A Holiday Movie. With a Squirrel.

That dances. And drops money from the sky.

Dewey was just beside himself.

We just watched a very funny 1950 movie with Jimmy Durante that I'd never seen before. It has been shown under two different titles: "A Christmas Wish" and "The Great Rupert." The only non-family-friendly or scary things in it that I can think of are a house fire near the end (nobody gets hurt) and one or two remarks about a young lady's reputation.

This is the story: it starts out with an old animal trainer who's down on his luck but who has taught a very talented squirrel to dance the Highland Fling. I am not joking--this is the first scene in the movie and we just sat there with our mouths open--the stop-action animation or whatever they used to make the squirrel dance was so funny. Anyway, the old man is told that the squirrel isn't "box office" enough (who wants to pay money to watch a squirrel dance), and besides that he's about to be evicted; so he packs his bags and lets the squirrel go in the park. Another down-on-their-luck performing family, friends of his, move into his awful little apartment, and what they don't know is that the squirrel has returned and is living up above the hole in their ceiling. What they also don't know is that their landlord has been "squirreling away" money in a hole in his baseboard. When the mother of the family starts praying for money to pay the rent and buy her daughter a pair of shoes, the squirrel drops the landlord's money down through the ceiling. They figure it's a gift from heaven and use it to help people out and invest in neighbourhood businesses. Every week they pray, the squirrel drops more money, and they start to get rich. (Some people may not like this praying business, as it seems more like magic words than it does talking to God, but if you listen to the mothers' comments about this, you can tell she takes it seriously.) Eventually things get tangled up, the IRS and the FBI get involved, but the squirrel more or less saves the day.

And if you've never seen Jimmy Durante in anything except the Frosty cartoon, he's very entertaining too.

Recommended for those who are sick of the usual holiday stuff--or who just like talented squirrels.