Word: gwenn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Miracle on 34th Street (20th Century-Fox) is brought about by a well-beavered, somewhat pixillated old gentleman (Edmund Gwenn) who calls himself Kris Kringle and isn't kidding. So far as he is concerned, he is the original, the one & only Santa Claus. As such, he is well pleased to take the throne in R. H. Macy & Co.'s toy department. His employer (Maureen O'Hara) regards him as a harmless old lunatic and her grimly progressive little girl (Natalie Wood) is sure he is an outright fraud. Kris stakes his earthly failure or success...
...soapboxing for Life, Growth, Fulfillment and the Future. They set these abstractions up in an English country house, and arrange a match against Stagnation, Snobbishness, the Status Quo, Prudishness and Decay. On Life's side, along with a young flyer, is the young heroine's father (Edmund Gwenn), a rum-soaked old sea captain full of Elizabethan gusto; on Stagnation's side is the heroine's aunt (Catherine Willard), a snooping spinster full of Victorian gentility. The trouble with such highly contrasted symbols is that they themselves are virtually burlesques: almost everything the old maid does...
While it gets off to a slow start, "You Touched me" succeeds very well as comedy, mostly because of Edmund Gwenn, but where "The Glass Menagerie" had a well-knit cast, Gwenn pulls the cast of "You Touched Me" a little off-balance. And unlike "The Glass Menagerie," the more topical new prodigy of Tennessee Williams types its characters...
Thinking he has found the kindness in his foster sister (Mariapne Stewar), he makes her his target for tonight, supported by the bibulous ex-sea captain (Gwenn) who brought him home from the orphanage...
...behest of this alter ego, the girl kills her fiance. Then she goes toward the chair almost eagerly, in her desire to liquidate her inner devil-while the lawyer-lover, an ingenious psychiatrist (Edmund Gwenn), and the governor of the state stand by, wondering what to do. The psychiatrist finally does plenty...