holiday affair

I wasn't expecting this when I started watching. By 1949 Robert Mitchum was established enough as a badass that I was thinking something more noir-ish. Instead we get Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh in a post-war Christmas soap. Leigh plays a war widow raising her son alone. Two years after her husband's death she is being courted by a milquetoast named Carl. She accidentally gets Robert Mitchum fired and conflict ensues as she, and her son Timmy, have to pick between the uncertain impetuosity of Mitchum or the safe blandness of Carl, the baxter.

It's a good movie actually, the courtroom scene in act three is much less funny than it wants to be, but Capra had the market on that one - plus a decade earlier. The part that works (and the only real connection to film noir) is the post-war disillusionment that both the Leigh and Mitchum characters feel. Leigh lost her husband and lives in the past, using her little boy as a surrogate husband. Mitchum lives in the harsh present, one without direction or meaningful employment for a man recently returned from the war. Both characters are essentially brought together through Timmy and reconciled to the world in which they must learn to live.