The 25 most inspiring movies of all time

What are the most inspiring movies ever made? Check out our full list.

9. 'Miracle on 34th Street'

George Seaton's 1947 film centers on a mother, Doris, who works for Macy's (Maureen O'Hara) and her pragmatic daughter Susan (Natalie Wood). On Thanksgiving Day, a man named Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) discovers the man portraying Santa Claus is drunk and complains to Doris, who convinces him to play Santa Claus instead. When Kris goes to work at a Macy's store location, Doris and Susan begin wondering if he could possibly be the real Santa Claus.

The movie's poster was made with O'Hara and John Payne, who portrays Doris's love interest, in the foreground and Gwenn in the back because the head of 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, said the movie should come out in May, believing more people saw movies in the warmer months. The poster thus de-emphasized the Santa Claus angle of the story.

"Miracle" was actress Thelma Ritter's first film.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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