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jadelotusflower · 2 years

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Obscure Christmas Movie Rewatch: Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

This was my absolute favourite Christmas movie when I was a kid (behind Muppet's Christmas Carol), and it is so veiled in nostalgia I'm not sure I can be objective (or snark too much), but here we go.

Purporting to tell the story behind the 1897 Editorial Is There a Santa Claus? by Francis Pharcellus Chruch, the events and characters have been heavily fictionalised (as the text and v/o at the end helpfully reminds us). I'm therefore going to do some fact checking as to historical accuracy, but only out of interest, and certainly not intended as a criticism. I genuinely love this movie!

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We open with Francis P Church (the late great Charles Bronson) in a cemetery, brushing the snow off the grave of his wife Elizabeth and baby Eleanor who died a year earlier. He opens up a gold watch with her picture inside, and it plays a gentle tune. He then takes out a bottle of whiskey, but turns away from the grave before he takes a swig.

In real life Church was indeed married to Elizabeth Wickham, but they had no children and I can't find any information about when she died (Francis passed in 1906). However in terms of framing a character, this is pretty effective.

We see The Sun newspaper being delivered, giving us the date of 17 December 1897.

Then we're at the docks, where James O'Hanlan (Richard Thomas) and Dominic Donelli (Massimo Bonetti) are fired after getting into a fight with another worker who levies several ethnic slurs and anti-immigrant rhetoric at them. Thomas was apparently one of the Walton kids (which I've never seen), and is one of those working actors who has seemingly been in every procedural known to man - he was also in The Americans and Ozark (but I haven't seen those either).

Their eight year old daughters Virginia (Katherine Isabelle) and Maria (Virginia Bagnata) meanwhile, are being mocked by her classmates for believing in Santa Claus. Look, the child performances in this movie are...what you would expect. But I'm not here to criticise kids, they do their best.

James can't find another job, reduced to reading The Sun a day late once it's put out in the trash, and the family is struggling. His wife Evie (Tasmin Kelsey, who I remember as Gairwyn from Stargate SG-1) is an optimist and tells him to keep up his spirits. James: "The trouble is there's too much damn spirit and not enough damn jobs."

In actuality, Philip O'Hanlan was a surgeon and coroner and they were a middle class family who lived on the Upper West Side. Virginia went on to achieve a doctorate in childhood education and was a teacher for over 40 years - her childhood home is now a school.

Frank stumbles into the offices of The Sun to pick up another bottle of whiskey from his desk, and then to the local bar to brood. Local pompous aristocratic jerk Cornelius Barrington (John Novak - who has apparently been in every Canadian-filmed production ever, including Smallville and Stargate) arrives to goad Frank about his affinity for those filthy poors. In doing so, he makes Frank sound legitimately badass: "The great egalitarian editorializer, friend and champion of the common man, would-be slayer of the capitalist dragons!"

The newsroom is populated by editor Edward Page Mitchell (the late great Ed Asner), copyboy Teddy (Shawn Macdonald), and sole female reporter Andrea Borland (Colleen Winton - apparently she was also in two episodes of Stargate but I can't place her). She's ambitious and frustrated that Mitchell will only let her report on society matters. Not gonna lie, there's a whiff of Perry White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen about them (or maybe it's just that I rewatched the 1978 Superman recently). There's a bit of snappy dialogue:

Andrea: Did you like my society piece on the Vanderbilt ball?

Mitchell: I printed it, didn't I?

Andrea: Well...half of it

Mitchell: That was the half I liked.

Andrea heads to the bar and hesitates only for a moment at the "men only" sign before going in to find Frank and try and retrieve the article Mitchell was looking for - "The Shame of Greatness".

Frank hands her a page of a few ideas and a lot of gibberish, while Corenlius watches literally eating popcorn. There's just a big bowl of popcorn sitting out in this men's bar and grill!

If gifs were a thing in the 90's this would have been a meme.

Andrea rewrites the article and gives it to Mitchell in Frank's name. It's a great success, with Teddy walking around reciting lines and calling it "a real humdinger!" Frank confronts Andrea, and she confides in him that it was his lecture at her university that inspired her to keep going when she was only one of three women in the class (and the other two ended up getting married).

