Sorry to be sour; I enjoy older movies, even silly ones, but when they have that grating fingernails-on-chalkboard caricatures that just set-up bad feelings as being funny, then I'm not amused.It's not much of a spoiler, but the scene early in where Jeff has fallen off his horse, is trying to get back on, and then a car comes around and blast its horn loooong, and then you find out the driver, Grant, is a highly experienced horse owner, it's too unbelievable.Obvious manipulation of the viewer always tells me that the writer was immature or spent little time on the script. Why waste an entire movie on a weak script? It's filler, and who needs to waste their time that badly?Stanwyck is good, but gets only shallow lines. None of her brilliant smiles or coy glances that delight me in other pictures.

The film opens with Sally Warren (Stanwyck) and hubby Jeff (Cummings) out riding, and bickering over why they live in the country, instead of in the city where they had originally agreed to live. Then Lance, Sally 's old flame shows up, and honks the horn over and over, scaring the horses, causing Jeff to get tossed off yet again! (You'd think being a horse person, Lance would know better than to honk the horn over and over right near the horses...) This is a story of marriage, love, and the meaning of giving... it IS Christmas time, so Sally and Jeff get each other gifts that they think the other will like, but things take a strange turn along the way! Having Sally's old flame around only makes things worse. Robert Benchley is here for comic relief as Uncle Todd. And a young thing starts coming on to Jeff, which doesn't help either. Costumes by Edit Head, (of course) and directed by Irvinv Pichel, one of FIVE films he released that year! Good, clean fun, if you can take all the bickering. It looks like the only other project Cummings and Stanwyck worked on "together" was "Flesh and Fantasy", but they were in different chapters of that film, so not sure how much they actually worked together on that one.

Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Cummings are married but having problems. She loves horses and he doesn't. He keeps getting caught in compromising positions that aren't of his own doing. Natalie Wood is one of their children. She has a very minor part. Sort of cute and worth watching if you like one of the stars.

The performance given by robert cummings is good.He gets caught by his wife barbara stanwyck in the arms of diana lynn several times.Not by his own doing but he gets blamed anyway.Diana Lynn played a role of manipulation and did it very convincingly.And barbara stanwyck played the wife who is always one step ahead of everyone.