25 Days of Christmas | Miracle on 34th street, 1947

Miracle on the 34th Street | 1947

Although it's clearly a Christmas film, this one
opened in the summer because the studio believed
people would be more inclined to go to the movies
while it was warm. That's why they hid the fact
that it's a Christmas movie and the
original posters have Doris and Fred in the front,
with barely any references to Santa or Christmas
at all!. It's a nice yellow (summery)  poster... 

"Christmas is not just a day. It’s a frame of mind."

Many Christmas movies sometimes have a mysterious secondary character that no one has seen before but who seems to know everybody around and invariably makes everything better just by being there. That character is often Santa Claus in disguise (or sometimes an angel), walking among ordinary people. Miracle on the 34th street begins with Santa Claus walking across the streets of New York, but he doesn’t seem too worried about disguises… In fact he gives himself the trouble of knocking on the wondow of a shop that’s closed for business just to explain to the employee who’s fixing the decorations on the window that the reindeers placed in front of Santa’s sleigh are incorrectly arranged! After all, Comet should be on the right! Wherever he goes he has no problem saying that he’s the real Santa indeed… And it doesn’t matter either because no one believes him.

And he doesn’t stop there. He walks among the people who will be part of the parade that is to take place soon and he is most distressed when he realizes that the actor who’s supposed to be playing Macy’s Santa is drunk! That’s absurd! So he looks for Doris, the woman who’s organizing the parade, introduces himself as Kris Kringle and presents a complaint. Doris is exhasperated! She was already juggling dozens of things by herself without having to worried to a passed out Santa on one of the cars… But mr. Kringle even looks a bit like Santa, and when he accepts her request to play Santa instead, it seems like things will turn out allright...

Kris is very disheartened with everything he sees in New York city… Christmas has become a purely commercial date, it’s lost it’s meaning. Christmas, he say, is not just a day, it’s a frame of mind! And that frame of mind has been lost… he needs to do something about it.

An oportunity presents itself when they decide to hire him to be Macy’s Santa at the shop for the season, after the success he was at the parade. “He’s a born salesman” they say, unaware that such mentality is precisely the type of thing Santa won’t stand for. It’s Doris herself who hires him, in spite of the fact that she thinks he’s a bit eccentric.

Doris is a young divorcee who’s raising a daughter by herself in a small New York apartment… She’s grown to be a sceptical woman, somewhat stoic and she does everything in her power to raise her daughter, Suzie, the same way: “That's right. We should be realistic and completely truthful with our children and not have them growing up believing in a lot of legends and myths like Santa Claus, for example.”

 As a result, Suzie is a rather serious little girl, very sceptical, and very mature for her own age… That surprises Fred Gailey a great deal… He’s a neighbour who carries a torch for Dories and offers to look after the little girl while her mum is away organizing the Christmas parade. They have the most interesting conversation about fairy tales:

FRED (Pointing at a big balloon shaped like a baseball player): He certainly is a giant, isn't heSUZIE: Not really. There are no giants, Mr. Gailey. FRED: Maybe not now, Suzie... but in olden days, there were a lot of... What about the giant that Jack killed? SUZIE: Jack? Jack who? FRED: "Jack and the Beanstalk." SUZIE: I never heard of that. FRED: You must've heard that. You've just forgotten. It's a fairy tale. SUZIE: Oh, one of those. I don't know any. FRED: Your mother and father must have told you a fairy tale. SUZIE: No. My mother thinks they're silly.I don't know whether my father thinks they're silly or not. I never met my father. My father and mother were divorced when I was a baby.

Fred e Suzie... On the left they're watching the parade together... The other images show Fred, Suzie and Santa... 

Fred doesn’t quite agree with Doris’ take on this… She even gets mad at him when he brings Suzzie to the store at her request and decides to stand in line with her so the little girl can talk to Santa Claus… The precocious Suzie says there’s no point in meeting an actor impersonating Santa, but mr. Gailey doesn’t fret, he just says she might feel different when she talks to the man. And mr. Kringle is very convincing indeed… He even lets Suzie give a little tug to his beard so she can see the beard and the whiskers are real! And her mother pulls her away from the line in a hurry...

