Classic Film Guide

classic HOLIDAY DVD Collection Volume 2

All Mine to Give (1957) - based on the true story of the Eunsons, a family of Scottish immigrant pioneers who settled in Wisconsin in the 1850s, this tear-jerking family drama was directed by Allen Reisner (his first such effort) from the screenplay by Dale Eunson and his wife Katherine Albert Eunson. Glynis Johns and Cameron Mitchell play the couple from Scotland that finds their way to Wisconsin only to discover that her uncle recently died when his homestead burned to the ground. With help from the community, the Eunsons rebuild and, while he works in the logging industry for Tom Cullen (Alan Hale Jr.), she has six children (three boys, then three girls). But while the children are still very young, their father dies from diphtheria and then their mother dies from typhoid. The oldest, 12-year-old Robbie (Rex Thompson), must then fulfill a promise he made to his mother on her deathbed: to find homes for each of his siblings (including Patty McCormack, just one year after she’d received her Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination as The Bad Seed (1956)) on Christmas day. Ernest Truex, Hope Emerson, Sylvia Field, Royal Dano and Ellen Corby are among those who play adult roles. Filmed in Technicolor.

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Holiday Affair (1949)

It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947) is a Christmastime story about a bum that occupies the New York mansion of the second wealthiest man in the world while he’s away. Directed by Roy Del Ruth, it was written by Herbert Clyde Lewis and Frederick Stephani, who earned their only Oscar nominations for this comedy’s original story. Victor Moore plays Aloysius T. McKeever, the interloper who’s spent his last three winters in the boarded up home of Michael J. O’Connor (Charles Ruggles), the developer-financier that spends November through mid-March at his estate in Virginia. This winter, McKeever takes in one guest after another, starting with Jim Bullock (Don DeFore), a veteran who, ironically, has just been evicted from his $40/month apartment by O’Connor’s construction company, which plans to build an 80 story office tower). O’Connor’s unhappy daughter Trudy (Gale Storm), who’s run away from college, happens upon McKeever and Bullock in her father’s home, but pretends to be someone else in order to escape her situation for a while. Shortly thereafter, she and Bullock fall in love. Some former service mates of Bullock (including Alan Hale Jr.), their wives (including Dorothea Kent) and kids join the ‘party’ at the once vacant mansion. Eventually, O’Connor himself and his ex-wife – they divorced four years prior – Mary (Ann Harding) come to live under their own roof incognito in order to meet their daughter’s prospective fiancé. The love in the air rekindles their long lost romance. Grant Mitchell plays one of O’Connor’s employees; Edward Brophy plays a patrolman. Edward Gargan and Charles Lane are among those who appear uncredited, as does Abe Reynolds who has the funniest bit (a monologue as a tailor) midway through the movie.

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Blossoms in the Dust (1941) - full review!

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