Christmas in the Movies

What saves Miracle on Main Street from being just a far-fetched melodrama (or an obvious Christ-child parable) is the film’s touching way of using Christmas as an entity that pushes characters to redeem themselves. Maria finds a new will to carve out an honest life; a doctor (William Collier Sr.) grows from drunk hobo to wise philosopher; two dancers (Wynne Gibson and Veda Ann Borg) soften their cynicism; and Maria’s landlady (the plucky Jane Darwell) finds a sweet maternal instinct under her crustiness. Only Dick, the villainous husband played by Lyle Talbot, is irredeemable.

Maria is played by the actress known as Margo, born in Mexico as Maria Margarita Guadalupe Teresa Estella Bolado Castilla y O’Donnell. A professional dancer from the age of nine, she helped popularize the rumba in the early 1930s by performing in nightclubs to the music of her uncle, the bandleader Xavier Cugat. By the time she made this picture, she was already well known for her screen role in Winterset (1936), which she had also played on Broadway, and her turn in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937) as the woman who ages rapidly upon leaving Shangri-La. Miracle on Main Street is a much smaller and cheaper production than Lost Horizon, but Margo carries it with a committed performance as she evolves from stripper to clothing designer and mother. She even sings a lullaby.

There was some surprisingly interesting talent behind the camera as well. This was the first American film for the Hungarian director Steve Sekely, who had worked as a journalist in the 1920s before embarking on a filmmaking career through Europe, Mexico, and India. Cowriter Boris Ingster had roots stretching back to his work with the pioneering Sergei Eisenstein in their native Russia; following this movie, Ingster would direct what some consider to be the first true film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940).

Producer Jack Skirball would decades later become a major philanthropist with a passion for interreligious and cross-cultural programs, and Miracle on Main Street is an early example of that interest: it was produced in two languages so as to appeal to Latin audiences. A former rabbi, Skirball transitioned to film in 1933, producing short subjects and an infamous educational documentary, Birth of a Baby (1938), which was banned in several states for its explicit childbirth scenes. After taking a job as head of production at the poverty-row studio Grand National Films, he formed a subsidiary, Arcadia Pictures, to produce English- and Spanish-language versions of the same scripts.

Both versions of Miracle on Main Street were shot at Grand National in the spring of 1939, with Margo starring in each. A few weeks later, Skirball resigned from the studio but continued to run Arcadia as an independent producer. When Grand National disbanded soon thereafter, he enticed Columbia to step in as domestic distributor.

In September 1939, Twentieth Century-Fox released the Spanish-language version, El milagro de la calle mayor, in South American markets. The English-language version opened in the United States a month later. Reviews were mixed: “Hokum the family will enjoy,” said one. “Will please those who see it, for it has a message of happiness and hope.”

Miracle on Main Street remains decidedly rough around the edges, lacking the polish of a major studio’s resources, but it compensates with some unusually frank scenes for its time and an offbeat story that succeeds because its heart, like that of Maria’s, is in the right place.

Remember the Night is a charmer. While it has remained for decades mysteriously under the radar, its tender romance and comedy are so skillfully blended—and its use of Christmas so poignant—that it stands among the very best holiday movies. The creative forces came together perfectly here: a witty screenplay by the great Preston Sturges; the visual touch of producer-director Mitchell Leisen, who had just made the masterful romantic comedy Midnight (1939); and the screen chemistry of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, so strong that the duo would team again for three more pictures, starting with Double Indemnity (1944).

Sturges’s story revolves around a New York assistant district attorney (MacMurray) prosecuting a shoplifter (Stanwyck) just before the holidays. Feeling sorry that she will have to spend Christmas in jail waiting for the trial to resume, he bails her out; she has nowhere to go, so he offers to drive her to her childhood home in Indiana, as it’s right on his own way. When he sees her cold and unwelcoming mother, however is, he whisks Stanwyck off for Christmas at his house. Stanwyck is bowled over by the love and affection she encounters there, and she and MacMurray start to fall in love. Hanging over both their heads is the realization that they still have to return to the city to resolve the trial. Will MacMurray purposefully blow the case? Will she let him? As Sturges himself said: “Love reformed her and corrupted him.”

Christmas is key to Remember the Night. It practically defines the inner psychologies of the two main characters. For Stanwyck, there is no such thing as Christmas at home—there’s just a dead-looking house with no electricity, no smiles, a mean stepfather she’s never met, and one of the iciest moms in American cinema. (She is underplayed perfectly by Georgia Caine.) For MacMurray, Christmas equates to cheer—with a boyhood house full of light, laughter, food, music, and a kindhearted mother (the wonderful Beulah Bondi). MacMurray’s Christmas feels a bit unreal, too, which is by design: it’s the idealized, nostalgic Christmas that Stanwyck always dreamed of and finally gets to experience.

The visual contrast between the two houses—in terms of their design and lighting—is especially striking, revealing the expertise of Leisen. A trained architect, he had worked as an art director (and costume designer) before starting his directing career, and he always kept a careful eye on set design and decor as tools to help tell his stories.

This was Leisen’s second picture with a script by Sturges, after Easy Living (1937). He trimmed many scenes before shooting and deleted a few more afterward, something that always irritated Sturges and was why he resolved from then on to direct his own scripts. But Leisen was certainly intelligent enough not to make the trims haphazardly. Biographer David Chierichetti has written that Leisen reshaped the script to the personas and abilities of his two stars, which had the effect of making MacMurray less heroic and Stanwyck a bit more dominant than Sturges had envisioned.

Leisen wrapped production eight days ahead of schedule and $50,000 under budget. He attributed this not to the script pruning but to Barbara Stanwyck’s professionalism. “[She] was the greatest,” he said. “She never blew one line through the whole picture…. We never once had to wait for her to finish with the hairdresser or the makeup man…. She set that kind of pace and everybody worked harder, trying to outdo her.”

Sturges often visited the set and got to know Stanwyck well. She later recounted that he was already planning to work with her again: “One day he said to me, ‘Someday I’m going to write a real screwball comedy for you.’ Remember the Night was a delightful comedy, swell for me and Fred MacMurray, but hardly a screwball, and I replied that nobody would ever think of writing anything like that for me—a murderess, sure. But he said, ‘You just wait.’” A year later, Sturges was directing Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941), one of the best movies either of them ever made.

Perhaps the only blemish on Remember the Night is its inclusion of a character named Rufus, MacMurray’s valet, who is presented as a black stereotype. Billed as “Snowflake,” his stage name, he is played by actor Fred Toones, a familiar face to audiences for two decades. He appeared with and without credit in more than two hundred films, many of them at Republic, where he was under contract for several years.

Remember the Night opened in early January 1940, the same time of year that the story within the movie winds down. The New York Times called it “the real curtain-raiser for 1940,” and the film was a hit. Preston Sturges quipped that he knew exactly why: “It had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz, and just enough schmutz to make it box office.”