We get the dramatic irony in Frank's refusal to be impressed: "Tomorrow it will be yesterday's newspaper, and you can wrap a fish in it. Nothing that you, or I, or anybody else writes for a newspaper has a lifespan of more than 24 hours."

Cornelius approaches Andrea and offers her a job to work at his uncle's paper The Chronicle in order to expose Frank as a fraud (in real life Church actually once worked at The Chronicle, which was published by his father). But as a woman of principle she coldly rejects him, and honestly, I love her. Frank has been nothing but dismissive and patronising towards her, so it's clear it's not solely about protecting him (and perhaps the ideal she had of him) but more about who she is and what she believes. Underrated character in an underrated movie.

James foils a robbery, and the police arrive with accents of the diddly dee potatoes variety. When he arrives home he's greeted by his Jewish neighbor Mrs Goldstein. It's interesting that this is a very similar setting to Mrs Santa Claus - New York at the turn of the century and has some thematic similarities - the immigrant experience and the importance of community in particular.

James reads aloud The Shame of Greatness article to the family:

"We have become a great nation, but at what cost? Ask the red man, the black man, the immigrant, the elderly, the ill. We have built a railroad across the 45 states and bridges across rivers but there is no bridge of brotherhood. Why? Because there is no profit in that bridge. Ask the captains of industry, ask the robber barons, ask the politicians about that bridge."

Unfortunate racial wording aside, it's a sentiment that wouldn't be out of place now, 31 years after this film was made, and 125 years after the film is set. I like a little activism in my Christmas movies.

It's also worth noting that most of the above passage were parts written by Frank, so Andrea's suggestion that they were his ideas is given credence - we don't know what the rest of the article went on to say but it's implied Andrea is a great writer able to match Frank's voice.

James speaks to the frustration of America not being the promised land: "It's hard to believe that fifty years ago our people came to this country because they were starving in Ireland. Potato famine indeed! High rents ha! It's no different over here."

As a child watching this movie was the first time I'd heard of the potato famine, and it's only this rewatch I noticed that Virginia is reading a book about Oliver Cromwell! Yikes. I don't know if that was deliberate, but certainly an interesting touch.

Evie however, takes the other side of the argument, telling James to stop feeling sorry for himself, and to be grateful for what they have - family, a place to live, and food (and God - this is certainly the most religious movie of this rewatch). Evie: "You can be poor if you want to James O'Hanlon, but I'm rich. And I grow richer every day of my life."

Virginia asks her father if Santa Claus is real, and he is the envy of every parent in quickly thinking to deflect and encourage her to write to The Sun for an answer instead.

Frank is back at the bar, where Cornelius goads him about Andrea, implying there are other things she is taking care of for him. Finally Frank is moved to respond, and when Cornelius warns him that he was "Captain of the Yale boxing team" Frank punches him square in the face, knocking him to the floor.

"I've done some fighting myself, Captain," Frank says, "around Hell's Kitchen." When I was a kid I didn't realise this referred to a gritty part of New York and thought it was a metaphor and an allusion to his roving reporter life - I think it works either way.

At the postbox, Virginia is gifted a stamp by the kindly German postman Hans Schuller, in another example of this community of immigrants helping each other through the hard times.

At The Sun, Frank looks at his wife's picture in the watch, and Teddy remarks that one day he'll have a watch like that ("a real himdinger!" - an annoying catchphrase, but it's meant to be annoying). Frank takes the picture out and puts the watch in an envelope with Teddy's name on it, then goes home where he turns off the fire but leaves the gas on, in the grand tradition of family Christmas movies including attempted suicide!

I admit this went right over my head when I first watched this as a kid, I think subtle enough not to be too dark for younger viewers. There's also a nice bit of production design comparing Frank's warm and furnished apartment with the O'Hanlan's grey and bare abode.

Mitchell arrives to give Frank the assignment of answering Virginia's letter, and we get to the core of Frank's depression - that he was a man who lived for his work, never even spending one Christmas dinner with his wife because he was away on assignment, and the irony that he was in Panama writing about yellow fever while she was dying of pneumonia - guilt and longing and regret. It's pretty complex stuff for a family film, and something I never really appreciated until I was older.

