Daily Dialogue — December 21, 2011
SAWYER: What do you mean busting into my office like this?
KRIS: Are you a licensed psychiatrist?
SAWYER: What business is it of yours?
KRIS: I have great respect for psychiatry… and great contempt for meddling amateurs who go around practicing it. You have no more right to analyze Alfred… than a dentist has to remove a gallbladder!
SAWYER: I beg your pardon.
KRIS: Your job here, I understand, is to give intelligence tests. Pressing yourself off as a psychologist. You ought to be horsewhipped… taking a normal, impressionable boy like Alfred… and filling him up with complexes and phobias.
SAWYER: I think I’m better equipped to judge that than you are.
KRIS: Just because the boy wants to be kind to children… you tell him he has a guilt complex.
SAWYER: Sharing his delusion, you couldn’t possibly understand. The boy is definitely maladjusted, and I’m helping.
KRIS: Maladjusted?! You talk about maladjusted. It seems to me the patient is running the clinic here.
SAWYER: I won’t stand… Leave this office immediately.
KRIS: Now either you stop analyzing Alfred… or I go straight to Mr. Macy… and tell him what a malicious contemptible fraud you are.
SAWYER: Leave or I’ll have you thrown out.
KRIS: There’s only one way to handle a man like you. You won’t listen to reason. You’re heartless. You have no humanity.
SAWYER: Are you going to leave?
KRIS: Yes.
— Kris (Edmund Gwenn), Sawyer (Porter Hall), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), written for the screen by George Seaton, story by Valentine Davies
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is Christmas conflict. Today’s suggestion by Bill Weinberger.
Trivia: 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck was very much against making this film because he thought it too corny to succeed. He finally agreed to a medium-sized budget provided writer/director George Seaton would accept his next three assignments unconditionally. Seaton, who desperately wanted to get the picture made, agreed.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Santa reads a shrink the riot act! Perfectly awesome. Best line: You ought to be horsewhipped!”