“Miracle on 34th Street” x 12

December 14 was the original air date of the first remake of the holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street in 1955. Oddly, we learn that the release date of the original 1947 was in June, and we weren’t about to publish a post about this film at that time of year! This year also marks the 50th anniversary of one of the film’s many remakes, and the 60th anniversary of its Broadway musical adaptation. High time to pay it tribute for the pleasure it has given audiences over the past three quarters of a century.

The original 1947 Miracle on 34th Street was the brainchild of Valentine Davies, who’d previously contributed to the screenplays of Syncopation (1942) and Three Little Girls in Blue (1946). Davies wrote the original story, but the man who blew it up into a classic was writer/director George Seaton, who’d written vehicles for the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny, contributed to The Wizard of Oz (1939), and wrote the 1943 screenplays for Coney Island and The Song of Bernadette. His first directing credit had been Diamond Horseshoe (1945) inspired by the nightclub started by Billy Rose.

This story about a department store Santa (Edmund Gwenn) who may or may not be the real thing owes a lot to Frank Capra, I feel. It’s a kind of mash-up of It’s a Wonderful Life, which had been released the year before, with its mission of finding the Christmas spirit in a cold and cynical modern world, and earlier movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which idealists are judged to be mentally ill strictly on the basis of their simple goodness. It’s the Holy Fool idea we can’t stop flogging. Here (speaking of the Marx Brothers), the Sanity Clause is literally invoked to thwart Santa Claus. (Digression: my wife wants you to know that in this movie Santa Claus lives in our town of Great Neck).

The real miracle of this movie is that it manages to do tell its heartwarming story while simultaneously being an example of unprecedented and perhaps unsurpassed commercialism in a major motion picture. Miracle of 34th Street is a literal infomercial about Macy’s Department Store, starting with live footage of the 1946 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and taking us through the Christmas shopping experience there over the course of the next few weeks. While I can think of many Hollywood films based on actual products (the recent Barbie film being a sterling example) it’s hard to think of ones celebrating entire companies — and what’s more, getting away with it. It’s a little surprising that there hasn’t been a lot more of it, and I’m not sure why there hasn’t. Don’t tell me we haven’t fallen that low; we’ve actually fallen lower somehow without trickling down that particular tributary.

The original Miracle on 34th Street was one of the first films of Natalie Wood. She plays a little girl who has been raised by her cold, careerist mother (Maureen O’Hara) to be a chilling, nearly Soviet style materialist, not in the sense of acquisitiveness but of uncompromising rationalism. In short, she is a child who does not believe in fairy tales. It’s not a very feminist movie, I must say. O’Hara’s devotion to her job (she’s the p.r. flack for Macy’s) is presented in a negative light, while her boyfriend, the bland, likable John Payne is always trying to gently nudge her into being soft and maternal. The unsubtle subtext of the movie is definitely that this single, working mom needs to quit her job and marry this shlub to restore order to the universe. This may be one of the reasons that the film’s last remake was 30 years ago — this aspect of the story really needs to be rethought and reworked in order to speak to mainstream modern audiences, and it may be unsolvable.

Another miracle of this particular story is that, as you’ll see, every version has magical casts. In addition to the principals we have already mentioned, this one has Gene Lockhart (a veteran Bob Cratchit) as the judge in the movie’s climactic scene, Percy Helton as the drunken Santa who gets replaced by the genuine Kris Kringle (haha, Kringle actually gets the guy fired — Merry Christmas!), silent comedy star Snub Pollard is the mail clerk who dumps all those letters from children out of the bag in the film’s most memorable single shot, and we also get Thelma Ritter (in her first screen appearance), William Frawley, Jack Albertson, Jerome Cowan, a young Jeff Corey, and lots of other familiar faces.

The original version of Miracle on 34th Street was adapted for Lux Radio Theatrewith the original cast no fewer than 3 times, in 1947, 1948 and 1954, and two other radio versions on Screen Directors Playhouse, with Edmund Gwenn remaining as Santa, in 1949 and 1950.

