Awesome Original Movie! They don't make em like these anymore 😪

Great movie. Very funny Christmas movie with the late actor Bob Hope

This is a Bob Hope movie, and just saying that says a lot. Hope has has his usual comedy format of 1 liners, sight gags, witty comebacks, and slapstick comedy. Based on a Damon Runyon story, this one's about Hope playing a New York hustler, the title character, who's touting horseplayers in Florida and unknowingly touts a gangster's hot squeeze (the blonde Andrea King) off the winner and ends up owing a gangster $10,000 3 weeks or so before Christmas. He negotiates a deal where he has until Christmas to come up with the $10K and goes to NYC to raise the money with a cast of Runyonesque characters playing street corner Santa Clauses. The Santas are all standard '40s vintage character actors that you've seen in many other '40s vintage movies: Jay C. Flippen, William Frawley, Ben Welden, Sid Melton, and Harry Bellaver among the crew, and Fred Clark as the gangster to whom the debt is owed. The '40s lovely Marilyn Maxwell is Hope's long suffering girlfriend and Jane Darwell plays Nellie Thursday, the grand dame of Broadway for whom the Santas are, allegedly raising the money. Lloyd Nolan is another gangster who wants to cut himself in on the money and the highlight of the production is the introduction of the Christmas song "Silver Bells" by Hope and Maxwell.
It's a lively movie, good jokes, good dialog, and quite entertaining. I first saw this many, many years ago when I was a kid and TBS used to play it a week or 2 before Christmas and it's a Christmas tradition for my family. For some unknown reason, it's disappeared from the Turner channels but, thankfully, this DVD is available so the family tradition can continue. It's a good, not great, movie but very entertaining and best watched a week or 2 before Christmas. Highly recommended.

It seems an odd match: Damon Runyon, Christmas, and Bob Hope. Still, this is one of the best comedy vehicles Hope ever had, and Shout!, current owner of the film's distribution license, has given good little girls and boys, and everyone else, a cleaned-up print with excellent audio. Everything comes together here. The script is by Edmund Hartmann and Frank Tashlin, who also collaborated on "The Paleface" (1948) and, with others, on classic Hope-Crosby Road pictures and "Son of Paleface" (1952). Edith Head did the costuming, which means the con men are as well dressed as "the dolls." Victor Young ("Around the World in Eighty Days") covers the score. Paramount's house composers Jay Evans and Ray Livingston offer three songs, the best and most enduring of which is "Silver Bells," introduced here by Hope and his leading lady (reputedly his offscreen squeeze) Marilyn Maxwell. The rest of the cast is also perfect: Jane Darwell, the elder and most endearing doll; Lloyd Nolan and Fred Clark as the chief racketeers; William Frawley as Hope's primary henchman; and a moaning cow, whose name, we learn, is Crosby. If you're a Runyon purist, you may be disappointed, though there's enough of his spirit here to grease the plot and provide some of the funniest sight gags. The show belongs to Hope, who delivers one-liners with his impeccable timing. A great change of pace for the holidays, entertaining any time of year.

I purchased this one as a NEW Christmas movie. It was okay. A TYPICAL Bob Hope movie, with lots of jokes, silliness, and big holes in the plot, but fun.