General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Lemon Drop Kid

The Lemon Drop Kid is a 1951 American black-and-white comedy starring Bob Hope as Sidney Milburn, a racetrack tout (someone who sells horse-race tips at tracks) nicknamed for his fondness for lemon-drop candy, who must repay $10,000 to a gangster by Christmas and hits on a bogus street-corner Santa charity as his scheme. Directed by Sidney Lanfield and produced by Hope Enterprises with Paramount Pictures, it is loosely based on Damon Runyon's short story "The Lemon Drop Kid," first published in Collier's on 3 February 1934, and it introduced the Christmas standard "Silver Bells."¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York opening 21 March 1951; national release April 1951; copyright claimed by Hope Enterprises, Inc. on 1 April 1951¹
Director and writers	Sidney Lanfield; screenplay by Edmund L. Hartmann, Robert O'Brien, and Frank Tashlin, with story credit to Edmund Beloin¹
Lead cast	Bob Hope (Sidney Milburn, "The Lemon Drop Kid"), Marilyn Maxwell (Brainey Baxter), Lloyd Nolan (Oxford Charlie), Fred Clark (Moose Moran)¹
Source	Damon Runyon short story in Collier's (3 Feb 1934), later collected in Blue Plate Special (1934)²
Signature song	"Silver Bells" by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, first performed in the film; first recorded by Bing Crosby and Carol Richards for Decca, October 1950³^•⁴
Runtime	90–91 minutes, black and white, Western Electric recording¹
Earlier film	A 1934 Paramount version directed by Marshall Neilan, starring Lee Tracy, is closer to Runyon's story⁵

Spoilers

Story

At a Florida track, the tout Sidney Milburn talks an attractive stranger into changing her bet, not knowing she is wagering for her boyfriend, the gangster Moose Moran. Moran's original pick wins, and Milburn has cost Moran $2,000 instead of delivering a $10,000 win, so Moran threatens him with torture through his enforcer, Sam the Surgeon, unless Milburn can hand over $10,000 at Moran's defunct Long Island casino by Christmas.² Back in a snowy New York with twenty-three days to go, Milburn meets his old friend Nellie Thursday, who is about to be evicted, and borrows ten dollars from his sometime girlfriend, the singer Brainey Baxter. After gangster Oxford Charlie laughs off his request for a loan, Milburn sees a sidewalk Santa collecting donations and starts soliciting in his own Santa suit.²

Milburn's first bell-ringing lands him in trouble for soliciting without a charity license, so he and his crew of former confidence men turn a shuttered gambling joint into the "Nellie Thursday Home for Old Dolls," an old ladies' home that fronts the fundraising. Another gangster tries to move in on the scam, and the scheme unravels and resolves through vintage Hope-style scheming.¹^•⁶

The film's title card reads "Damon Runyon's The Lemon Drop Kid," and its opening statement places the story in the racetrack world Runyon wrote about, calling the Kid "an interesting source of mis-information." The connection to Runyon is loose: reviewers have noted that beyond the character's name, his taste for lemon drops, and his job as a racetrack tout, the 1951 plot shares little with the original story.¹^•⁷

Production

Principal photography ran from early July to late August 1950, with retakes from mid-November to mid-December 1950. According to modern sources, Hope wanted Jan Sterling as his co-star, but script delays kept her out; after viewing a rough cut, Hope asked Paramount to hire Frank Tashlin for rewrites, and Tashlin agreed on the condition that he could also direct the retakes. Tashlin, though never credited as director, is credited with the rewritten "Silver Bells" sequence, and several reviewers have judged his uncredited contribution a major asset to the film.¹^•⁸

Some background detail is studio invention rather than location work: the Florida horseracing scene was shot at Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia, California. Character actor Charley Cooley, who plays "Goomba," was Hope's former vaudeville partner and boyhood friend.¹

"Silver Bells"

In the summer of 1950 Paramount asked the songwriting team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, already Oscar winners for "Buttons and Bows" and "Mona Lisa," to write a Christmas song for the film. The pair were reluctant, figuring the world had too many Christmas songs already, and worried that a flop could cost them their expiring Paramount contract.³

Their inspiration was a little bell on a desk in their shared office, which recalled the bells rung by Salvation Army Santas on city street corners. They titled the song "Tinkle Bells," but Livingston's wife objected that "tinkle" is a childish euphemism for urination, so the title and some lyrics were changed to "Silver Bells."³^•⁴

Before the film reached theaters, Decca released the song in October 1950 as a single by Bing Crosby and Carol Richards, backed by John Scott Trotter's orchestra. It became a hit, and Hope and Marilyn Maxwell were called back to re-film a more elaborate staging of the number, which Tashlin directed, replacing the original choir-like staging.³^•⁴ "Silver Bells" quickly became a Christmas standard, and Hope made it his own Christmas theme, singing it every year on his annual television special, usually as a duet with his female guest.¹^•⁴ The song is unusual among Christmas standards for its urban setting, describing city sidewalks and shoppers rather than a countryside scene.⁴

The 1934 version

Paramount had already filmed Runyon's story in 1934, directed by Marshall Neilan and starring Lee Tracy and Helen Mack, with William Frawley as the Kid's sidekick, "The Professor." In that drama, confidence man Wally Brooks marries and loses his wife and newborn son, a plot much closer to Runyon than the 1951 comedy; AFI notes that in the original short story the Kid has no other name and both his wife and baby die. Frawley appears in both films, playing "Gloomy Willie" in the 1951 version.⁵^•¹

The 1951 film was Hope's second appearance in a Runyon adaptation, following the successful Sorrowful Jones (1949), based on "Little Miss Marker"; screenwriter Edmund Hartmann, producer Robert L. Welch, and director Sidney Lanfield worked on both pictures.¹

Reception and legacy

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 80% Tomatometer from five reviews and a 75% audience score from more than 1,000 ratings.⁹ Contemporary and retrospective critics split: Ken Hanke called it a "terrific Bob Hope Christmas picture" and "one of his best," while Dennis Schwartz rated it C and dismissed it as "another awful Bob Hope comedy."⁹ A scholarly study of Cold War-era Christmas films places it among the simpler 1949–1951 holiday pictures that attempted light social commentary and met only mediocre financial and critical success, as the blacklist's effects were still fresh in Hollywood.¹⁰ Reviewers have repeatedly expressed surprise that the film itself, despite introducing "Silver Bells," has not joined the ranks of standard Christmas movies, though it appears on lists of holiday comedies and was released on DVD by Shout! Factory in 2010 and on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in 2017.¹¹^•⁸ Hope and Maxwell reprised their roles for a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on 10 December 1951.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1950s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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