A second- or third-string feel-good movie trundled out perennially as the holidays draw nigh, Tenth Avenue Angel will charm or irritate viewers in proportion to their responses to Margaret O'Brien, who stays front and center throughout. Best known for stealing Meet Me in St. Louis away from Judy Garland, she was 11 years old at the time of this, her 17th film role, and her precocious tomboy routine was running on fumes.
The story's set in the Depression year of 1936, in the shadow of the El in Hell's Kitchen, where O'Brien lives in proud poverty with her parents and aunt (Angela Lansbury). Lansbury's set to marry George Murphy, who's been `away;' O'Brien thinks he was in Australia, although he was doing a stretch up the river. Coming to learn the truth over the course of the movie, and in the process discarding other falsehoods foisted on childhood, ushers her from girlish innocence to the dawning of grown-up wisdom. It's that kind of movie.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but....
In almost a counterrevolutionary movement against the cynical world-view of newly-hatched film noir, the late 40s also saw a spate of movies whose view of American family life was glacéed in sentimentality. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (which this movie resembles, with petty crime instead of alcoholism) was one; that canonized Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life another. (I Remember Mama was the pick of the litter.) Struggling to make ends meet was gift-wrapped as ennobling, good for stiffening the backbone; hardship never bred discord or dysfunction. Maybe being poor once had its plus side, when most people were barely staying afloat in their small and leaky crafts. Or, if not, maybe the myth was necessary. At any rate, most of us will no doubt be finding out the truth for ourselves in very short order.
The story's set in the Depression year of 1936, in the shadow of the El in Hell's Kitchen, where O'Brien lives in proud poverty with her parents and aunt (Angela Lansbury). Lansbury's set to marry George Murphy, who's been `away;' O'Brien thinks he was in Australia, although he was doing a stretch up the river. Coming to learn the truth over the course of the movie, and in the process discarding other falsehoods foisted on childhood, ushers her from girlish innocence to the dawning of grown-up wisdom. It's that kind of movie.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but....
In almost a counterrevolutionary movement against the cynical world-view of newly-hatched film noir, the late 40s also saw a spate of movies whose view of American family life was glacéed in sentimentality. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (which this movie resembles, with petty crime instead of alcoholism) was one; that canonized Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life another. (I Remember Mama was the pick of the litter.) Struggling to make ends meet was gift-wrapped as ennobling, good for stiffening the backbone; hardship never bred discord or dysfunction. Maybe being poor once had its plus side, when most people were barely staying afloat in their small and leaky crafts. Or, if not, maybe the myth was necessary. At any rate, most of us will no doubt be finding out the truth for ourselves in very short order.