A Miracle on 42nd Street (1947)*

A little girl meets Santa Claus and everyone assumes he isn't really Santa Claus until a lot of people write a bunch of letters or something. Maybe they put Santa in jail? I think he rides a sleigh-float in a parade, and I'm like 90% sure the movie is in black-and-white.

Santa in his civvies.

* This movie is called Miracle on 34th Street. I was on the right island, at least.

Movies My Mother Remembers: Song of the South (1946)

Reportedly this is the first movie I saw in the theater (in its 1980 rerelease). Take it away, Mom:

I thought you'd like the cartoon characters zinging around the star's head as he sang, but you were not ready for it. There was one scene where a little boy pushed a little girl in a yellow dress into a big mud puddle, and you loudly and insistently kept asking me "Why did that boy push the girl into the mud??!" We had to leave.

Why? Why?!

Citizen Kane (1941)

Citizen Kane builds a newspaper empire and alienates people. Eventually he lives in a big castle. Everybody knows about "Rosebud" and the very, very end of the movie; what I'm less clear on is the rest of it. Isn't it sort of a mockumentary? Does he stand up for some kind of principles but in the end allow them to become compromised? I should know this movie better, and I remember thinking I should be enjoying it better, too. Greatest movie ever made or something—oh, well. I think I remember him yelling at a woman or being told off by a woman—probably both. Citizen Kane, you know so much, but the one thing you never learned was how to love.

This is what remembering Citizen Kane feels like.