Perkins selects kindly and elderly Richard Attenborough as her store's Santa during the Christmas season.
He proves a major marketing success, angering the bald and malevolent boss of a competing department store. He has dastardly British couple Jane Leeves and James Remar set up Attenborough by provoking him with drunken Bad Santa Jack McGee. The scheme works, and because it is a movie, Attenborough is soon confined to a prison / mental asylum.
Meanwhile, Perkins has been ineffectually courted by ever-patient lawyer Dylan McDermott, who befriends both Attenborough and Perkins' tot Wilson. Perkins turns down McDermott's proposal, but nonetheless asks him to rescue Attenborough from the prison / mental asylum. This requires a court hearing, where McDermott competes with smug prosecutor J.T. Walsh to win over judge Robert Prosky, who, in a packed courtroom, proclaims that if the Federal government can believe in God, then New York can believe in Santa Claus. Cue the ludicrous yet inevitable happy ending.
How others will see it. This feature film remake was a modest box office success, doing its best business overseas, where veteran actor and director Attenborough was better known. Today at imdb.com, the movie has a reasonable 21K user votes but a somewhat low user rating of 6.4 out of 10. Men regard it as a well-made borefest, and grade it 6.2. Women give a higher 6.8 rating, presumably pleased by the happy romantic ending.
How I felt about it. Given the superior 1947 film, one might wonder why 20th Century Fox chose to remake its own classic. The answer is obvious: the 1947 movie was black and white, and modern children require a color film to command their mercurial attention.
But youngsters will likely regard the movie as dull as their adult counterparts, who have little to enjoy aside from the tepid romance between Perkins and McDermott. Thus, the question is, what went wrong?
We certainly won't blame the casting department, since everyone seems right for their roles. (We especially like Jane Leeves and Robert Prosky). And if you mute the dialogue, it is an attractive film to watch. So, we won't blame director Les Mayfield, however uninspired and safe his choices may be.
Instead, the primary culprit is the screenwriter, namely former wunderkind filmmaker John Hughes. With a script this boring, it would take a miracle to put the movie over, and that miracle would take place at the back lot of 20th Century Fox studios, instead of 34th street in New York City.
In this movie, even the villains are polite. The 1947 Santa (Edmund Gwenn) was decidedly more feisty, and the 1947 mother (Maureen O'Hara) was more assertive. The daughter could be more bratty, as children often are, and wouldn't it be nice if Santa left little Mara Wilson a note saying "Can't swing the house, kid, sorry!"