“Look How Much Fun We’re Having!”: Miracle on 34th Street

[This article was written by “Cliffy,” a lawyer and film buff living outside Washington, D.C. — ed.]

The most striking thing about Miracle on 34th Street is what isn’t included, or really even mentioned, in a movie that came out in 1947. But we’ll get back to that.

In this 20th Century Fox family classic written and directed by George Seaton, Maureen O’Hara plays Mrs. Walker, an unromantic and take-charge professional woman in the corporate office of Macy’s Department Store. (Her first name is Doris, but I don’t think it’s ever mentioned in dialogue — she’s not a first-name kind of person.) Mrs. Walker is in charge of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to welcome Santa Claus, but things look to go off the rails when she is informed that the actor playing Santa is drunk. Fortunately for Mrs. Walker, the person who gave her this information is a kindly old man with a long white beard (Edmund Gwenn), who Mrs. Walker presses into service as a replacement without, at first, realizing that this nice old man actually believes himself to be Kris Kringle.

Back at Mrs. Walker’s apartment, we are introduced to her adorable daughter Susan (an eight-year-old Natalie Wood who is so cute you want to eat her up) and Fred Gayle, the charming attorney who lives next door and has befriended Susan in an effort to make time with her mother. Susan doesn’t believe in Santa Claus or fairy tales; the unhappily divorced Mrs. Walker doesn’t want her daughter living in a fantasy world and making the same mistakes she did.

Eventually Mrs. Walker learns of Kris’s strange beliefs and considers giving him the boot. But in the meantime he has made himself indispensable to Macy’s by establishing a wildly popular customer-first policy, making sure the shoppers get exactly the toys their kiddies want whether Macy’s sells them or not. So Mrs. Walker installs Kris at Fred’s apartment so she can chaperone him on the way to and from work. And while there he begins to teach Susan how to be a child.

Eventually calamity strikes, and Kris is sent to Bellevue for being a nutcase. The final third of the movie is the well-known trial sequence, where Judge Harper (Gene Lockhart) must decide whether Kris is dangerous and must be permanently committed. Fred takes the case and gets Kris sprung when he successfully proves that Kris isn’t insane — because he really is Santa Claus.

Let’s get this out of the way: Kris is not Santa Claus. He’s just a nice old man with whiskers. You can be forgiven for thinking he is the first time you see this movie, or if you saw it as a child. Maybe. But if you’ve seen it twice, and you still think so, you need to hand in your cinéaste card. The titular miracle isn’t an act of magic or of god. Mrs. Walker is right — that stuff is all a fairy tale. The miracle is that everyone’s own self interest comes together to do good. Mrs. Walker’s colleague Shellhammer wants to get ahead at work. Fred wants to make a name for himself as a lawyer. Judge Harper wants to get re-elected. The political boss also wants to get him re-elected. The D.A. doesn’t want to disappoint his son. Mr. Macy doesn’t want to anger the public. And the Post Office wants to get rid of their junk. 

And this is why this film is such an interesting document of 1947. Less than two years before this movie came out our boys were still fighting in the Pacific Theater and demobilization in Europe was just starting. But you wouldn’t know it from this picture. Fred, certainly, and maybe the D.A. or Shellhammer were the right age to have served, but that is never mentioned. Mrs. Walker is a divorcée, not a widow. There are only two brief allusions to the time period, both easy to miss if you’re not thinking about the context. As Kris bemoans the increasing commercialism of Christmas, his friend, the young janitor Alfred, commiserates “Yeah, there’s a lot of bad -isms in this woild, but commercialism is one of the woist!” (I can think of a couple that are even worse.) And when a Dutch war orphan sits on Kris’s lap, her adoptive mother says she has been living in an orphanage since “you know.” But in a different time, “you know” could have been anything.

And this, thus, is the message of this film. It’s not that Doris is wrong about the unhappy truths of the world. But if we all decide to put them behind us and move forward, making room for a little grace and a little imagination, we can conjure for ourselves a more pleasant existence than the mundane — and occasionally horrific — one in which we actually live. I can’t say I’m convinced. But when Kris sings with the Dutch girl, I get awfully close.