Rating:
Has there ever been a Kris Kringle more spot-on than Edmund Gwenn, a little girl more bug’s-earish than Natalie Wood, a Christmas movie more magical than 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street? Don’t be silly. Of course there hasn’t.

Though there are other excellent holiday movies that are indispensible for any merrymaking movie buff, none is more perfectly realized than this story of a little girl learning to believe.

That little girl is Susan (Natalie Wood), as adorable as anything you’ve ever seen but sadly lacking in the childlike sense of wonder department. Her mother (Maureen O’Hara) has raised her by the generally appropriate maxim of “deal with the real world and don’t go falling for a lot of dopey nonsense,” but this has had one unfortunate consequence: Susan doesn’t believe in Santa Claus!

This cannot stand, so it’s rather fortuitous that a man claiming to be the one and only real Kris Kringle plops right into her lap. The kindly old man teaches Susan a thing or two about imagination and manages to bring a little Christmas spirit to everyone he encounters, to boot. When working as a department store Santa at Macy’s, for example, he doesn’t hesitate to send shoppers to other stores if that’s where they can get the best deal on what they need. It’s about making the children happy, after all, not about which store should make the biggest profit.

But you can’t go around claiming to be Santa Claus and, most egregiously, being nice to strangers without people growing suspicious, so it’s only a matter of time before Kris Kringle is committed and made to stand trial to prove his sanity. It’s this trial that gives us one of cinema’s most well known and most often parodied moments: an army of mailmen bringing sack after sack of letters addressed to Santa Claus into the courtroom.

Throughout the picture are scenes of genuine comedy, of pathos, of unabashed emotion. When Susan writes a letter to Mr. Kringle saying she believes in him and her mother adds the postscript “I believe in you, too,” I cry every time. That’s right, I cry. You wanna fight about it?

My DVD copy of Miracle on 34th Street features a colorized version of the film in addition to the original black and white. Now, even if you were the sort of inhuman monster who normally watched old movies in colorized form, you’d be making a particular mistake here. The black and white—aside from imparting an easy elegance and just being the way movies looked best—also helps to sell the fantasy. By providing that slight disconnect from the way your real life works, the movie can draw you into its story of belief in the implausible all the more easily.

The movie has been remade several times, to varying degrees of success. But even with such names as Thomas Mitchell, Ed Wynn, Sebastian Cabot and Richard Attenborough in the Kris Kringle role, none of those subsequent tellings have matched the breezy charm and potency of story of this original version.

Watch Miracle on 34th Street and learn to believe in Santa again. It’s the best Christmas gift you could give yourself.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town
• The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
• Prancer
• The Santa Clause 2
• The Worst Day of My Life