Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

The 1947 comedy “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” is gentler than screwball, though like many earlier and better screwball comedies involves people passing for what they are not. In this case, a portly seasonal squatter, Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore) occupies the mansion of the second-richest man in the world, Michael J. O’Connor (Charles Ruggles)  each winter while he is on his Virginia estate.

A demobilized GI, Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) is evicted (handcuffing himself to the bed frame) from a property that O’Connor is having demolished to build a skyscraper office building on Manhattan. When McKeever’s dog gets Jim wet (in a way too hokey to describe), McKeever takes Jim “home.”

The O’Connor daughter, Trudy (Gale Storm)  runs away from finishing school (proclaiming herself finished) and the squatters in her father’s Fifth Avenue mansion think she is a burglar. Soon enough, the young (think Baby Boom) families of two of Jim’s army buddies are installed.

Then her father passes himself off as a panhandler to scrutinize the man with whom his daughter has fallen in love. When he tires of being condescended to by McKeever wearing his clothes, smoking his cigars, and downing his brandy, O’Connor tells his daughter that the charade is up. And Trudy appeals to her mother, Mary (Ann Harding), who becomes the cook for the household. The feelings her parents once had for each other re-emerge.

Plus O’Connor and the GIs both are bidding to buy a no-longer used Army base. Plus the nightly patrolman dropping in to make sure everything is undisturbed. Plus some really wretched songs oversold by Storm. (Trudy gets a job in a music store.)

Postwar housing shortages lead to comic sharing of space as in George Stevens’s wartime “More the Merrier,” though McKeever is less pixiesh than Charles Coburn was in that. More like Coburn’s role in another romantic comedy starring Jean Arthur, the rich “devil” in “The Devil and Miss Jones.” And McKeever is more like William Powell’s “My Man, Godfrey,” more aristocratic in manner than the rich man whose place he is occupying.

O’Connor is as preoccupied with money and as oblivious to human relations as Scrooge, though Jim is a feisty American Bob Cratchitt who does not work for him, and is a’courtin’, not yet a father as his buddies are. (There is a healthy American blond substitute for Tiny Tim.)

Not to neglect the parallel for the GIs with young children of the "No room in the Inn" aspect of the original Christmas story...

Compared to screwball comedies of a decade earlier, "It Happened on Fifth Avenue" moves at a stately pace. I think it would have been better half an hour shorter (with the songs cut out), instead of running nearly two hours.

The redemptions and the resentful veterans finding that the rich aren’t so bad after all (a recurrent message of screwball comedies with love conquering all) are predictable, and it takes a lot of very willful suspension of disbelief to accept O’Connor going along with being low man in the hierarchy of squatters in his house, or an overdose of Christmas spirit.

Frank Capra originally optioned the film, but sold it when he made another Christmas movie called “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The movie is available without any bonus features as part of a set, Warner Brothers Classic Holiday Collection, Vol. 2, along with “Blossoms in the Dust,” "Holiday Affair," and "All Mine to Give.”

Victor Moore was in the Astaire/Rogers classic “Swing Time” (1936) and costarred with Beulah Bondi in the Leo McCarey tearjerker “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937), which has an even higher IMDB rating than “Swing Time.” (Beulah Bondi is in the company of Zasu Pitts and Gale Storm for my favorite actress names.)

Charlie Ruggles had a very long Hollywood career that included  playing a part other than that of Ruggles in "Ruggles of Red Gap" (the title character was played by Charles Laughton, the major in "Trouble in Paradise," and narrating cartoon Aesop fables on the "Bullwinkle Show" (my first memory of him).

©2009, Stephen O. Murray

a contribution (to follow what I thought was my last one) to Chelledun’s holidays writeoff.

Recommended: Yes