Poseidon Quickies: It's a "Miracle!"

No, not Miracle on 34th Street (1947) though we love that one. While convalescing at home this holiday season, there was a rare airing of the 1939 film Miracle on Main Street. Feeling a bit down and wondering if it might warm the heart a bit, I gave it a shot. Miracle is a short, inexpensive, pat, contrived little number, but I found it charming nonetheless. At about an hour and twenty minutes, it certainly didn't drag on and on. I was curious to see Margo in a leading role and am a bit of a sucker for redemption tales. As it is December 26th, you may be past it all by now, but if not the movie is available on YT in a pristine print right here. 

The principle star of Miracle on Main Street is Margo, a Mexican dancer-turned-actress whose uncle was famed band leader Xavier Cugat. Here, she plays a shady performer in a carnival, managed by her even shadier husband. 

One might politely call her a belly dancer or an exotic dancer, but in truth she's basically an attractive stripper...! I saw in her expressions some of the looks that one Marilyn Monroe would later adopt in her breathy sex siren persona. 

Margo's husband is played by Lyle Talbot, who I invariably confuse with Lyle Bettger until it dawns on me that one is markedly more handsome than the other. Talbot tries to con a seeming drunk out of some money, but it turns out to be an undercover cop! He and his wife flee the scene to avoid being taken in.

Margo injures her knee, but manages to hobble into a nearby church. 

While praying to the Virgin Mary, she can't avoid the feeling that she hears a baby crying. And it's not the plaster Jesus in the nearby manger...! 

Examining the foliage more carefully, she spies a newborn infant lying in the undergrowth! 

There's a note enclosed from his birth parents (who can't seem to stop producing offspring!) This type of thing still happens today. Just recently in my area, an infant was left in a local firehouse's "baby box." She uses the bundle of joy to leave the church without being suspected of any crime. 

After Talbot hightails it out of their apartment and she manages to elude the police once more, she goes back to the church with the intention of returning the infant to where she found him, but ultimately she opts to keep him for herself. 

It takes a village... A kindly, if boozy, doctor lives upstairs, she has two floozy fellow dancer friends from the carnival and Jane Darwell is her cranky, yet kindly, landlady. The hefty Darwell (one year prior to her Oscar-winning triumph in The Grapes of Wrath, 1940) decides she is going to give the little tyke a bath. 

Hilariously, the scene-stealing little gem of a baby gives Ms. Darwell's sizeable chest the once over, wondering if he's going to be called upon to feed from that wellspring! Ha ha!

Newfound motherhood causes Margo to rethink everything. She wants no part of her tacky, shifty former life. 

Singing a lullaby to her "son," she vows to find a way to provide for the two of them. At first, she attempts to dance at a legitimate supper club, but ultimately works as a seamstress so that she can be at home with the infant. There is plenty more to the story, but as it's so brief, I don't want to reveal much further. 

Walter Abel costars as a wealthy man who marries a bored society girl who swiftly finds domestic bliss with him a near total bore. 

The un-billed boy who plays Margo's child is rather adorable and provides good face a number of times.  

Perhaps Margo's greatest claim to fame was two years prior to this when she played Maria, the lovely inhabitant of Shangri-La who captures the heart of John Howard in Lost Horizon (1937.) Things take a disastrous turn for the couple when he removes her from her home. She was later immortalized in the play Bye Bye Birdie when Mrs. Peterson refers to her son's fiancee as looking "like Margo when they took her out of Shangri-La!"

At this time, Margo was wed to actor Francis Lederer, though the union only lasted from 1937-1940.

She was more famously the wife of longtime actor and two-time Oscar nominee Eddie Albert. 

Together, they produced a son in 1951 called Edward Albert Jr. 

The handsome young man became a successful actor in his own right with movies like Butterflies Are Free (1972), 40 Carats (1973), When Time Ran Out... (1980) and others.

To me, the resemblance to his mother is clear. Margo died at age 68 of brain cancer in 1985. Eddie Albert lived until 2005 and was 99 when pneumonia claimed him following a battle with Alzheimer's disease. Sadly, Edward Albert succumbed to lung cancer the following year at only 55. 

What a way to end, right?! But the woman in Edward's lap at least has a right to be there. That is Kate Woodville (former spouse of Patrick Macnee), who he wed in 1979. Their poetess daughter Thais Carmen Woodville Albert (who now goes by Tai Carmen) was partly named after Margo's aunt by marriage, Carmen Castillo, a singer wed to Margo's uncle Xavier Cugat. So, as one of the songs from Lost Horizon (1973) goes, "The world is a circle..."