Pocketful of miracles - 1961

I like it, it's one of those Christmas-miracle story, where it all goes well and it ends in smile and tears in equal measure. It's also a Cinderella story, where Cinderella is an old, drunk beggar :-) Apple Annie (Bette Davis), the beggar walking the streets of New York selling apples, is transformed for a few days into a wealthy, respectable lady. The best part of it is of course Bette Davis.
Everyone knows her so I'm not saying anything new, but she really is great.
The story is simple: local gangster Dave the Dude believes his luck comes from the apples that Annie sells him. Annie is a poor old woman who has a daughter but was never married. The girl Louise has been educated in Spain and they've been writing each others letters. Annie always sent her all the money she could master, with the help of the other beggars , each of them giving her a part of their money. Annie pretended with Louise to be "somebody", and now Louise writes her that she's about to get married  to Carlos, the son of a Spanish Count, and the three of them are coming to New York to meet her. Panic! What is she going to do? Dude's girlfriend Elizabeth "Queenie" Martin wants to help her, so Dave puts Annie in a big apartment and Queenie comes with a whole staff of people to take care of her image and make her look beautiful and sofisticated. I didn't know they had gay-jokes back in 1961, but when Dave protests the hair-stylist can't go in the room with the others because he's a man, Queenie insists "believe me, it's okay".
Dave and Queenie also arrange a party full of people to announce the wedding, and choose a man to pretend to be her husband, since Annie had wrote to Louise about a pretended step-father.
In order to do all this, Dave has to stall and postpone a deal with a big dangerous gangster boss, and kidnap three reporters: this last thing causes trouble and the police are watching him, almost ruining Annie's party. Dave goes to the police to make a deal and is taken to the mayor and the governor. We don't know how but he tells them all about Annie and at the end they all attend the party and the Count is amazed at such important personalities coming to compliment Annie and her daughter. What is not known is how they were convinced to let Dave go without any charge after the party was over, as well as what happened afterwards of the big boss that waited all this time and kept waiting because it looks like Dave changed his mind since he talked to Queenie about their wedding in Maryland, so we don't know if he'll look for revenge or of someone will bust him, since I'd say the king definitely lost his face here, since he was kept waiting, he had to bend to Dave's conditions and terms, and yet he was dumped.
Peter Falk was the funny bit, almost every line of his was a laugh :-) My favourite was when Dave had thought of him for the husband-part, and he said his wife doesn't take it well about him going around marring other women, she's funny that way :lol: