Headscratchers / Miracle on 34th Street

• This one's a doozy. The whole conflict in the original is whether or not Kris is actually Santa Claus, and how the ruling will play in the media. But... couldn't the hearing be opened with something along the lines of "The purpose of this hearing is not to establish the existence of Santa Claus; indeed, its being held presupposes the existence of such a being. The purpose of this hearing is to determine, based upon the available evidence, whether or not Mr. Kringle is in fact that being, or simply a man of good heart with a mild delusion."
  • I always assumed because of the simple fact that the defence only has to prove reasonable doubt, whereas the prosecution has the much harder job of proving beyond such, and admitting the possibility of there being a Santa Claus would thusly be sacrificing their best upper hand of saying "uh... he’s literally claiming to be Santa Claus... case closed, methinks.". The only problem is how the media will, as you quite rightly point out, take the deployment of said upper hand. They probably thought it better to either win or sacrifice the case on their own terms rather than waste the time of the Court, the public, themselves, and the defence on some arduous process of "playing along" which they’d likely end up losing anyway. Of course, this wouldn’t work in reality, since a man claiming to be a God of any religion in existence would almost certainly be found insane without necessarily denying at least some small possibility of there being such a being as God in existence, but since this movie runs on both Magical Realism and Absurdist Realism, it can be expected to follow perfectly cohesive internal logic which bears precisely zero resemblance to real life logic.
  • The opening question of the hearing is "Is Mr. Kringle dangerously insane?" The prosecution says "Well, he assaulted someone and he's telling everyone he's Santa Claus, so yes." The defense could have argued "He's got fifteen hundred people lined up to tell you he's a wonderful person, plus no criminal record or evidence of past misbehavior, so no." Instead, the defense went for the "He's not delusional: he says he's Santa Claus because he is Santa Claus." That's what gets them on the "Is Santa Claus even real?" tangent, until the prosecutor brings things back on course and demands that the defense submit some proof for the claim that Kris Kringle is Santa Claus.
    • That was likely the tactic Fred would have used, had Sawyer not given him the idea to turn the trial into a media circus. "This trial will prove whether Santa exists" is a much bigger deal than "This trial will prove whether or not this old man is or isn't senile and dangerous".
  • The 1994 remake gives only a single line to this. When Bryan talks to the judge after court and the judge says Kris is disturbed, Bryan says he isn't dangerous. Kinda short shrift to what is an extremely important legal principle.
• Does anyone else find it rather odd that, at Kris's sanity hearing, we hear testimony from Mr. Macy and Mara's kid... but not, you know, any actual psychiatrists? You'd think that Sawyer, or Dr. Pierce, or one of the Bellevue doctors, or somebody with actual clinical experience would have been put on the stand at some point, but if so we never see it.
• Who is Dr. Pierce talking about when he mentions a restauranteur who insists he's a Russian prince? Is this a real person?
  • Yep. Michael Romanoff (born Hershel Geguzin, which was later Anglicized to Harry Gerguson) did run a very successful Hollywood restaurant, and did claim to be a member of the Romanov family, but he wasn't delusional...he was a con man, or at least started out that way. After some years as a relatively small-time crook (passing bad checks, etc.), he started claiming to be "Prince Michael Dmitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff" and lived pretty well off it, eventually making his way to Hollywood. By the time he'd built himself up to a respectable and legitimate career as the owner of Romanoff's, everyone knew he was a fraud and HE knew everyone knew he was a fraud, but he kept up the charade for the fun of it and everyone else kept up the charade that they believed it. By all accounts, despite his shady past, he never really harmed anyone and didn't have a malicious bone in his body.
• In the original, the mother of the orphaned girl states that she told her that Santa wouldn't be able to communicate with her because of the language barrier. How does the mom communicate with her then? Couldn't she translate?
  • It seems like the adoptive mother has learned Dutch, as seen with her beautiful, happy reaction when her daughter calls her "this nice lady." It's more likely that the woman thought that Kris (who, to the best of her knowledge, was simply a Macy's employee) didn't know Dutch. Presumably there's a time limit to how long each child can spend with Santa—there's always a large line of kids visible in the scenes where he has them sit on his lap. If families were given one minute each (as a random estimate), the mother probably figured that the lengthy process of translating her child's words into English, telling them to Kris, and then translating his response back into Dutch would take too much time.
• If Doris is in charge of the parade, why does she go home as soon as it starts? Shouldn't she be staying for the whole parade in case there are any last-minute mishaps?
  • Doris is in charge of planning the parade—she's not necessarily in charge of executing it. She likely appointed a few trusted employees as technical management to handle any emergencies or route changes. It seems comparable to the role of a director and a stage manager in a theatrical production: the director does all of the artistic and prep work in rehearsals, but it's the stage manager who is actually present at each performance and "calls" the show while addressing issues with their crew (in some cases, the director comes to the opening night performance then doesn't return at all). Doris had planned the parade to the best of her ability, and she may have been so sick of the whole process that she didn't want to stick around to see it.