Tenth Avenue Angel

Tenth Avenue Angel is a film about growing up and also about the disadvantages of same. It's never easy to discover that family and friends are sometimes all too human.

Which is what happens to Margaret O'Brien as a little world she's created in her own mind. The biggest bit of disillusionment comes from George Murphy who is the fiancé of her aunt Angela Lansbury. True to the code of the street Murphy whose cab was used by holdup men clammed up and did nine months as an accessory. But young O'Brien has been told he's been on a trip around the world.

It's not easy with her parents either. Her father Warner Anderson is an out of work musician and her mother Phyllis Thaxter is having one difficult pregnancy. On Christmas as Thaxter is in labor, Margaret may have to face the possibility of losing her. That's never easy at any age.

Although at times Margaret O'Brien can be cloying and a bit much, in Tenth Avenue Angel she hits the mark of your heart strings. She put just the right amount of sentiment into her performance and face it, the film rises and falls on what she does on the screen and how you accept her.

Tenth Avenue Angel is a wonderful family film about a little girl's Christmas in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York. And it holds up well for today.

This is one of Margaret O'Brien's weaker films. She's the little girl that played in Meet Me In St. Louis, but although her character here is not as annoying as the precocious girl in Meet Me In St. Louis, she's still cloying and appears to have been surrounded by a wise family.

Margaret O'Brien was 9-10 years old here, this movie had had production problems which kind of ruined the film for her because at times, she doesn't look much like an 8-year-old. Though, I still loved her marvelous performance and the expressions and emotions she conveys are real.

This just strikes me as something that they have wasted Margaret's talent on, the director didn't seem to get her to perform her scenes as well as she did in other movies. And the script could've been rewritten in order for the movie to be a great one.

I saw this movie as a child, and of course I have a different perspective than I would have had as an adult. I never forgot that she doubted God; because her Mom had told her about untrue superstitions.

One user comment contains an error that should be rectified. The character of Steve, played by George Murphy, is not the child's (Flavia's) father. His original relationship to the family is unclear, but he's a potential uncle, and the point is that he is a big favorite of this little girl's. Flavia's father appears early in the film, very briefly. He appears to be a music teacher. Steve is unmarried, and one of the major themes in the movie concerns whether he and Susan (the unbelievably pretty Angela Landsbury) can build up a life together after he has been released from prison.

Maybe my tolerance for smaltz is higher, I don't find the film to be that cheezy or obvious. It's hard for children to know the difference between fact and fiction, how fiction is often truer in spirit than facts, and how stories help get us through rotten times. (If you notice, Flavia's mother uses stories mostly to console the child).

Christmas stories are supposed to be schamltzy, aren't they?

Warm film with the usual top MGM production values, strong cast.

When I finally saw this film I was surprised it was described as a "bomb" by Leonard Maltin. While it's not the greatest movie ever made, it's hardly a bomb, despite the problematic production history. Because retakes took so long, Margaret O'Brien is noticeably taller and older in some scenes than in others. The character's belief in fairy tales strains credulity in the scenes where little Margaret seems to be aging rapidly.

One could argue, as well, that, despite the hardships supposedly being endured by the characters in their poor New York neighborhood, at the height of the Great Depression, they seem reasonably well fed, dressed, and housed. The apartment where Flavia (O'Brien) lives is quite large, for example.

But there are some very true things in the film, the experience of being an only child, living among adults; the realities of readjustment for an ex-con (George Murphy). Many of the realities are not in the scenes or the lines, but in Margaret's and George Murphy's faces.

The cast is great and there's a nice Christmas atmosphere in the scenes that wrap up the story.