Tenth Avenue Angel

The folks who live in the teeming tenements lining Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue could sure use an angel. And they have one—Flavia Mills, a little girl with big dreams who touches the lives and hearts of everyone in her run-down neighborhood. Margaret O’Brien plays Flavia with the endearing earnestness that made her the leading child star of the 1940s. A host of MGM stalwarts take other roles: Angela Lansbury as Flavia’s aunt, Phyllis Thaxter as her mother, George Murphy as an ex-con hoping for a second chance, Connie Gilchrist as a kindly neighbor and Rhys Williams as a blind newsvendor robbed by hooligans who implicate Flavia in the crime. Roy Rowland, who directed O’Brien in Lost Angel and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, guides the story, which ends with a joyful Christmas miracle. And the cinematography is the work of Robert Surtees, who would go on to lens Ben-Hur, The Graduate and The Sting among other classics.