Now, it's certainly wholesale fiction - Francis Church married Elizabeth in 1871, so not merely married for "more than three years" as in the film. In fact, her birthdate on the grave is 1860, which puts a bit of a different spin on things with Frank significantly older rather than being her contemporary as in real life. This is alluded to in their conversation as Frank says he took many more years than most men to find a wife, adding to his guilt for not being there for her and appreciating what he had.

There's also nothing I could find that indicated he was an alcoholic - allegedly he was an atheist and hated writing the famous editorial.

But Ed Asner and Charles Bronson are both great actors, and play so well off each other. I do give credit for this scene not being too overwritten - if you actually pay attention to the grave at the beginning you see that Elizabeth and Eleanor died on 24 December the previous year - which is on the nose, but it remains subtext rather than Frank giving exposition of the "They died on Christmas and that's why I hate it!" variety.

The next day at the paper we get a cameo from screenwriter Andrew J Fenady as the reporter who tells Mitchell things are "heating up" in Cuba, referring to the Cuban War of Independence and a precursor to the Spanish-America War. I do enjoy these small historical touches.

Meanwhile, James and Dominic find jobs for the day but have another run in with the dock workers and get to thoroughly beat them up in a nice bit of karma. There's really no point to this scene other than to see the bigots get punched, but hey, I'm here for that, and it also keeps James' story parallel to Frank's.

Frank wanders around the city and is inspired by what he sees - the poor being fed by a soup kitchen, a policeman helping an elderly homeless man, people donating to toy drives, and a scene in a park complete with brass band, sleigh rides, ice skating, and general seasonal joy. He finds a baby's rattle that inspires part of the editorial, and sees a young couple with their child, sending him back to visit his wife's grave. He buys flowers but decides to throw them away rather than placing them on the grave - along with his bottle of whiskey.

I actually think this is a great example of show-not-tell writing - a lesser piece would have had Frank talk to his wife at her grave, saying how sorry he was he never appreciated her enough when she was alive, asking how he was going to answer Virginia's question when he himself doesn't believe in anything anymore, and then make a breakthrough. But not a word is uttered - we have Bronson's performance, we see him start to experience life again and decide to stop wallowing in his grief and return to his passion for writing. It's actually very deftly done.

Mrs Goldstein appears again to give the O'Hanlan's some brisket because she "made too much." It's very sweet but James gets in his feelings about it because he's not the one providing for his family.

The police arrive to take James down to the station for questioning about the robbery, and while he's gone Virginia uses a penny she found on the street earlier to buy a paper - wanting to give her father the gift of The Sun on the day it's printed rather than the next.

Back at the paper, Frank puts his wife's picture back in his gold watch, and instead gives Teddy another: "it's not gold, and it doesn't play a tune, but it was my first watch and it helped me start the day for many years." He also tells Mitchell he will come to Christmas dinner after all, and Andrea asks him to follow her somewhere, repeating his earlier words back to him: "there has to be a finish to every story."

James arrives back at home with a tree and laden with gifts, including a pet kitten (that he befriended earlier on). Turns out he was given a reward for his part in the robbery, and that both he and Dominic were offered jobs on the police force. Something could be said about James and Dominic becoming cops on the basis of punching people really well, but perhaps this isn’t the place for it.

Virginia gives her father the paper, and of course sees the editorial and reads it aloud, as all our friends arrive, including Andrea and Frank. It's actually a rather moving scene, the community that has supported each other, and who all played a part in the letter being written, delivered, and finally answered.

I honestly think this movie holds up despite the nostalgia goggles - there is some cringe, but through fictionalising the story behind the editorial, it becomes it's own metaphor - the weaving together of these disparate lives and their various struggles, united by hope and faith. Bronson gives a great performance that really grounds the film (and the part must have been particularly resonant for him, as his wife Jill Ireland had died the year before the film was made). I really recommend this movie, and think it's a shame that it isn't as enduring or well known as the original editorial.

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe In Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

#obscure christmas movie rewatch #christmas movies #yes virginia #there is a santa claus #jlf rewatch #jlf posts

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