This thoughtful, sensitive comedy is unusual for tackling two hardly hilarious subjects: suicide and miscarried pregnancy.  It is also a timely post-war film, dealing with the G.I. Bill and the era’s overall mix of optimism and gloom.  Fresh from his Oscar-winning Kris Kringle in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1947), and again directed by MIRACLE’s George Seaton, Edmund Gwenn stars as a retired professor, bent on suicide, who re-engages with life thanks to the young married couple, William Holden and Jeanne Crain, who moves into his attic and changes his life.  The professor might have been played by Clifton Webb, but Gwenn’s casting automatically makes him warmer.  Ultimately, it is Gwenn who is the film’s magic ingredient.  APARTMENT FOR PEGGY is in color, an unexpected choice for a contemporary comedy of the 1940s. 

The film is marred by Crain (what film in which she appeared wasn’t?).  Her part required a comedienne with a natural vitality, a young Jean Arthur, but Crain is her usual plasticized self, forced and a bit tiring to watch.  But a dark-haired Holden brings glimmers of his 1950s (post-SUNSET BOULEVARD) darkness to the film’s post-war mood.  He is excellent, as usual, as natural and connected as Crain is effortful and phony.  (This was Holden’s first of four films with Seaton.) 

It’s now shocking to watch Holden smoking around the pregnant Crain, but far more shocking when Crain miscarries, in a comedy!  Despite the eventual uplift, APARTMENT FOR PEGGY feels risky, genuinely trying to be something somewhat offbeat and probing.  If you can forgive Crain (and the movie is intelligent and touching enough so that you should be able to), this sleeper is most pleasing and thought-provoking.  Another triumph for Santa Claus.