A word for the child actor. From Jackie Coogan in Chaplin’s The Kid to Edmund Moeschke in Germany, Year Zero to Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker to Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird to Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon to Mohsen Ramezani in The Color of Paradise to Alex Edel in Millions (to pick just seven of hundreds), children have shown an eerie affinity for the camera, and vice versa. What’s that magic? Are stars really born, not made? Or is it the serendipity of the right kid in the right role under the right director? No idea. But of all the movie moppets, Margaret O’Brien had the earliest and most acute understanding of the screen’s demand for charm and craft. It’s said that when as director asked her to cry, she said, “Right eye or left?” She was terrif in Meet Me in St. Louis and Journey for Margaret, but I’m picking the 1948 Tenth Avenue Angel because this soapy Christmas drama has no reason for being other than to get its little star to cry. More than that: to doubt the goodness of her family and the existence of God. (This was way before Bresson and Bergman did their God movies.) Margaret, then 11, did it with her usual winsome brilliance. And I cried too. Right eye and left.
All-TIME 100 Movies
TIME's Richard Corliss updates our All-TIME 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923 — the beginning of TIME — with 20 new entries
Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S.
Full List
Behind the List
A - C
- Aguirre: The Wrath of God
- The Apu Trilogy
- The Awful Truth
- Baby Face
- Bande à part
- Barry Lyndon
- Berlin Alexanderplatz
- Blade Runner
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Brazil
- Bride of Frankenstein
- Camille
- Casablanca
- Charade
- Children of Paradise
- Chinatown
- Chungking Express
- Citizen Kane
- City Lights
- City of God
- Closely Watched Trains
- The Crime of Monsieur Lange
- The Crowd
D - F
G - J
K - M
N - P
Q - S
T - Z
Great Performances
Guilty Pleasures
- Gone With the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming, U.S.
- Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S.
- Sailor Beware, 1951, Hal Walker, U.S.
- Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France
- School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S
- There’s Something About Mary,1998, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, U.S.
- Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S.
- Gun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S.
- The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S.
- Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990, John Patrick Shanley, U.S.
10 Best Soundtracks
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