to its connection to various schemes) it doesn’t deliver very much at all that felt like the holidays, to me, beyond some attractive backdrops.  If you’re looking for immersion in those cozy feelings (or even less comfortable vibes that do still go along with the holidays, awkward family visits and such), this isn’t really the film for you.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): The plot arcs are probably the film’s weakest point, and unfortunately, the movie is constructed in such a way that we really needed a tight script to make it work.  There’s too much business to take care of (and too little character development, with a couple of exceptions) for me to feel really invested in it.  I do enjoy watching Van Dyke and Feldon pull off some romantic chemistry together, and some of the scenes from 60s New York (finally a more fully multi-ethnic space on screen than the older holiday flicks manage, even if it still has a long way to go) did feel inviting to me.  Well, and who wouldn’t enjoy thinking about getting to be Robin Hood at least briefly, tricking and cheating and stealing but all of it for a wholesome cause?  In the end, it does seem like a C+ movie to me, but it’s a C+ movie with some upside.

Party Mood-Setter? I can’t really imagine this working (it’s got too many little twists and turns for inattentive viewing), though I also doubt it would be too distracting, since the events of the story don’t come across as all that urgent given how the narrative unfolds.

Plucked Heart Strings? There really aren’t any at all – but the film’s not trying for it either. The film’s about the fun side of a rom-com far more than it is about sincere emotional resonance.

Recommended Frequency: Fitzwilly is a very slight little thing – you’d be fine never having seen it, but if you’re the kind of person who’ll enjoy seeing Barbara Feldon and Dick Van Dyke lure each other into some passionate embraces, it’s not a bad way to spend an evening.  And if you’d like to just see this bizarre plot unfold at least once, I do think it’ll amuse you enough to see it through to the end.  I would say that, having now seen it twice for the blog, I’ll probably see it again at least one more time in my lifetime, but I’m not rushing back to it.

To try out Fitzwilly, this year, the easy way is to stream it free (with ads) on Pluto, unless you’re a subscriber to Screenpix, which is a premium add-on at Amazon Prime and the Roku Channel and lots of other places, showing older movies for a modest monthly fee (I am not).  You can rent it on Fandango at Home, too.  You can, of course, buy it on DVD (or Blu-ray, which surprised me a little) at Amazon, and according to Worldcat a few more than a hundred libraries have it for you on disc.