Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young woman returns to her hometown for the holidays, expecting to spend some quiet time with her family, and winds up meeting a handsome man, eventually falling in love against the backdrop of various tinsel-strewn Christmas activities. If I understand my Hallmark and Netflix movies correctly, usually this man is some manner of humble townie, with a masculine yet unthreatening, maybe even darling, profession. But what if he was also an out-of-towner, and his job was insurance investigator, and the tinsel-strewn Christmas activities included figuring out whether a recent death in the girl’s hometown was a suicide, as reported, or actually a murder? At this point, maybe it sounds as if Cover-Up, a 1949 Christmas-set thriller, is not quite the model of holiday romance that it could have been. But part of what makes this noirish, underseen holiday movie so much fun is how recognizably Christmassy it really is, even as it gets into the murder business, which makes it an appropriate post-holiday pick, too.
Why watch Cover-Up tonight?
There are a fair number of noir, crime, and thriller pictures set on or around Christmas and the new year – but not all of them make great use of that setting. Some use it as gimmicky window dressing, which can be superficially enjoyable but marginal as a winter-season watching choice; others mine it for rich thematic resonance without actually having much in the way of holiday aesthetics. Cover-Up is notable for the way the movie really integrates its sweet Christmas romance into the small-town mystery at its center. Sam Donovan (Dennis O’Keefe, who also co-wrote under a pseudonym), the insurance investigator, seems weirdly unbothered to be sent (via bus, no less!) to a strange town on Christmas Eve to look into the death of a local man ruled as a suicide; he’s basically a hard-boiled detective character who bumps straight into the heroine of a holiday rom-com when he helps Anita Weatherby (Barbara Britton) with her impossible pile of loose Christmas packages.
Sam isn’t a holiday cynic; he’s happy to accept a dinner invitation from Anita’s family, once he sorts through this insurance case. But as he looks further into the matter, and finds the suicide evidence even flimsier than initially suspected, a key weapon seems to be tied to Anita’s father, and the victim in question was apparently widely hated around town. Basically, Sam spends the movie alternating between questioning various figures in the case and cavorting around doing holiday activities with Anita, who has clearly formed a quick crush on the new guy in town.
A more lady-centric and/or comic version of this story might assume Anita’s point of view as she gets caught up in this web of intrigue, exposing elements of her hometown she wasn’t fully aware of, reflecting how a familiar place can look different after time away. Cover-Up is more traditionally positioned than that, and admittedly it’s not one of the great whodunits of the 1940s. (It probably isn’t even the best whodunit of 1949.) On the other hand, it’s a hookier story than the usual claptrap about holiday romance, and it integrates its two disparate genres remarkably well, making it work equally well for cozy holidays or chilly January nights.
Not only does director Alfred E. Green evoke warm homecomings with its decorations and pivotal tree-lighting ceremony, the story it winds up telling about the town and cover-up in question has the kind of communal concerns that you might expect from a milder, cornier Christmas picture, while still involving murders and conspiracies. Calling this a cheerful movie would be a stretch, but if it doesn’t quite feel like a noir, it’s because it maintains a Christmas movie’s faith in the idea of the greater good. Also: The movie runs a slim 83 minutes, which means you can get back to hibernating nice and early.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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