Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young woman returns to her hometown for the holidays, expecting to spend some quiet time with her family, and winds up meeting a handsome man, eventually falling in love against the backdrop of various tinsel-strewn Christmas activities. If I understand my Hallmark and Netflix movies correctly, usually this man is some manner of humble townie, with a masculine yet unthreatening, maybe even darling, profession. But what if he was also an out-of-towner, and his job was insurance investigator, and the tinsel-strewn Christmas activities included figuring out whether a recent death in the girl’s hometown was a suicide, as reported, or actually a murder? At this point, maybe it sounds as if Cover-Up, a 1949 Christmas-set thriller, is not quite the model of holiday romance that it could have been. But part of what makes this noirish, underseen holiday movie so much
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