Holiday Affair Mystery Masked Machine

Happy Holidays. :-)

The vintage sewing machine seen in 1949's Holiday Affair has intrigued me for close to a year now, judging from the recording date on my satellite TV device.

At a glance, the sewing machine is devoid of obvious maker tells, such as a name stenciled on the arm, or a maker's medallion badge on the pillar, but not so fast -- if you look closer, those details appear to have been literally masked.

The masking on the arm is a bit crude-looking. By contrast, the masking on the pillar looks perfect, albeit a bit large if the masker had done it to protect the medallion badge from a spray-painting of the body.

Why would the film makers do that?

Just dunno, but I do wonder whether this sewing machine might be a Singer model 99.

First, it's a portable. A lot of vintage Singer sewing machines could be bought as or converted to portable, but the model 99, as a three-quarters size machine, was really designed with portability in mind.

It has a forward-facing upper tension assembly, and a lever style stitch length mechanism on the pillar. Especially the specific style of the latter suggests either a later-submodel 66 or 99, possibly the 99-24.

The overall look of the sewing machine body seems a bit too stubby to be a 66, and the shape of the needlebar-containing part looks more like the 99 (hat tip to Nicholas Rain Noe).

Of course, this vintage sewing machine could be another make and model entirely.

Sigh. 'Tis a puzzlement. Marking this as an Unsolved Mystery.

IMAGE CREDITS:

Low-tech screen captures from a recording of the 20240124 showing of 1949's Holiday Affair on Turner Classic Movies.

REFERENCES:

Holiday Affair at Turner Classic Movies:

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/78191/holiday-affair#overview

Holiday Affair at Internet Movie Database:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041473/

A Visual Guide to Identifying Singers from Crappy Craigslist Photos, Part 5: Is It a 99?:

https://vssmb.blogspot.com/2011/08/visual-guide-to-identifying-singers_16.html

Singer Model 99-24 List of Parts:

https://maritime.org/doc/pdf/singer-99-24-parts.pdf