When Miracle on 34th Street was released in June (yes, June) 1947, it became a solid critical and commercial hit. The movie, about Macy's new Santa (Edmund Gwenn) who claims to be the real thing, the cynical Macy's executive (Maureen O'Hara) who finds her disbelief melting away the more time she spends with him, her equally cynical young daughter (Natalie Wood) who finds she likes being a kid, and the friendly lawyer neighbor (John Payne) who agrees to represent Gwenn when his sanity is questioned while also falling for the mother and becoming a father figure for the daughter, ended up as one of the twenty highest-grossing films of the year and pulled in four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It would end up winning three of its nominations, including Supporting Actor for Gwenn. In 1994, John Hughes produced a modern day-set remake, with Richard Attenborough as Santa, Elizabeth Perkins as the mother, Dylan McDermott as the lawyer, and Mara Wilson as the little girl. Critics wondered why the story needed to be retold, and audiences largely ignored it in favor of the more hip competing Christmas comedy The Santa Clause.
While most people are aware of the two theatrical versions, what is not so well-remembered is that in between, there were three TV remakes of the story. One, a 1973 TV movie, starred Sebastian Cabot as Santa and Jane Alexander as the mother. It is two hours long so ineligible to be reviewed here. The other two, however, were each an hour. Made four years apart, they both provide an interesting comparison to each other and to the feature film, which ran 96 minutes.
The 1954 version, complete with the beginning article that no other version has, was produced for The 20th Century Fox Hour, a weekly anthology series in which the studio made condensed remakes of its film library, at a time when seeing the original versions was generally considerably more difficult than it was today, of which this served as its first season Christmas episode (no June broadcasts here). This one was well cast, with two Oscar winners in the lead roles--Thomas Mitchell as Kris Kringle, Macy's newest employee, and Teresa Wright as Doris, the Macy's exec and single mother. For whatever reason, both are billed below Macdonald Carey as Fred, the lawyer. While having amassed a decent film and TV career, Carey, who had starred with Wright in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, hadn't achieved nearly the success of either Wright or Mitchell, and his best-known role, as family patriarch and opening narrator on the long-running soap Days of Our Lives, was still a decade in the future. Meanwhile, busy child actress Sanda Descher played Susan, Doris's daughter.
While obviously much lower-budgeted than the feature film, it still looks quite good, with numerous sets and extras, particularly in scenes set at Kris's throne and in a scene set during a school play production. Mitchell is very good as Kris and Wright is also quite good as Doris. However, the condensing strips a lot of the character out of the story. In the movie, Kris is hired by Doris on the spot to be the new Santa for the Thanksgiving parade after he points out that the original Santa was drunk. In this version, the story starts with Kringle already Macy's Santa. The scene where he spoke Dutch to a young girl who had recently moved from Amsterdam is cut, and the scene where he bonks obnoxious store psychologist Dr. Sawyer on the head is moved from Dr. Sawyer's office to the stage of a school with a full audience watching. Instead of bonking Sawyer over his wrong-headed treatment of a Macy's employee, here Kris hits him because he is insisting Santa isn't real--not a particularly nice thing to do in front of a room full of kids, but it makes Kris come off as much worse. In addition, because the plot mechanics regarding Kris leading to the big courtroom scene at the end have to be tended to, the Fred-Doris romance is given extremely short shift, to the point where the two are declaring their love and desire to get married at the end, it seems to come out of nowhere (Fred, in general, is largely sidelined, again making Carey's billing over Wright and Mitchell confusing). Still, this is a solid version of the story.
The 1955 Miracle aired on CBS, but the 1959 version aired on NBC on Black Friday, as part of the network's NBC Friday Night Special Presentation. While both versions start similarity (with Kris trying to convince a window dresser that he had the reindeer in the wrong order), they take surprisingly different paths and end up in surprisingly different directions. The 1959 version is at once both more faithful to the movie, including scenes that the 1955 version left out (the Dutch girl, the drunk Santa at the beginning), but also more willing to follow its own path.
That may be because this production was (apparently) done live, necessitating some changes to the story, particularly the finale. The movie and the 1955 version both end with Doris, Susan, and Fred in an empty house for sale, which seems to be Kris fulfilling Susan's Christmas wishes for a house and a dad. There's no house in this version, as Susan's wishes have been reduced to just having a Christmas tree and a dad. The other versions leave it rather ambiguous as to whether Kris is actually Santa, but the 1959 version pretty much confirms that, yes, he very much is.
This time around, Kris is played by Ed Wynn, a longtime comic actor who earlier that year had scored critical praise for his unexpectedly dramatic turn as one of the Jewish outcasts trying to hide from the Nazis in The Diary of Anne Frank (he would go on to earn his sole Oscar nomination for the performance). In contrast, Wynn leans into the comedy much more dramatically than any of his predecessors in the role, with a nearly unending series of humorous asides. Real-life married couple Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy played Fred and Doris, and another busy child actress of the day, Susan Gordon, played Susan.
Unfortunately, this production suffers from a rather obnoxious performance by Orson Bean as the incompetent psychiatrist Sawyer, who proves to be a little twirp right off the bat, getting angry at Doris for firing the drunk Santa and equally mad at her for hiring Kringle as a replacement, for reasons that are next really explained. While that was part of the script, there was no reason for Bean to play him as nails-on-chalkboard annoying, and his presence (and he has a much bigger one in this one than he did in the 1955 version, where he was played by character actor John Abbott) brings down every scene he's in. Wynn, whose unique voice is on full display here, is also an acquired taste.
The 1959 version was long thought to be lost, as is so much programming from the first 30 years of broadcasting, but a recording was discovered in the collection of the Library of Congress about ten years ago and is now publicly available. It was originally broadcast in color, but the recording is in black-and-white only, which is of course, how the vast majority of people who watched this then would have experienced it (only 9% of households had a color set then).
I liked the 1955 version of The Miracle on 34th Street but was considerably less enamored of the 1959 Miracle, but as a genuine piece of television history, I'm glad it was found and has been preserved. That said, neither is anywhere near as good as the original movie version, and given that one is only about 45 minutes longer than either of the TV productions and is readily available these days for viewing, that one should be the one you should watch. Both the 50s TV Miracles are fascinating curios, but not much more.
Next time: A cheap 80s animated special that had a surprising, if short-lived, afterlife.
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