The story goes that Frank Capra passed on this story to make "It's A Wonderful Life". It's easy to imagine why he considered it, indeed it too has links to Christmas, but in the end I think he made the correct choice. It's possible to think that Capra might have elevated the material here into another holiday classic but for me it falls short.
The plot is sort of "Trading Places" meets "You Can't Take It With You" as wandering tramp Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) alights on a boarded-up but fully furnished and unaccountably fully-stocked 5th Avenue mansion and makes it his home while its owner, multi-millionaire financier Michael O'Connor (Charlie Ruggles) is absent for the season. McKeever soon meets ex-serviceman Jim Bullock (Don DeFore), himself indirectly made homeless by the self-same O'Connor whose company has just bought the building which contained the apartment where he lived. From there the O'Connor place attracts people to it like iron shavings to a magnet, comprising DeFore's army chums and their families, plus inadvertently, O'Connor's rebellious 18 year old daughter Trudy (Gale Storm).
Indeed, it's not long before O'Connor himself has entered the household, also in disguise as a vagrant, ostensibly to prise Trudy from Jim to whom she's quickly grown attached, but when the daughter turns for help to her mother, O'Connor's four years divorced wife and she too enters the house under false pretences, we're soon enough pointed towards a seasonal happy ending for all, under the beatific gaze and general beneficence of the venerable vagabond McKeever.
Although I quite liked the film, I ultimately wasn't completely charmed by it. It took me some time to warm to McKeever's Christmas squatter and I found the plotting just too contrived, meandering and sweeping, before O'Connor's inevitable conversion from capitalism to philanthropy is complete.
DelRuth's direction is also staid and lacking in flair, making too obvious use of back projections for the exterior New York scenes, all the more odd considering the grand interiors of the O'Connor mansion. The humour, what there is of it, is somewhat forced while I found the acting to be largely second-rate too.
In the end, the film comes over as B-movie Capra, which isn't to say it's bad, but it does appear to lack the sparkle and emotional resonance that a more capable director not to say cast might have given it.
The plot is sort of "Trading Places" meets "You Can't Take It With You" as wandering tramp Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) alights on a boarded-up but fully furnished and unaccountably fully-stocked 5th Avenue mansion and makes it his home while its owner, multi-millionaire financier Michael O'Connor (Charlie Ruggles) is absent for the season. McKeever soon meets ex-serviceman Jim Bullock (Don DeFore), himself indirectly made homeless by the self-same O'Connor whose company has just bought the building which contained the apartment where he lived. From there the O'Connor place attracts people to it like iron shavings to a magnet, comprising DeFore's army chums and their families, plus inadvertently, O'Connor's rebellious 18 year old daughter Trudy (Gale Storm).
Indeed, it's not long before O'Connor himself has entered the household, also in disguise as a vagrant, ostensibly to prise Trudy from Jim to whom she's quickly grown attached, but when the daughter turns for help to her mother, O'Connor's four years divorced wife and she too enters the house under false pretences, we're soon enough pointed towards a seasonal happy ending for all, under the beatific gaze and general beneficence of the venerable vagabond McKeever.
Although I quite liked the film, I ultimately wasn't completely charmed by it. It took me some time to warm to McKeever's Christmas squatter and I found the plotting just too contrived, meandering and sweeping, before O'Connor's inevitable conversion from capitalism to philanthropy is complete.
DelRuth's direction is also staid and lacking in flair, making too obvious use of back projections for the exterior New York scenes, all the more odd considering the grand interiors of the O'Connor mansion. The humour, what there is of it, is somewhat forced while I found the acting to be largely second-rate too.
In the end, the film comes over as B-movie Capra, which isn't to say it's bad, but it does appear to lack the sparkle and emotional resonance that a more capable director not to say cast might have given it.