time period?

If you are talking about the book, I have no idea. Check with Amazon. If you are talking about the movie, it can be "guestimated" according to common knowledge and the fashions of the actors.

Let's see what we can figure out.

There was no mention of "war" so it had to be after 1945.

Castro came along in 1959 and closed down Cuba for Americans.

So, we can narrow it to 1946 to 1958.

It is impossible to date Salvation Army garb without an historical record from them.

The clothing styles worn by the "civilian" women is definitely not of the 40s or even early 50s.

The dress syles are closer to 1956 - 1958.

So, it appears that the movie was set exactly the time it was filmed, 1955.

I lived in the mid-west at the time, and we were behind Hollywood as regards to fashions.

On stage, there is a lyric in "Take Back Your Mink" -- "That was late '48, I recall," so the show took place in the "present" of 1950.

In the film, that lyric was changed to remove the reference to 1948, so that it could be in the "present" of 1955.


I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.

Runyon's stories were set in the 1930s, in the Depression, but when the stage musical for 1950 premiere was written and composed, the time, if not the characters, was updated to 1950 (as DryToast mentions, one song has a line about something that happened in "late '48"). That's why there's a slight bit of anachronistic feel about the thing, because those Runyonesque characters didn't exist, or talk, exactly like that in the 1950s, but it still works fine.
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