an elegant miracle
This is one of my favourite movies ever: the original, and best, 1947 version of A Miracle on 34th Street, starring Maureen O'Hara and Natalie Wood.
In this picture everyone looks exactly as they should: the professional mum with cunning pleats in her padded shoulders, the impeccable, kind, handsome and single neighbour, the little girl in her smocked dress, and of course Kris Kringle himself: Santa, who loves the child in everybody. Look at his generous suit! His big square belt buckle is I think quintessential.
I've loved this film since I was tiny. The Christmas spirit I saw in it was that that if you believe, anything can happen. In recent years I've come to see that the real meaning of Christmas (and the 'message' of this story) is that even if you don't believe, the miracle can still happen.
In the movie, Doris Walker is so busy trying to prove herself to her bosses, bring up her child in a world that feels hostile, not get emotionally hurt, and generally keep the wolf from the door that she doesn't realise it's sitting in the house. Her ideological rationalism means she won't let her daughter really be a child about anything, and of course the emotionally hungry Susan Walker is simply a smaller and more expressive representation of her mother's emotional hunger. The mother's career in Macy's means the commercial angle of the season gives body to her acquired cynicism.
Enter Edmund Gwynn, as the man Doris hires to be her Macy's Santa. Kris Kringle, the kindliest and most twinkly man in the universe, uses the power of love to help Susan open her mother's heart and show her what she's missing.
Easy also to recognise this single mum who's been hurt in the past & can't afford to trust anyone, rely on anyone, take anything for granted or be taken for granted: can't allow anything to disturb the precarious balance of her little ecosystem. And easy to envy her forties grey flannel suits and dresses!
6 comments:
Elegant they might be, in the sense of perfect conformity, though I know suits from the era tended to be of lesser quality than today. Either way, they don't stand a chance in the elegant stakes against Sunday's crowd.
I'll be settling down with It's a Wonderful Life.
P-Ump: Sunday? Lesser quality? Perfect conformity? Did you see those pleats?
TSP: ohhh, I find that one a little hard to watch, and that is despite my lifelong love for Jimmy Stewart. Maybe I should give it another go.
Yeah but Sunday's girls are prettier, and let's face facts you could dress Vanessa Felz in Saville Row but no-one would ever say she was more elegant than Debbie Harry circa 1979 even if the latter was wearing a garbage sack. That's how the adolescent boy mind works, remember.
Having said that, if someone has other redeeming qualities, then even the adolescent male, or at least the never grown up teen that is P-Ump, is prepared to make concessions on the elegance front. Oletta Adams could be elegant even if she wasn’t pretty, although she is quite pretty so that’s a bad example (in my defence, she’s playing on my Ipod at the moment). Ok, none of Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, or Randy Crawford are going to win beauty contests, but with voices like that elegance is something they should be afforded anyway.
Jimmy Stewart's an interesting one. He’s often said to be the epitome of Englishness even though he wasn’t English. Perhaps being English is a state of mind ...?
Anyway, suggest the pair of you steer clear of Xmas cliche films and watch The Great Escape instead. Alright, that wasn’t even very funny, though it is a good film. Instead watch Days of Heaven. If films were allowed to enter into EDW that one would set the benchmark off the scale out of the ballpark and nail it every week (Xmas is a time for cliches and mixed metaphors, I’ve unilaterally decided).
Meanwhile, on the Ipod, Carly Simon first bemoans domestic hell in Coming Around Again, and now she’s celebrating it in All I Want is You. Being the eternal teenager, I get most of my information and life guidance from pop and rock music. How can I get by with this sort of mixed message?
Thanks, P-Ump, & you are so right about Debbie Harry.
You're also right about Ella Fitz, etc.
But you're wrong about Roberta Flack, God I can't tell you how much she annoys me. I can;t think of the one number that doesn't grate on me like finger nails on a blackboard.
However, you are right about Jimmy Stewart.
and you know what, I've never seen The Great Escape. One for the list.
Watch Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and Dr Strangelove first if you've never seen any of them either.
Roberta Flack isn't high on my list, though I've always thought her voice was good. But the best voice of any living artist is probably Alison Krauss
Merry Xmas, and keep blogging whilst you're at it
P-Ump x :-)
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