Millionaire Michael O’Conner (Charles Ruggles) and his wife pack up their luggage and spend the winters down South in Virginia, away from the cold, and the 5th Avenue mansion they own in Manhattan. So first let’s get the plots out of the way. Both take place in New York during the holiday season, both feature kindly cherubic older men and both spread philosophies, though very different, on the goodness of man. While the stories are different, the two films do have some similarities. Who will grab the public’s imagination and more importantly their dollars? The two contenders were the now almost forgotten “It Happened on 5 th Avenue” and a film that would become a perennial holiday classic, “Miracle on 34 th Street.” Both placed ads in the New York Times weeks before they opened as if it were a preliminary for the main bout. In June of that year, two films were released within a week of each other. Apparently back in 1947 Hollywood thought it was a good idea to release Christmas films in the middle of the year instead of the holiday season.
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