Miracle on 34th Street
Twentieth Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck insisted on releasing this quintessential yuletide film in the summer, supposedly reasoning that more people go to the movies then. Maybe he was right, since the film has become a perennial crowd-pleaser. It certainly features the ideal Kris Kringle in Edmund Gwenn, not to mention a fiery heroine in Maureen O'Hara and an eerily precocious Natalie Wood as the sophisticated child who demands rational proof that Gwenn is who he says he is. There's a delightful logic to the film's still-sharp satire of both commercial culture and the justice system. (Bonus points for noticing that the political adviser who argues that civic and economic society would collapse without Santa Claus is played by William Frawley, the future Fred Mertz.) The film's unusual message: Faith may be incompatible with reason, but it can be good for business.
