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 Connie is a widower trying to raise a son by herself. She can't afford a train for her son on Christmas, but a "drifter with dreams of building boats in which to sail away" shows up and changes that. He also "wins Connie's heart from another suitor."
1949, 87 minutes, VHS
Back in the winter of 1949, there must have been a shortage of eligible young hotties in New York City. How else to explain the fact that Janet Leigh had two single guys battling for her affections even though she wasn't rich and even worse, had a snot-nosed six year old kid named Timmy? I don't know about you, but at the honky tonk I hang out in, gals who are obsessed with their crappy kids don't get asked to do the tush push like the ones who only see their kids every other weekend and for two weeks in the summer. All this is a roundabout way of saying that even though I've seen this movie three different times now, I can't remember a heck of a lot about it, except that viewing number four will probably be delayed until I'm dead and Satan is having his way with me.
It's not a real long film at 87 minutes and it doesn't really drag (though that's merely a testament to Robert Mitchum's screen presence more than anything to do with the story), but it doesn't exactly keep you riveted to the proceedings either. I figured this out toward the end of the film when Robert and Janet were having a big talk about whether she would be acknowledging her feelings for him or would forever be haunted by the memory of her dead soldier husband, Guy. It was only after she was getting back into the car with her lawyer fiancee Carl (he sounds like a winner, huh?) that my foggy brain began to wonder just what they had decided about whatever it was they were flapping their gums about. In the end, I merely shrugged and figured it would all resolve itself with a Christmas miracle or last minute change of heart.
How was it that we arrived at this rather forgettable and hazy moment in time? How was it that poor Connie Ennis was forced to make a decision about her love life right smack dab in the middle of when she should have been out shopping for presents for her ungrateful whelp? How was it that Robert Mitchum ended up playing Dr. Phil to both her and her kid, when by all rights he should have been terrorizing them like he did in the superior Night Of The Hunter?
Blame it all on the unremarkable story called The Christmas Gift penned by John D. Weaver. Not that I've actually read it since I'm not really about to go into my grandma's attic and sift through all her old Atlantic Monthlies, Harper's, Low Rider and magazines looking for the issue where this thing originally appeared. It's just that you can imagine it was the sort of story that chicks read in the forties after the war and wistfully wished that their own husbands had been killed instead of coming back all boring and stuff. The least they could have done while they were "over there" was have those easy French girls teach them some new positions!
Connie is one of the lucky ones though, her husband slain in WWII and reduced to an idolized memory of grainy black and white photographs and whacky neckties. I always maintained that the worst thing that's ever happened to me is that I didn't die younger, back when I still had my life whole life ahead of me and thus had what is known as "potential." Now, that I've gone ahead and lived through my youth and pretty much ruined all of my good years driving away the people who once cared for me with my callow ways, I am left a bitter old coot, an embarrassing husk of what might have been. Can you imagine how much better my life would have been if I died in a car wreck way back about two years ago? I would have been pleasantly remembered for months!
Sadly though, I know my way around my tricked out Civic, so there would be no easy way out via a bridge abutment, thus I found myself watching Connie Ennis going to work as a harried single mother and comparison shopper for a major department store. Maybe someone out there who lived back in the time when the Earth was still cooling and men still rode dinosaurs to work can tell me exactly what this comparison shopper job is. The way it looked to me was that Connie would pose as a shopper, buy stuff, and then report back to her overlords about the price. If she was found out by the rival store, she would be banned forever from there just like one of those card counters we're always kicking out of the Indian casino I frequent every third of the month. I understand all that, but what I don't get is why she actually has to go through the trouble of actually buying the stuff. Couldn't she just say, "how much is that electric toy train" and have Robert Mitchum respond "$79.50, ma'am" then go and make her phone call? Or would that interfere with John D. Weaver's housewife fantasy story?
Connie buys this train ($79.50 in 1949? In today's dollars that would be about the same as Sierra Leone's Gross National Product!) from Mitchum (his cover in this film is Steve Mason, a much studlier name than Connie's wuss boyfriend, Carl Davis) and takes it home, intending to return it the next day. We meet her punk kid, Timmy when she gets home and it becomes rapidly apparent that he should probably be removed from the home, since she refers to him as Mr. Ennis and he calls her Mrs. Ennis and they hug and kiss a lot. I grew up in a normal house in Gary, Indiana and there was no hugging and kissing! That's called a "bad touch" and no kid should be subjected to that from his family!
