Miracle on 34th Street (G)
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Caution: potential spoilers.

This came out in 1947, and I must have seen bits of it on TV at some point, but I didn't really watch the whole thing until 2014. I'm really glad to have finally seen it, because it's quite a charming and funny movie. Also I want to mention that the DVD I watched included a 5 minute promo film... not really a trailer, because it doesn't actually show or tell us anything about the movie. But I found it incredibly amusing.

Anyway, it starts on Thanksgiving, when a woman named Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara) is directing the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. A seemingly random old man (who audiences have already been led to believe is the real Santa Claus) informs her that the man playing Santa Claus in the parade is drunk. She fires him, and since the guy who told her about this looks the part, she hires him as a replacement Santa. (He calls himself Kris Kringle.) And he works out so well that she later hires him to play Santa in Macy's itself. Meanwhile, Doris has a neighbor named Fred Gailey, who has recently befriended her daughter, Susan (an adorable young Natalie Wood). Doris had divorced her husband (whom we never meet) when Susan was just a baby, and so Susan has never met her father. (Seems a bit odd to me that just because her parents are divorced, she'd never meet her father, but that's not really important to the story.) Anyway, it seems Fred is genuinely fond of Susan, but he had an ulterior motive in befriending her: he was hoping to start dating Doris (which he admits to her). And his plan works.

Doris has always taught Susan not to believe in things like Santa Claus, or fantasy stories in general. (This is apparently because Doris wants to spare her daughter the same disappointment she herself felt when she discovered her ex-husband wasn't the sort of "Prince Charming" little girls learn to wish for, by believing in fairy tales.) So, Susan is a very serious girl, who doesn't even want to play pretend games that other children her age play. But Kris and Fred both try to change her mind, with some success. Susan even begins to believe that Kris really is Santa, which troubles her mother. But Doris is even more troubled when she learns that Kris actually believes himself to be the real Santa Claus... which obviously means he must be insane. So she tries to fire him. However, Mr. Macy himself wants to keep Kris as an employee, because a policy Kris had instituted had become very popular with the public. When Macy's didn't have something a customer wanted (or even not the best version of a particular product), he'd tell them where they could find what they wanted... at competing stores. And this kind of honesty made the public appreciate Macy's, therefore turning them into loyal customers. (It kind of reminds me of the insurance company Progressive, which I think is interesting because at one point Susan said she attends a progressive school.) Still, Doris and another employee of Macy's are concerned about Kris's sanity, so they have him tested by a psychologist who works at the store. And the psychologist takes an immediate dislike to Kris. Kris himself comes to dislike the psychologist later, when he learns about obviously erroneous psychological evaluations he'd made of yet another employee of the store.

Anyway... the psychologist eventually gets Kris committed to Bellevue, at which point Fred, who happens to be a lawyer, decides to represent him. And the judge who's hearing the case is advised by his political consultant that it would endanger his reelection if he put Santa away permanently. Still, he has no choice but to base his decision on which lawyer makes the better case. And Kris doesn't really help himself when he continues to claim, under oath, that he is Santa Claus. And the hearing reaches its climax on Christmas Eve. The interesting thing about this movie is... it never really does prove that Kris is Santa Claus, or even that Santa Claus is a real person. Both ideas are eventually accepted by the court, and the ways in which this happened were clever and amusing, but also entirely too convenient, and pretty clearly meaningless. Which means... we're left wondering if Kris really is Santa Claus or not. Of course, it's very nice to believe that he is Santa, but if we choose to believe he's actually insane, it doesn't really matter, because either way he's a kind and harmless man who brings joy and holiday spirit to lots of people.

There was a remake in 1994.