Miracle on Main Street (Grand National, Columbia, Arcadia Pictures, Keith T. Smith Modern Sound Pictures, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film last night I’d never heard of before turned out to be unexpectedly good: Miracle on Main Street (not to be confused with Miracle on 34th Street eight years later), a 1939 production of Grand National, the plucky little studio that at least tried for major-company status. Grand National was formed in 1936 by producer Edward Hirliman; he already owned a distribution company called First Division, and he intended to expand his activities into production. He scored an early coup – or so it seemed – when James Cagney sued Warner Bros. over a billing issue and was suddenly available on the open market. With the other majors unwilling to risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing his renegade star, Hirliman signed Cagney to Grand National and made two films with him, Great Guy (in which Cagney played an agent of the Bureau of Weights and Measures out to bust a ring of people who short-changed customers) and Something to Sing About (a musical of which Cagney was so proud he devoted a whole chapter of his autobiography to it). Then Warner Bros. won back Cagney’s contract on appeal and Grand National sold Warners the gangster story Angels with Dirty Faces they had developed for him. With Cagney gone, the closest Grand National had to a major star was Western hero Tex Ritter, pioneer in the “singing cowboy” genre, but Hirliman continued to produce surprisingly adventurous films, including Captain Calamity (a quite good spoof on nautical films shot in the two-strip “Hirlicolor” process), Exile Express (made with star Anna Sten four years after she’d flamed out at Goldwyn) and this one. Unfortunately Grand National went out of business in 1939 and this and their other remaining films were sold to Columbla, which released them in the U.S. (though the print Turner Classic Movies was showing was credited to “Keith T. Smith Modern Sound Pictures,” apparently the British distributor). Miracle on Main Street was a quite charming and unexpectedly good movie, directed by Steve Sekely (a Hungarian immigrant who made such unusually good “B” films as Lady in the Death House for PRC and Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar for its successor company, Eagle-Lion) from a script by Samuel Ornitz, Boris Ingster and Frederick J. Jackson. It reminded me, except for the inevitable (for Hollywood) happy ending, of the so-called “street films” that were big in Germany in the 1920’s, of which by far the best known is The Joyless Street (1925) because it featured Greta Garbo, even though she was only the second female lead (Asta Nielsen and Werner Krauss were the stars).

Maria Porter (Margo, the quite interesting actress/dancer who made her screen debut at age 15 in the 1934 film Crime Without Passion and three years later played the woman who suddenly aged when taken out of Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon) is a dancer in a shabby little sideshow attraction alternately called “Streets of Cario” (on the overhead sign) and (correctly) “Streets of Cairo” on the smaller sign on the entrance. She’s also a B-girl whose husband, Dick Porter (Lyle Talbot at his oiliest), uses her to lure sailors and other drunks so he can rob them. When one of the “drunks” turns out to be an undercover cop, Dick flees and tells Maria he’ll be in touch with her when he’s sufficiently well established in a new identity which nobody from law enforcement knows about. Stunned by these events and desperate because the lack of Dick’s money means she’ll likely be thrown out of her rooming house by the typically implacable landlady, Mrs. Herman (Jane Darwell), she stumbles into a church on Christmas Eve. There she hears a crying baby, and Sekely’s moving camera first lights on the Jesus doll at the altar before panning to a real baby, left there by his parents (we later learn it’s a boy) because they already had five kids and couldn’t take care of a sixth. Until the baby arrives Sekely and his cinematographer, Charles Van Enger, shoot the film as almost all-out noir; after opening with a powerful montage of various Christmas celebrations the film becomes hard-edged realism as Maria’s dancing gig comes to an ignominious end due to Dick’s illegal side hustle. Meanwhile, wealthy orange grower Jim Foreman (Walter Abel) is having a surprisingly gentlemanly divorce from his wife – they just dispassionately agree that they’re no longer in love with each other and so she goes to Reno to get her marriage dissolved – and he meets Maria at a Mexican restaurant called Pepito’s (the film had some interesting glances at Olvera Street in Los Angeles as it existed in 1939 just after my husband Charles and I had been there recently, and it’s barely changed at all). Maria becomes a driven character, bound and determined to keep her baby and raise him even though he’s not her biological son. Partly to raise the money for her rent and partly so she won’t have to hassle child care, Maria takes a job sewing baby clothes at home and ultimately the shop promotes her to designer.