In 1955 The 20th Century Fox Hour presented the first made-for-tv version, this being that dark time before anyone dreamt of simply airing the movie. The great Thomas Mitchell plays Kris Kringle here. Anyone who remembers him as Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life knows that Mitchell would have been been better cast as Kris’s drunken predecessor! Teresa Wright also seems miscast in the hard-bitten O’Hara role; perhaps she was fighting being typecast as sweet innocents. MacDonald Carey, her love interest in Hitchcock’sShadow of a Doubt played the John Payne role. (Coincidentally the iconic Edmund Gwenn had also been a veteran of Hitchcock films). Sandy Descher, the girl who screamed the title line in the horror flick Them! (1954) is little Susan, as by now Natalie Wood was old enough to be cast as a wild teenager in Rebel Without a Cause. And another wonderful crop of character actors in supporting parts: Hans Conried,Ray Collins, Dick Foran,John Abbott, Whit Bissel, et al.

Yet another magical version emerged in 1959 on NBC Friday Night Special Presentation. This one was in color, and starred the great Ed Wynn, then enjoying a late career Renaissance, and like his character, a one time resident of Great Neck. As in the previous version, the girl Susan was played by a child actress with a horror connection. In this case it was Susan Gordon, daughter of Bert I. Gordon, who appeared in his films Attack of the Puppet People (1958) and Picture Mommy Dead (1966). The real life performing couple Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, also of Dr. Seuss’sThe 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) play the O’Hara and Payne roles. (Hans Conried had also been in that film, but though he’s in the previous version of 34th Street, he’s not in this one). Orson Bean and Loring Smith play supporting roles.

We shift now to the inevitable Broadway musical adaptation. One might think that it would be logical for such an adaptation to be happening NOW, as there is such a vogue for that these days (i.e. adapting proven existing properties) but it was already done 60 years ago by no less an eminence that The Music Man‘sMeredith Willson. And it played on Broadway for nearly a year! It ought to be better known, and it ought to be revived, wouldn’t you think? But you’d need the change the title. Willson decided to call his version Here’s Love. It starred the great British actor Laurence Naismith (whose birthday is also today) as Kris, with a cast that included Janis Paige, Fred Gwynne,Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), et al. It was choreographed by Michael Kidd. (Postscript: a friend writes to tell me that she participated in a 2000 revival, and that it’s terrible, and that’s why it hasn’t received a major new production).

Then came yet a third made-for-tv version in 1973, and friends, I regret to inform you that I am old enough to remember when it premiered. That’s my only regret though, it’s a perfectly good version, and it’s more than likely that I saw it prior to seeing the original. The lovable Sebastian Cabot (Mr. French from Family Affair) was Kris, with another blockbuster cast: David Hartman (soon to become the original host of Good Morning, America), Jane Alexander, Roddy McDowell, Jim Backus (a little Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol synergy there), David Doyle,Tom Bosley, James Gregory,Conrad Janis, and Burt Mustin.

Having already made a “Christmas contribution” with his Home Alone films, John Hughes undertook to bring Miracle on 34th Street back into cinemas for the first time in nearly a half century. Hughes’ 1994 remake fictionalizes the store for the first time. No longer Macy’s, it is now Cole’s (not to be confused with Kohl’s). The decision to do so was not the producer’s; Macy’s didn’t want to lend its name to the remake, declaring that the original version already served their purposes very nicely. Perhaps they thought Hughes’ version would be in the cynical spirit of most of his previous films and didn’t want to be associated with that. Critics liked the new version just fine though. Richard Attenborough, fresh off of Jurassic Park, was very intelligently cast as Kris, with Mara Wilson of Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Matilda (1996) as the little girl. It’s also got Elizabeth Perkins, Dylan McDermott, J.T. Walsh, William Windom, Allison Janney and Peter Gerety!

In the interest of keeping you up to date. An original stage version, adapted directly from the story by Will Severin, Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder and John Vreeke, premiered to great reviews in Chicago in 2000. It’s a period piece set in the ’40s, and was published by Samuel French so it has been oft-produced around the country, though I’m not aware of any major New York productions.

Frustrated by no new screen versions in three decades? Don’t be! Why risk spoiling a track record like this?