A Film Canon

This Christmas classic is a shrewd piece of sentimental realism, turning on Kris Kringle's (Edmund Gwenn) increasingly vocal claim to be Santa Claus, which takes him from the Macy's store where he is employed by Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara), to the courtroom, under the guide of benevolent lawyer John Payne (Fred Gailey). In the process, the importance of magic (for children) and mythologies (for adults) is foregrounded, while the final twist leaves the possibility of the miraculous open. Simultaneously, Seaton touches on a number of gritty realities, some of them related to the post-war scenario, such as Doris' (implicit) status as a war widow and single mother, and some of them related to more general American experiences, such as immigration, as evinced in the scene in which Kringle proves himself to be the only person in the city capable of comforting and orienting a recently arrived Dutch girl. However, the most pervasive engagement is with big business, against which Kringle continually pitches himself ("That's what I've been fighting against for years...the way they commercialise Christmas"), albeit in an unusual way, by continuing to work for Macy's, but recommending that customers visit other stores if products are cheaper or of a higher quality there. Given that this ultimately works out in Macy's favour ("The helpful store, the friendly store, the store with a heart"), the ultimate recommendation seems to be of a slight reorganisation, rather than radical interrogation, of big business - a specific, rather than systemic, critique, that ensures that the villain is not the manager of Macy's but the store psychologist (although, to their credit, Seaton - and Kringle - refrains from too many crude generalisations of psychology, which is important for a film built around the issue of insanity). That said, these concerns are ultimately irrelevant to the sentimental message of the film - a far more immediate qualification comes from the irritating smugness with which Payne delivers it, as well as the reduction of Doris' daughter's curiosity and thoughtfulness to 'common sense', and of this, in turn, to a straw man; the mere absence of imagination, or of a sense of the marvellous.