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In Portugal (where I'm from), Father's Day is celebrated on March 19. So, for this week's «Film Friday» I thought I'd bring you a film that features a father as its main character. Directed by Michael Curtiz, Life With Father (1947) follows stockbroker Clarence Day (William Powell), who strives to make his 1890s New York City household run as efficiently as his business. He and his wife Vinnie (Irene Dunne) have four sons. The eldest, Clarence, Jr. (Jimmy Lydon), is headed for Yale. John (Martin Milner), the next eldest, likes to invent things, while brother Whitney (Johnny Calkins) struggles to learn his catechism, and Harlan (Derek Scott), the youngest, is most interested in his dog. Knowing how much Clarence dislikes it when visitors stay in the house, Vinnie neglects to tell her husband that their cousin, Cora Cartwright (ZaSu Pitts), and her young companion, Mary Skinner (Elizabeth Taylor), will spend a week with them.   Irene Dunne, William Powell, Jimmy Lydon a...

Directed by George Seaton, Miracle on 34th Street (1947) begins when Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is persuaded by Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara), the special events director at Macy's department store in New York City, to play Santa Claus in their Thanksgiving Day Parade. He does such a good job that he is hired to as the store Santa during the holiday season. While he is successful, Doris learns that he has been directing clients to other stores and claiming that he is Santa Claus. Meanwhile, Doris's neighbour and friend, attorney Fred Gailey (John Payne), takes her skeptical young daughter, Susan (Natalie Wood), to see Santa at the store. Doris has raised Susan not to believe in fairy tales, but her lack of faith is shaken when she sees Kris conversing in Dutch with an orphan girl from the Netherlands who does not know English. Although Doris asks him to stop telling people that he is not really Santa Claus, Kris continues insisting that he is. Worried that he is delusi...