Never Say Goodbye (1946) & Holiday Affair (1949)

Holiday Affair (1949), produced and directed by Don Hartman.

Widowed Janet Leigh (22 here and with an 8 year old son -- pass me the calculator) is a somewhat inexpert comparative shopper researching prices at rival stores for her employer. Robert Mitchum is a toy department clerk -- wait, what? Well, he really wants to build sailboats, so that's ok. He catches her at work but goes easy on her because -- well, you figure it out. He buys her son the electric train set he has been wanting.

Her nice-guy boyfriend Wendell Corey doesn't have a chance.

Said to be a minor Christmas classic but I had never heard of it. I wanted to see Mitchum and Leigh in their only film together. This might be a good companion film to Never Say Goodbye (1946), another light Christmas romantic comedy with another handsome couple, Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker.

It is a very sweet, modest little film, worth seeing only if you like the actors. It was intended to soften Mitchum's image because of some criminal mischief, but I don't believe the marketing department got the message:



Notes:

• I always boggle at Janet Leigh's beauty. She made six films that year.
• Mitchum is pleasant but coasting.
• A cute bit: it opens with a train sequence and we scrutinize the quality of the model work before the camera pulls back and we see this is a toy train. It ends the same way: real train morphs into an electric train set.
• I remember my train set when I was about that age. I slept with it the first night.

Roy Webb score, photographed by Milton R. Krasner.

Available on DVD.