the guy from My Three Sons.
A bold choice! People don't often talk about it as a Christmas movie, but it definitely is. One of the great Billy Wilder lines of all time, too: “Ya know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe. I mean, shipwrecked among eight million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you are.”
It happens that Fred Mac Murray also stars in one of my very favorite overlooked Christmas classics...which was of course NOT the topic here, but still a genuine gem: 1940's Remember The Night, with Barbara Stanwyck.
Now, the following year, they'd burn down the screen, and darn near the whole wide world with that noirest of noirs, Double Indemnity, but here, they're in a sweet, sincere, intelligent comedy written and directed by Preston Sturges, a guy who specialized in such things (and was in fact the first guy with "written and directed by" in a Hollywood screen credit!).
She's a repeat-offender shoplifter who gets arrested for the third time right before Christmas. He's the Assistant DA who decides to postpone her trial until after Christmas -- he doesn't want jurors feeling generous and maybe let her off the hook in the Christmas spirit. I guess he thinks that maybe they'll be cranky after spending time with their families?
Oh but wait, she really DOESN'T have anyone to go home to, SO HE BRINGS HER HOME TO HIS FAMILY AND... Don't make me say it.
Okay, it's not a spoiler, it's the entire reason why anybody went to see it.
But yes, he has no idea how to work out his duty vs. his dawning love for this adorable criminal. The winner? Christmas!
Fred had become the highest-paid actor in Hollywood (and the fourth highest-paid man in America!!!) by playing the sincere, befuddled foil to America's greatest screwball comediennes (including 4 pictures with Carole Lombard, with whom he remained close friends, and Katherine Hepburn, whom he gave a career-reviving hit after she'd had a long string of flops).
Forgotten now but a huge hit at the time, the sparkling comic and romantic chemistry between Fred and Barbara in Remember The Night is part of why Double Indemnity landed so hard. He'd played a heel or two early, and so had she, but nobody saw THIS coming.
It was a little less shocking to see him play such a sleaze in The Apartment, but only a little. He'd already made an impact in live action Disney comedies in the years immediately before this (the two Flubber movies ABSOLUTELY hold up for what they are, and are highly recommended; The Shaggy Dog less so, but still better than average)....but when strange women were beating him with their purses in the street and scolding him for taking such a nasty part, he decided he'd had enough, and stuck with nice, befuddled guys from then on. (My Three Sons might have been the very next year, iirc.)
Nothing wrong with that! Nobody did it better! He really was a gem.
And Remember The Night is too! You can find it streaming on Criterion and TCM with subscriptions, on Sling and Plex for free, and hybrid-style on YT Premium, Roku and others. Really worth tracking down!
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