The Cheaters

I have longed to see this film for years and although I scour the TV guides eagerly each Christmas season, it never seems to appear. This is a truly touching and delightful film. Full of amusement and drama. I can remember looking forward to it each year when I was a child. We always made sure that we saw it, since it was one of my mother's favorites. It's the story of an erudite actor who's fallen on hard times, and is taken in by a vacuous wealthy family over the holidays. He reminds them all of the true meaning of Christmas. It's full of touching sentiment that is on par with It's a Wonderful Life. Even better, I think. I would snap this one up in a second if it was available on video.

This is a delightful movie that is rarely seen. It's a Christmas movie. A family of rich, self-absorbed people loses everything in the depression. They are visited by a mysterious stranger who helps them to find something more important than the money they have lost. Nicely done.

Have watched this movie at least once every Christmas for the past twenty years. Never tire of the superb acting and well-crafted script. Joseph Schildkraut is wonderful as a down and out actor and a perfect foil to Eugene Pallette's family's frivolous and seemingly naive view of life.

The Cheaters is one of the best, yet largely unseen, Christmas movies of all time. A winning combination of comedy and drama, it features stellar performances by two of the great character actors of the Forties, Joseph Schildkraut and Eugene Pallette. It delivers a positive message about the holiday, while also offering a cynical edge.

This odd little film plays out like a Christmas spin on MY MAN GODFREY. The family of rich businessman Eugene Palette is in financial trouble and when they learn that an even richer uncle has died and left his fortune to a woman he didn't even know, a former child actress named Watson, they scheme to find her and keep her under wraps until the search period is over, when the money will revert to them. A homeless former actor (Joseph Schildkraut) who is staying with the family helps out with the scheme, but the dawning of Christmas Day brings some changes of heart.

The best thing about this film is its physical production; it's an A-looking movie produced by B-studio Republic Pictures. The actors are also bigger names than Republic typically used, though most of them were aging actors who had seen better days. The real problem is the writing; the screenplay could have used another draft or two, especially in character development. One daughter is built up as a kind of sly, whimsical type in contrast to the other who is more cold-blooded, but nothing is done with that potentially interesting tension. Old pros Palette and Billie Burke are fine, though their choice to underplay their underwritten parts takes some of the fun out of the proceedings. Schildkraut is good, but his character remains a cipher, not in a mysterious angel/ghost way, but in a way that suggests the writers didn't know what to do with him. There is solid support from Raymond Walborn, Norma Varden, and eternal butler Robert Grieg. TCM host Robert Osborne introduced this as "the best Christmas movie you've never heard of," and as I am familiar with almost every Christmas-themed Hollywood feature film ever made, he may be right, and I am grateful for the chance to have seen it, but it's not a gem I'll want to revisit often.