 “I tell her Santa Claus is a myth, you bring her here and she sees hundreds of gullible children meets a very convincing old man with real whiskers. This sets up a very harmful mental conflict within her. What is she going to think? Who is she going to believe? And by filling them full of fairy tales they grow up considering life a fantasy instead of a reality. They keep waiting for Prince Charming to come along.” 

 Fred is desolated for having upset Doris. He in love with her but he’s about to lose hopes to win over her heart… He’s got his heart in the right place, and when it turns out that mr. Kringle needs a place to stay, Fred offers to have him in his home. When Kris realizes that Fred is about to give up on Doris, he decides to interfere. He is decided to bring the Christmas spirit back to Doris and Suzie’s lives and Fred will be his partner in this enterprise

KRIS: You're right about Mrs. Walker.A little more effort and she might crawl out of that shell. Take her to dinner, the theater.FRED: I've tried that. She's always too busy with her job.KRIS: Try a little harder.Those two are lost souls. It's up to us to help them. I'll take care of Suzie if you take care of her mother.FRED:  It's a deal

Fred is my favourite character in the story. He didn’t mean no harm by taking Suzie to see Santa, he’s just that kind of a guy who believes in there should be a little fantasy in one’s life to make it worth living. He believes in magic and in the Christmas spirit. And when the time comes when mr. Kringle is placed on trial for his wild claims to be the real Santa Claus, Fred presents himself as the deffence attorney, determined to prove to a jury that Kris is who he says he is indeed…

Miracle on the 34th street is a Christmas classic… The script is incredible and in fact, it did win the Oscar for best original script that year. The criticism to the materialistic aspects of Christmas is but the most superficial layer of the story. When Kris is placed on trial, it is Christmas itself that faces judgement: everything it represents and the idea our society makes of it. It says a lot about the way our world works that we are all willing to use images of Santa claus to sell merchandise but when the real one comes along we call psychiatrists and throw him in jail…

 And Fred does wonderfully as the defence attorney. He’s a guy who believes in Santa even more than the little Suzie, but his arguments don’t reflect that dreamy personality at all! They are arguments of authority that speak to the things society believed in and valued in his time: governmental authority and the words of important businessmen (like Macy’s owner, for instance). That is wonderful because Fred doesn’t come across as an overgrown child at any point. He is a man, who understands the way the world works, but his spirit hasn’t been broken by it. He stands for what he believes in.

 DORIS: But you can't possibly prove he's Santa Claus. FRED: Why not? You saw Macy and Gimbel shaking hands. That wasn't possible either, but it happened. It's the best defense I can use. Completely logical and completely unexpected. DORIS: And completely idiotic. What about your bosses Haislip and Mackenzie and the rest? What do they say? FRED: That I'm jeopardizing the prestige and dignity of an old, established law firm and either I drop this impossible case immediately or they will drop me. I beat them to it. I quit. DORIS: Fred, you didn't. FRED: Of course I did. I can't let Kris down. He needs me,and all the rest of us need him. DORIS: Darling, he's a nice old man and I admire you for wanting to help him but you've got to be realistic and face facts. You can't just throw your career away because of a sentimental whim. FRED: But I'm not throwing my career away. DORIS: If Haislip feels that way so will every other law firm. FRED: I'm sure they will. I'll open my own office. DORIS: What kind of cases will you get? FRED: Probably people like Kris who are being bullied. That's the only fun in law anyway. If you believe in me and have faith in me everything will… You don't have any faith in me, do you?DORIS: It's not about faith. It's just common sense. Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to. FRED: It's not just Kris that's on trial. It's everything he stands for. It's kindness, joy, love, and all other intangibles. DORIS: Fred, you're talking like a child. You're living in a realistic world Those lovely intangibles aren't worth much. You don't get ahead that way. FRED: That all depends on what you call getting ahead. Evidently, we have different definitions. (…) Someday,you're going to find out that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover they're the only things that are worthwhile.

