The mood shifts to some lightweight breezy respite next with 1951 Bob Hope vehicle The Lemon Drop Kid. This one, directed by Sidney Lanfield sees Hope at his silly slapstick best as Sidney Milburn, a cheeky New York swindler known to all as the titular Lemon Drop Kid. He gets his moniker from the sweet lemon drop candies he’s constantly sucking and which he feeds to race horses at the track where he runs his cons. We first meet him at a Miami racetrack where he winds up conning the wrong guy. Soon he’s up to his neck in debt with just a few weeks to raise $10,000 before (you guessed it) Christmas, or else the notorious gangster Moose Moran (Fred Clark) will make sure he sleeps with the fishes.
The Kid heads back to his old NYC stomping ground to try and figure the perfect con, getting mixed up with old flame Brainey (Marilyn Maxwell) as well as local crime kingpin Oxford Charlie (Lloyd Nolan). He tries his hand at some festive fraud, scamming money while posing as a Salvation Army Santa, but gets nicked pretty quickly. Bailed out by a kindly senior ex-criminal compatriot named Nellie Thursday (Jane Darwell), the Kid hatches a scheme to convert an abandoned casino into a retirement home that won’t turn people like Nellie away due to their criminal past. This allows him and his colourful kooky crooked pals to pose as Santas legitimately to get donations.
Naturally, this leads to clashes with the local hoods and a moral dilemma for the Kid, who has to decide whether to keep the loot or do the right thing. Being a Christmas film, I think you can guess how this all turns out.
There are some decent laughs at times but also a whole load of Bob Hope screwball mugging that hasn’t aged particularly well. There’s the standard groan-inducing cross-dressing shenanigans and some childish silliness, like the Kid having a full-blown conversation with himself in the mirror. You can see Hope’s finely honed comedy act shining through as he presents this grifter’s cons more as cute rascality than mean-spirited thievery. It’s highly cartoonish with the Kid tip-toeing around danger like the Road Runner, never in much genuine peril, though does carry a lovely message of festive redemption.
It’s the sort of film where serious threats of decapitation from a crime lord carry no real weight, as it’s all so light-hearted you can be sure everything will work out just fine. For me, this feels like a super-cheesy ‘50s version of the Bad Santa series minus the colourful language and eyebrow-raising debauchery. The Kid is so delightfully charming that there’s just no doubt about this crooked confidence man making the switch from crook to angelic saviour.
Still, it’s impossible not to at least partly enjoy the film that first introduced the festive standard ‘Silver Bells’ to a mass audience, here covered by Hope and Maxwell in the film’s most dazzling, undeniably pure Christmas magic moment. Wonderful.
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