George Seaton (1947)
I’d always thought it was a children’s film but it turns out to be anything but. It’s about proving the existence (or otherwise) of Santa Claus so I guess it would be alarming to infant believers and ridiculous to kids who’ve just grown out of the idea. The Santa on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York is drunk if not disorderly. A distinguished elderly man with a white beard complains to the event director Doris Walker that the sot is bringing the name of Santa (‘my name’) into disrepute and the anxious Doris persuades the old gentleman to take over. He does the job so well he’s hired to continue as Santa at Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street – but he’s a Santa with a difference. If a child wants something that Macy’s don’t stock, he advises the parents to try another store instead – even if it’s Gimbels, Macy’s arch-rival at the time[1], on 33rd Street. The unconventional approach of the old gentleman, who insists that his name is Kris Kringle, proves so commercially innovative and headline-getting, however, that before long Gimbels are imitating it. (It’s remarkable testimony to the self-confidence of both Macy’s and Gimbels at the time that they allowed their names to be used in this way.)
In the meantime, however, Doris – who doesn’t hold with her daughter believing in Father Christmas, let alone with Kris believing he is Santa – arranges for him to be ‘psychologically evaluated’. He passes with flying colours but antagonises the psychologist, Granville Sawyer, by calling into question the latter’s own mental health. When Kris learns that Sawyer has told Alfred, a teenager who sweeps the floors at Macy’s, that he’s got mental problems, he lets fly at Sawyer verbally and bops him on the head with his walking cane. In revenge, Sawyer gets Kris confined to a mental hospital. Kris has been lodging with Fred Gailey, a young lawyer who lives in the same block as, and is very keen on, Doris. Fred successfully applies for a court hearing to prove Kris’s sanity and unique identity. There are happy endings all round. Miracle on 34th Street is a very successful mixture of conservative sentimentality and light-hearted, sharp-eyed satire. On the one hand, the rational, divorced, working woman Doris has to learn the error of her ways, and psychology is beyond the pale. On the other, Kris Kringle is vindicated in court through a comical convergence of the self-interested strategies of commercial competitors, ambitious local politicos and workers at the New York post office, who want to get rid of thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus.
Edmund Gwenn, with a George Bernard Shaw beard, is splendid as Kris Kringle. He plays the role with great wit and charm but dead straight, steering well clear of the roguishness that could have made it insufferable: Gwenn is so good that he’s thoroughly believable both as someone deeply delusional and as Father Christmas. (He deservedly won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The film also won writing Oscars for George Seaton and Valentine Davis.) Doris’s young daughter Susan, whom Kris helps to rediscover her belief in Santa, is played by an eight-year-old Natalie Wood with startling competence and precision. She does great things with her eyes and with bubble gum: it’s just a pity that you can’t watch her without being reminded of the adult performer she became. Maureen O’Hara, as Doris, could use some of Wood’s liveliness. O’Hara is lethally dull and John Payne as Frank is likeable mainly because he’s so ordinary – but their romance never feels central to the story anyway. There are some highly enjoyable turns in the minor roles – notably Gene Lockhart as the anxiously droll New York Supreme Court judge, William Frawley as his cigar-smoking political adviser, Jerome Cowan as the harassed district attorney prosecuting Kris Kringle, and Porter Hall as the egregious Sawyer (with a very funny shadow movement signalling his own psychological hang-ups). Thelma Ritter, as a weary shopper at Macy’s, is on screen for only a couple of minutes but they’re a couple of cherishable minutes. Jack Albertson’s appearance is even briefer but he’s great as a quick-thinking post office employee.
23 December 2010
[1] The rivalry was so notorious that, according to Wikipedia, the phrase “Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” was once general parlance in the US ‘as a put-off to inquiring people, the implication being that a company does not give information out to its competitors’. Gimbels folded in the 1980s.
