Miracle on Main Street

TCM's "Christmas" programming last night turned out to be promoting one of the books they're trying to sell, about Christmas in the movies. I had already seen a couple of the movies on the schedule, but there's one that I hadn't seen that gets another showing in the TCM Christmas marathon: Miracle on Main Street. That second showing is tomorrow (Dec. 20) at 10:30 AM, so I'm writing up a quick post on the movie.

The film starts off on Christmas Eve in the Mexican section of Los Angeles, the movie having been released back in 1939, when James FitzPatrick would inform us that Los Angeles has a population of several thousand Mexicans, so enough for one medium-sized neighborhood. While the Mexicans are doing their procession to midnight mass that brings crowds of onlookers, there's a second class of people just trying to eke out a living.

Among those are Dick Porter (Lyle Talbot), who does a carnival barker thing to try to get audiences to pay a dime to see the hoochie-koochie show in which his long-suffering wife Maria (Margo, who only went by that one name) dances, along with a couple of women who have become her friends, Flo (Veda Ann Borg, one of those names you see lower down the credits even if you didn't recognize the face) and Sade (Wynne Gibson). There's also a local bar/nightclub nearby where people celebrate, from the alcoholic Dr. Miles (William Collier) to a reasonably well-to-do orange orchard owner im (Walter Abel) and his now fiancée.

Dick's real act at the dance show is to find some unsuspecting schlub to shake down for all the cash the guy has on him after getting the guy good and drunk and promising to show him Maria. Only this time, the mark is really an undercover police detective, who plans to have Dick arrested, which of course would also mean trouble for Maria. So the two of them flee in separate directions, with Maria going into the church, Mass having finished.

As she prays in the church, she finds that somebody's abandonded a baby and put it in the nativity scene. Maria decides to take the baby for the night, since it will give her a way out of the church that will have the police not suspecting her of being Dick's partner in crime. At the boarding house run by Mrs. Herman (Jane Darwell) where all of the poor people live, Maria thinks about keeping the baby after it continues to save her from the police, while Dick ultimately scrams, for both of their sakes, with the plan to get together again when the heat blows off.

But the baby starts to bring good luck to Maria, as she's able to get a job doing sewing at home, making children's clothes. Sade and Flo get good jobs out in the more fashionable parts of town, and Dr. Miles goes on the wagon. Jim gets a divorce, but that turns out to be in the best interests of everybody too as the wife was just incompatible with agricultural life while it gives Jim a chance to run into Maria again and start a relationship with her, not knowing that she's married to a louse. And sure enough, the louse is about to show up again....

Miracle on Main Street was supposed to be released by Grand National, a company that was around for just a few years; I think the one movie of there's I'd remember is Something to Sing About. But the studio went bankrupt before Miracle on Main Street could be released, which is why it's lapsed into obscurity. It's also pretty much a B movie what with the brief running time and C-list at best cast. Not that it's bad; more that there's a good reason the movie has been largely forgotten. Still, it's definitely worth one watch at least.