Miracle on 34th Street
Just about any Christmas movie you see now is littered with schmaltz more than sincerity- like pretty much everything else about the holiday, it’s become commercialized to the point of lacking in honest reflection of the holiday. It’s been that way for a while, which is why some of the best films set around the holiday- “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story,” Chuck Jones’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas”- feel like relics of a bygone era, and not just because they all come from a very different era. George Seaton’s “Miracle on 34th Street” is in the same vein, and it succeeds because it comes with probably the best message of all- that even as adults, we could use a little imagination and faith in our lives.
I think I really started to invest in watching Christmas movies every year- at least, my favorites- after my grandfather Mitchell died in 2020. Even after we moved to Georgia in 1988, spending the holiday with grandparents and family was the order of the day, and while we would watch some movies, we had family to give us a sense of the spirit of the holiday. When it became just my parents and I, we would go through the motions, but by that point, I was also becoming more independent and working on Christmas Day, so we wouldn’t spend a lot of time together. It was at this point I would finally see “It’s a Wonderful Life” in its entirety, and it had a profound impact on me. I wouldn’t say “Miracle on 34th Street” had the same impact on me, but in a year of profound anxiety and stress, it hit the right buttons for me.
The story by Valentine Davies, which Seaton adapts into the film’s screenplay, is a fairly simple one, riffed many times since- it begins when the Santa at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade is stinking drunk, and the organizer of the parade (Doris Walker, played by Maureen O’Hara) has to find a replacement. There happens to be one walking around in an old man (Edmund Gwenn) whom we’ve seen berate a store owner who was placing the reindeer in their Santa display in the wrong flight order. He turns out to be a great, and enthusiastic, choice, so much so that Macy’s wants to hire him for their store Santa this year. When he begins suggesting people go to other stores when Macy’s doesn’t have what they want, they aren’t quite sure what to do. It’s in this man’s nature to make sure the children get what they want, though, as his name is Kris Kringle, and he claims to really be Santa Claus. Doris isn’t quite sure what to make of this, especially with her daughter, Susan (Natalie Wood). Doris has raised Susan to be logical and rational, so she doesn’t believe in Santa; Kris throws a monkey wrench in that belief, though. It’s not long before the case in thrown to the courts, with Doris’s lawyer neighbor, Fred Gailey (John Payne), having the unenviable position of trying to convince a court that Kris is, indeed, who he claims he is.
“Miracle on 34th Street” contains many of the narrative tropes that the Christmas movie industry would lean hard on, in a mismatched romantic pair with different ideas on the holiday, a kid, the belief in the spirit of Christmas, and even the question of whether Santa Claus exists being a part of the equation. What a lot of films don’t have is this film’s sincerity in the ideas of helping those who need it, instilling children with a faith in the spirit of Christmas, and being open to the spirit of the holiday. The end of the movie, with Santa letters being sent to court to prove Kris is, indeed, Santa, is justifiably famous, and you can’t help but get choked up by it. There’s an authenticity to the emotions in this film, and the dilemmas the characters are caught up in, that it makes it easy to fall in love with this story, and see it as one of the great Christmas movies because it understands why Santa Claus, and the holiday spirit, is important for us to keep with us, even if we no longer believe in Santa. I can’t help but appreciate that.
