It Happened on 5th Avenue (titled onscreen as It Happened on Fifth Avenue) is a 1947 American romantic comedy film directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Don DeFore, Ann Harding, Charles Ruggles, Victor Moore, and Gale Storm.
Herbert Clyde Lewis and Frederick Stephani were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Story, losing to Valentine Davies for another Christmas-themed film, Miracle on 34th Street.
Aloysius T. McKeever, a vagrant, makes his home in a seasonally boarded-up Fifth Avenue mansion, each time its owner—industrial magnate Michael J. O'Connor, the world's second richest man—winters at his Virginia estate.
Due to a housing crisis, Jim eventually invites war buddies Whitey, Hank and their families to share the vast mansion until they can find homes of their own.
When Mike becomes fed up and wants the squatters vacated, Trudy calls her mother Mary (who divorced O'Connor several years earlier) in Palm Beach for help.
Attempting to get rid of his daughter's suitor, who is still unaware of Trudy's real identity, O'Connor arranges to have the construction company that Jim approaches about his conversion plan reject it.
Celebrating Christmas Eve together, the residents are caught by the two patrolmen who check the mansion every night at 10 p.m. McKeever convinces them to let the families stay until after the New Year.
Soon, Jim sadly reveals that the camp has been sold to O'Connor, and later tells Trudy that he is considering the job offer in Bolivia so that he can earn enough money to marry her.
[5] The casting of Ann Harding and Victor Moore was announced in June 1946,[6] Don DeFore and Gale Storm in July, and filming proceeded from August 5 to mid-October 1946.
[9] "That's What Christmas Means to Me" was not the Varnick-Acquaviva minor hit for Eddie Fisher but another song written by Harry Revel.
"[12] Time wrote: "Most plausible explanations for the picture's success are: 1) the presence of Victor Moore, past master of creaky charm and pathos; 2) a show as generally old-fashioned, in a harmless way, as a 1910 mail-order play for amateurs; 3) the fact that now, as in 1910, a producer cannot go wrong with a mass audience if he serves up a whiff of comedy and a whirlwind of hokum.
[15] The screenplay was adapted for a radio version on Lux Radio Theater in May 1947, with DeFore, Ruggles, Moore, and Storm reprising their roles; and a live television production for Lux Video Theatre in 1957, with Ernest Truex, Leon Ames, Diane Jergens, and William Campbell.
[17] It Happened on 5th Avenue was part of a package of 49 Monogram and Allied Artists features from the late 1940s and early 1950s that were licensed for television broadcast in 1954.