Word: kris
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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...
Miss O'Hara, outraged, sets the house psychiatrist (Porter Hall) on Kris Kringle, but "Mister Macy" calls off the goons when it develops that Kris has turned one of the most lucrative good-will tricks in commercial history. "Mister Gimbel" hurriedly returns the compliment-he and Mister Macy are even photographed shaking hands-and the whole Manhattan department-store trade glows with the new love-your-neighbor policy...
...villainous psychiatrist maneuvers Kris into a sanity trial, during which Attorney John Payne, a glad eye on Miss O'Hara, manages by elaborate legal flummery to have him declared competent. By the fadeout, not only the courts of New York State but 20th Century-Fox itself are ready to insist that there really is a Santa Claus, and that Mr. Gwenn...
...also preaches a strangely ambiguous moral. Kris Kringle inveighs against the commercialism which has perverted Christmas. But most of the wit and comedy in the show, all of the logic, and much of the sentiment, endorse the idea that faith, honesty, kindness, magnanimity and the innocence of the imagination are chiefly to be respected because no other kind of investment pays off a fraction so well, in hard cash and at the voting booths...
Nearly 10,000 Danes had shelled out 4.50 kroner ($1) apiece for a 78-page, 3,000-word guide to U.S.A.-Slang. The lexicographers: Danish Newsmen Victor Skaarup and Kris Winther. To keep up to the minute and sometimes an hour or so ahead, Skaarup and Winther had listened to U.S. newscasts and radio comedians, swapped letters with Variety's Editor Abel Green and studied his slangy tradepaper of "show biz." (Said Green, washing his hands of some of their definitions: "They're talking smörgasbord slanguage...