12 Movies of Christmas: Miracle on 34th Street
So we’ve reached the final article of our 12 Movies of Christmas and we’ve covered quite a lot of ground in that time, from spending “Life Day” with Wookiees in the Star Wars Holiday Special to the spooky old tradition of telling scary tales on long cold winter’s nights with the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. We’ve also seen a variety of Santas along the way, from the psychotic to the alcoholic, but what better place to wrap up than with a film that genuinely asks the question: Do you believe in Santa Claus?
We’re talking about George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street which, like Die Hard almost 40 years later, was a bonafide Christmas classic released in the middle of the summer months. This is an altogether more traditional festive treat, however, and one that asks some surprisingly modern questions about the jolly fellow and his relationship with commercialism.
The story opens on Thanksgiving as everyone is eagerly awaiting the Macy’s parade through the streets of New York City. When the film was released in 1947, the annual event had only just resumed after a pause during World War II when the rubber and helium used for the signature giant balloons were deemed critical for the war effort.
The guy hired to play Santa during the parade turns up drunk, which proves another headache for busy event organiser and single mum Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara). Luckily for her, she finds a perfect ready-made replacement: a kind elderly gentleman who calls himself Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn).
Kris is such a success that he is immediately hired to play Santa in the toy department of Macy’s store on 34th Street. Despite receiving instructions to cross-sell products the store wants to flog, Kris is more interested in fulfilling the kiddy’s wishes and sending their harried mums to rival stores instead. This potentially sackable offence turns out to drive Macy’s profits even higher, but it also combines with Kris’s insistence that he’s the real thing to raise lingering doubts about his mental well-being.
Meanwhile, we also meet Doris’s level-headed daughter Susan (an eight-year-old Natalie Wood) whom Doris has raised not to believe in fairytales, myths, and all that other good stuff kids tend to enjoy when their imaginations are at their most fertile - she doesn’t even play make-believe with the other children in her apartment building. Susan gradually starts believing in Santa, however, when attorney Fred Gailey (John Payne), Doris’s friendly neighbour, takes Suzie to see Kris doing his thing at Macy’s.
Kris is just beginning to break down the skepticism of mother and daughter when an altercation with Macy’s mean-spirited store shrink lands him in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue hospital. With commitment papers pending, Gailey takes Kris’s case in a high-profile mental competency hearing. But can he really prove Kris is Santa Claus and save Christmas?
Miracle on 34th Street director George Seaton (who also wrote the screenplay) packs a lot of food for thought regarding consumerism and the true nature of Christmas into a tidy 96-minute running time. So while certain aspects feel rather dated, the film’s humorous look at the commercialisation of Christmas feels even more relevant today when festive products appear in supermarkets as early as September and the shopping season officially kicks off with an ugly brawl on Black Friday.
We might think of the 1940s as a simpler time when people enjoyed a more traditional Christmas without all the relentless marketing, but Miracle goes to show that it was still very much a thing back then. Indeed, Santa became increasingly linked with commercialism in the United States from around the mid-19th Century when department stores in big American cities used his image to advertise products, and Macy’s itself introduced the first store-based Santa in 1862.
The trend increased over the decades until Macy’s secured an even stronger grasp on Christmas with its first Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924. The tradition continues to this day with millions of people lining the streets of New York to watch in person and over 50 million tuning in at home. It’s no doubt a spectacular event that puts you in the mood for the festive season, but its commercial message is also unavoidable – only a month to go, guys, so you’d better get spending!
Seven years after the first Macy’s parade, Coca-Cola started placing adverts in popular magazines with artwork by Haddon Sundblom. Santa’s “look” had gradually evolved over the previous century towards something we’re familiar with today, particularly in the illustrations of cartoonist Thomas Nast. But Sundblom pinned down the idea of Santa as a jolly, rotund, rosy-cheeked gift-giver in a red outfit fringed with white fur – and one who was partial to a nice refreshing Coke at a time when many hard-up families during the Great Depression began the tradition of leaving out milk and cookies as a small token of appreciation. Santa has been associated with the multi-billion-dollar soft drinks company ever since, with people nowadays even excitedly turning out each Christmas to see the Coca-Cola truck with Kris Kringle’s smiling face on the side.
This relationship between Santa and flogging products is neatly woven into the story, complicated by the fact that Kris Kringle genuinely believes he is the real Santa and is only interested in the true spirit of Christmas. This raises the issue of his mental stability – Kris is neatly attired and impeccably mannered, but just how much can you trust somebody who believes they are Santa Claus around the paying public, particularly children?
Seaton’s screenplay cannily focuses on events happening around Kris even as he embodies Santa for all the children he meets. His genuine intentions of sending customers to Macy’s rivals is spun as a marketing gimmick, prompting other stores to follow suit, just going to show how anything can be turned into a money-making opportunity in a consumerist society.
When Kris’s trial reaches court, the film speculates about how the very existence of Santa Claus may have a huge knock-on effect on less Christmassy concerns, namely his enormous commercial clout and what that means in dollar signs for department stores, toy manufacturers, and all the people employed by them - people who translate into votes for the judge overseeing Kris’s trial.
Remarkably, Seaton’s screenplay touches upon all these details without ever getting bogged down in the politics, but wouldn’t count for anything if he didn’t have the ideal embodiment of Santa Claus at the heart of the movie.
Edmund Gwenn wasn’t even 20th Century Fox’s first pick to play Kris Kringle – his cousin Cecil Kellaway turned down the part initially. London-born Gwenn was a veteran of dozens of films and would later appear in a handful of Alfred Hitchcock pictures, but this is the role he is mostly remembered for. Stocky and avuncular, his Kris Kringle is a man of redoubtable good cheer who genuinely cares for the joy and well-being of others, particularly children – in one of the film’s great scenes, we watch from an awe-struck Suzie’s perspective as Kris turns on a dime and starts speaking fluent Dutch to a shell-shocked orphan who has just arrived in the States.
Wisely, the film doesn’t give us much back story for Kris, and we hardly spend any time with him away from the plot. While there are plausible explanations for some of the things he does (as Doris points out, just because he happens to be fluent in Dutch doesn’t equate to magic) it remains ambiguous enough to make us think that he might actually be Santa Claus. Gwenn is never less than utterly convincing and he remains the only actor to receive an Oscar nomination for playing Santa – an award he won in the year that Miracle in 34th Street lost out to Gentleman’s Agreement for Best Picture.
Santa is such a ubiquitous presence in Christmas movies that we sometimes forget to think about who he is and what he represents. Miracle manages to take commercialism to task while homing in on what it actually means to believe in Santa.
Do we need a person’s back story and irrefutable proof that they are the real Kris Kringle to believe in what Santa Claus represents? The movie is smart enough to give the judge a loophole to gratefully dive through at the conclusion while firmly coming down on a positive message for even all the lapsed believers out there. It can be easy to feel a little cynical when you’re dashing about buying gifts while keeping one eye on your bank balance, but as long as we’re locked in that cycle we have two options.
We can moan and write it off as a big old con, or we can still choose to believe in what Santa stands for and enjoy the spirit of Christmas through generosity and bringing joy to others. Ultimately, when our children’s faces light up at the gifts that Santa has placed under the tree, they don’t care about the price tag or any of our adult concerns – they’re just caught up in the magic of the season and the belief that wishes can come true.