Maria and Jim date – there are some marvelous scenes in which he drives her to his orange groves and she’s astonished because it’s been decades since she’s seen the country – but there’s the overhanging threat of Dick hanging over them. Maria and Jim are laying out on a beach and Maria is about to confess to Jim what her past had been and her relationship to the man she’s still legally married to when all of a sudden Sadie Blake (Wynne Gibson), her old friend from the Streets of Cairo days, shows up to warn her that Dick is back in town. Dick shows up at Mrs. Herman’s rooming house while Maria is out with Jim and crashes her room (a nice first-floor room Mrs. Herman has reassigned her to now that she’s raising a baby and is making good enough money Mrs. Herman doesn’t have to worry about her making the rent), announcing his intent to wait for her there. When she arrives, he tells her that he’ll leave her permanently and settle in South America if she’ll give him $500, and when she explains that she doesn’t have that kind of money he tells her to get it from the rich man she’s been dating. They work out a scheme by which Maria will tell Jim that her baby is sick and needs an operation (he isn’t and doesn’t) and she needs $500 from him in cash to pay for it. Only when Jim shows up with the money, Maria decides to pretend that she’d only been taking him for a ride all this time and that Dick is the man she really loves and wants to be with (the old La Traviata gimmick). Since as part of this imposture Maria keeps Jim’s money instead of giving it to Dick, he’s still broke and he decides to hold up a late-night delicatessen with a gun he took from Dr. Miles (William Collier, Sr.). Dr. Miles, whom we guess had lost his license to practice medicine but did so under the table for drinks, had previously tried to kill Dick so Maria would be out of her misery and free to marry Jim, but Dick easily took the gun away from him and pocketed it for future use. Fortunately, a cop ex machina happened to see Dick’s attempted robbery go down; he shot Dick from outside the store window (which probably wasn’t so great for the store owner since replacing the window would almost certainly cost him more than the money Dick was trying to steal from him) and conveniently eliminated him so Maria and Jim could get together at long last and co-parent the miracle child.

Miracle on Main Street is an unusually good movie, especially for the time, because of two aspects: Sekely’s advanced direction – he keeps the camera in almost constant motion, avoiding the long, static tableau scenes that afflicted all too many late-1930’s “B”’s because moving-camera shots and shot-reverse shot edits took too long to set up – and also due to the multidimensionality of the characters. Though the writers built their dramatis personae on the chassis of familiar movie clichés, they added enough complexity to create interesting people that aren’t all good or (with the arguable exception of Lyle Talbot’s character) all bad. Maria is drawn as a piece of human flotsam at the start who, faced with the challenge of raising a baby even though it isn’t hers biologically, gradually discovers reserves of strength and agency she didn’t know she had. Jim is basically sympathetic – indeed, one could describe Miracle on Main Street as a prototype of Pretty Woman, with Margo in the Julia Roberts role and Walter Abel as Richard Gere – but he’s also a bit of an arrogant asshole in his belief that money can buy him anything. Mrs. Herman isn’t your typical arrogant landlady but someone who becomes sympathetic once she explains that she, too, has bills to pay and she can’t keep non-paying tenants there forever. Interestingly, just as George Hirliman had shot simultaneous English and Spanish versions of Captain Calamity (the Spanish version was called El Capitán Tormenta), so he shot Miracle on Main Street in an alternate Spanish version, El Milagro de la Calle Mayor, reverting to a pattern in the early days of talkies where they would shoot versions of films in languages other than English, using the same stars if they could speak the languages (or, as in the case of Laurel and Hardy, they were so identified with their roles they couldn’t be substituted for even though they had to learn the lines phonetically) and other cast members if they couldn’t. Miracle on Main Street is an example of the diamond in the rough TCM sometimes allows us to rediscover (or discover in the first place), a quite remarkable film (even if it does fall back on typical Hollywood clichés towards the end) worthy of acknowledgment for Sekely’s inventive direction and a script with genuinely complex human characters.