Fred in action as a lawyer. Fred and Doris and on the right, Fred depicting genuine affection for Suzie - he's quite fond of the little girl. 

At some point, even Kris gives up, when he realizes that they are determined to send him to a psychiatric hospital and that Doris never really believed him, she was just humouring his as she would have a senile old man. He is sure that if the selfish dishonest men out there are healthy he must in fact be insane. He fails his psychiatric exam on purpose giving absurd answers to the questions (like stating that the first president of the United States was Calvin Coolidge and not George Washington).

That was an exaggeration but it’s also a well placed criticism on the way our psychiatric system works… Kris passed the psych exams several times before failing so blatantly on purpose and that was enough for the doctors to lock him away. That speaks to the eagerness of the psychiatrists of the time to lock people away in mental health institutions. And to how often people who are supposed to keep their minds opened (like scientists, for instance) are actually some of the most intolerant people of all. After all, none of them was ever willing to pay attention for long enough to realize the man was faking bad results on purpose… It is a criticism of how much it depends on simplistic ways to categorize people into narrow categories.

The dialogue between Santa Claus and Alfred, a chubby seventeen year old who enjoyes playing Santa is also a criticism on the mental health system, of how each and every variation on normality is classified as an illness or a disease:

ALFRED: Well, remember I was telling you how I like to play Santa at the "Y" on Christmas and give out packages to the young kids? I was telling that to Mr. Sawyer, see and he says that's very bad.(…) He's a psychologist.

KRIS: Ohh, that's a debatable poin Why is it bad, does he say?

ALFRED: He says guys who dress like Santa Claus, see and give presents away do it because when they was young they must have did something bad and they feel guilty about it. So now they do something they think is good to make up for it. It's what he calls a guilt complex.

KRIS: How old are you, Alfred?

ALFRED: Seventeen.

KRIS: Seventeen. Doesn't seem you've had time to be guilty of anything except overeating
ALFRED: (…) Oh, he knows what he's talking about. He's been studying that stuff for a long time.

Nowadays Kris’ absurd answers to the psych tests and the whole psych ward arch of the movie may be seen as a comic relief, but in 1948 the United States was deeply immersed in the psychiatric reform and the interpretation of this script would never be so naive as to ignore the frequently exposed abuses committed by psychiatric doctors all over the world.

When Kris quits and answers the questions incorrectly, it’s Fred who comes to the rescue and brings up yet another of the themes in the movie: How sometimes we have to hang on, not for our sake but for others…

“But, Kris, you can't just think of yourself. What happens to you matters to a lot of people. People like me, who believe in what you stand for, and people like Suzie, who are just beginning to. You can't quit. You can't let them down.”

The most wonderful Christmas moment on the film happens when Kris is at Macy’s sitting in Santa Claus’ chair and a mother brings a little girl forward. A child she’s adopted. But the girl can’t speak any English. She is Dutch. She had been living in an orphan’s home in Rotterdam… It’s clear she’s an orphan of the war… And that too must have spoken personally to the audience in 1948. The world was barely out of the second World War and there was an abundance of European orphans everywhere some of whom were adopted by American parents… And it’s in accordance with the message against the commercialization of Christmas that Kris Kringle should speak all languages and belong to all people…

The romance in the movie is wonderfully well-written. There are barely any kissing scenes or any openly romantic scenes for that matter, but there’s tension between Fred and Doris all along. In addition, his affection for Suzie is sincere, and the way he likes the little girl for herself, and not only for her mother is clear on how, for instance, he jeopardizes the opinion Doris makes of him to take Suzie to see Santa Claus.

It’s a wonderful movie, the story feels fresh and original, the themes are important and thoroughly discussed and the characters are incredibly well built. Even the most far-fetched arcs in the movie somehow feel very believable and even when it seems that the movie has reached an end, there are still more surprises to come...

Miracle on 34th Street | 1947 | Directed by George Seaton | Written by George Seaton | Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, Natalie Wood, Edmund Gwenn, Porter Hall, Gene Lockhart