Even though Connie has tried to corrupt her son with her dark desires, he is still a kid at heart and that means one thing around Christmas time - unadulterated greed! He immediately seizes upon the fact that she brought two packages home and she informs him that the big one has to go back to the store the next day. The big one is the train. The little one is some crappy clothes (probably not even Jordaches!) for Timmy. You can always tell when we're supposed to feel sorry for some white trash family because their only presents is crap like sweaters and leg braces instead of dope gear like a Colecovision!
Timmy peeks at the train and becomes very sad when Connie tells him that it isn't for him. I sure hope she wasn't planning on calling him Mr. Ennis anymore that night! She runs into Steve Mason again when she attempts to return it and he gets all fired from his hotshot job as seasonal help in the toy department because some prune-faced manager found out that he didn't report her as a comparison shopper like policy says he has to. Steve is the kind of guy that doesn't see this as a set back but merely an opportunity to get into the future Marion Crane's bloomers (like there's any room in there with Timmy and his daddy's ghost!). One of those quirky, romantic lunches in the park with the seals follows. I've always suspected my own relationship went south due to the absence of sea mammals to provide the playful backdrop for my smooth moves. Stupid rural midwest without zoos!
During this lunch, Connie and us get Steve's life story. It involves him wanting to go out to California and build boats. It may have involved more than that, but that was all we needed to see that he was one of those "creative dreamer" types that women moon over. Carl Davis, buttoned up lawyer that constantly bothers Connie to marry him while he's drying dishes at her house? I don't think you're going to be going to another rose ceremony, if you catch my meaning. And a tip to all you players out there: don't be drying no dishes at your old lady's house. That's the mark of a safe sap! You need to be out chasing your dreams! Riding your hog crosscountry to Cali to work in your brother's diamond mine! Taking a tramp steamer to China to work with underprivileged red pandas! Swimming the English Channel to New Zealand to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro! That's all chicks understand. You should also be wise, but not sensitive. Rough, but not a brute. Robert Mitchum, not Wendell Corey. That last one probably is the biggie.
The movie settles into a series of incidents that have Connie and Steve running into each other again and again. There's the packages she left with him while they were going comparison shopping together after their lunch in the park. There's the time she was meeting him in the park to complain about the train that he bought for Timmy. There's the time when she runs into him at the police station after he's accused of rolling a dude in the park (a frame up to be sure). And then there's time she meets him at his flop house room to return the money from the train to him that Timmy so dramatically got back from the head of the department store himself!
Through it all Carl is still milling around actually believing Connie when she tells him that she'll marry him on New Year's Day. Did I mention that Timmy hates Carl? But you probably knew that already. Did I mention that Timmy thinks Steve Mason is the coolest guy since Tom Mix? I'll bet you guessed that as well. See, Carl knows that Timmy hates his guts but is still going to marry this chick anyway! I know that there was a hottie shortage in NYC at about this time, but did he even check New Jersey? All this and he got Timmy a camera for Christmas! A camera vs. a train? Ouch!
Carl finally throws in the towel after her last encounter with Steve, but I think it wasn't so much Steve's competition that sent him to the showers so much as the fact that he was bummed out that Connie never asked about the big court case he won the week before that was in all the papers. Uh, if it wasn't the Scopes Monkey Trial, why would anyone care? So did Connie ever get over her fear of moving on with her life and confess her feelings to Steve before he left for California? I'll never tell, but yeah, she did.
There was an obvious lack of chemistry between Mitchum and Leigh that we'll have to chalk up to Ms. Leigh since Mitchum is the coolest guy in the movies. Even in a girly movie like this, he's a man's man, forcing himself on Connie in her kitchen (just giving her a free sample), giving life lessons to young Timmy (always aim higher than what you're shooting for and you'll hit the mark!), and cutting a promo on everyone at Christmas dinner announcing that Connie should marry him and not Carl (while Carl stood around looking like he'd just been piefaced!). This guy even fed orphaned squirrels in the park, but was so matter of fact about it, he didn't come off like one of those sissy Earth Firsters! The rest of the movie was boring with Carl not being any kind of real threat to Steve and with Connie being an indecisive ninny. Mitchum's presence is the only thing worthy of your attention in this one. Janet Leigh fans should just wait for her to get slashed by Alfred Hitchcock eleven years later. And Wendell Corey fans? Well, the price of The Astro-Zombies DVD is pretty reasonable.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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