Christmastide is nearly here, and in anticipation of the season, many of us have already begun our yearly binge of Christmas movies. For perhaps sixty-five years the list of films I’ve watched has included 1947’s beloved Miracle on 34th Street. Although I hardly need recount its storyline, it’s about a kindly old man named of all things Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) who becomes Macy’s department store Santa Claus—an entirely appropriate occurrence since Kris believes he really is Santa.
Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) who has hired him thinks he may be insane and sends him to the sly and malicious store “psychologist” Mr. Sawyer (Porter Hall) for a mental exam. Kris passes, but his jolly and nonchalant manner angers Sawyer who insists Kringle should be institutionalized. Mrs. Walker, her boss Mr. Shellhammer (Philip Tonge) and Kris’s gerontologist, Dr. Pierce (James Seay), for varying reasons, veto Sawyer’s diagnosis of “latent maniacal tendencies,” which should be the end of the matter.
However, Sawyer has taken to analyzing Kris’s young friend and Santa Claus “impersonator” Alfred (Alvin Greenman) and filling the naïve young man’s head with dire warnings of neuroses only he can fathom. In a state of righteous indignation, Kris goes to Sawyer, challenging his right to psychoanalyze Alfred. When Sawyer angrily refuses to listen, Kris pops him on the head with his cane, doing little damage, and abruptly leaves. In keeping with his character, Sawyer pretends to be unconscious from the blow. When Doris and Shellhammer rush in to revive him, he claims all he did was say “Santa Claus,” which threw Kris into a frenzy.
All of this results in Sawyer’s plot to commit Kris to Bellevue. He convinces Mr. Shellhammer to tell Kris a bald-faced lie, namely, that the mayor wants Kris to pose with him for photographs. The old man agrees and blithely goes to the cab that will take him to the mayor, only to find a rather large man seated beside him, who is obviously capable of restraining him. Sawyer immediately joins them and directs the cabbie to the mental hospital. There, a despondent Kris purposely fails his exam.
Fred Gailey (John Payne) a lawyer whom Kris rooms with (who has also fallen in love with Doris) comes to Bellevue to encourage him by explaining that Doris knew nothing about the plot. But since Kris has failed the exam, the doctors have recommended commitment. It’s up to Gailey to rescue Kris and, one imagines, eight tiny reindeer from cancellation.
How will Fred do it? In court, among other things, he places the prosecutor’s son, young Thomas O’Meara, Jr. (Robert Hyatt) on the stand to swear that his daddy, Thomas Sr. (Jerome Cowan), told him there was a Santa Claus. It’s a hilarious scene, but the embarrassing moment prompts O’Meara to demand proof that Kris is the one and only Santa Claus, and Judge Harper (Gene Lockhart) reluctantly concurs. Fred asks for an adjournment, but when the court reconvenes, he has not managed to find anyone—not the mayor, not the governor, not even (who knows?) the president—to declare that Kris is Santa.
What saves Kris is not—and I stress this—Gailey’s ability as a lawyer. Instead we get a classic deus ex machina in the form of the Post Office Department (in the days before USPS), which has re-directed all of the dead letters to “Santa Claus” to Kris at the courthouse, which gets everybody off the hook: Kris, Fred, Judge Harper (who certainly doesn’t want to commit Macy’s famous Santa), and even O’Meara who now can rush out to get his son a football helmet from Santa Claus.
Well, you say, what else is new? The movie’s plot has become almost the stuff of folklore. However, I feel bound to point out, that the pleasing dénouement depends on what we call a McGuffin, that is a device meant to do nothing else than drive the plot. In Miracle on 34th Street, the McGuffin is the idea that some authority (three cheers for the Post Office) must certify Kris as Santa Klaus, and if no such authority presents itself, then he’s bound for a cell in the looney bin.
But not so fast. Consider how Sawyer deceived Kris into stepping into that cab and then, with the help of a well-dressed gorilla, prevented Kris, clearly against his will, from leaving. Fred knew about the ploy. Consider, too, that Sawyer had acted well beyond his professional scope in analyzing Kris’s friend Alfred. It’s hard to imagine Fred’s being ignorant of that. All he had to do was demonstrate conspiracy to kidnap and even malpractice. Would Judge Harper, a man anxious to avoid the stigma of jailing Santa Claus, have found the case against Sawyer and for Kris’s exoneration reasonable, perhaps compelling? Seems so to me; maybe to you too. Kris then might have retained Fred to sue Macy’s and Bellevue for a gargantuan sum (maybe a quarter of a million in those pre-inflationary days) and, for the attorney, a tidy fee. Retirement for all, even the reindeer! Yet Fred, who later tells Doris he must be “a pretty good lawyer,” hasn’t detected a case in any of these plain facts. Except for the timely intervention of the Post Office Department, he would have lost his case.
And, of course, nobody cares. I noticed these glaring flaws several years ago, but they haven’t stopped me from faithfully watching Miracle on 34th Street annually. It’s a delightful, funny, and heartwarming classic with lines so memorable that one would be hard pressed not to anticipate them with each viewing. Miracle also comments wickedly on two modern sacred cows: progressive schooling, which has deprived Doris’s daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) of her childhood, and the Freudian psycho-babble Sawyer peddles. Who could complain about that? But as a primer for law school, Miracle is a joke. To aspiring lawyers who happen to watch Christmas movies I say, caveat emptor!