Miracle on Main Street

It's Christmas Eve in the Spanish quarter of L. A. Maria Porter (Margo) is a striptease dancer in an unscrupulous carnival sideshow. Her husband Dick Porter (Lyle Talbot) is the barker. They thought they hooked a potential fish, but he's actually an undercover cop. The cops are chasing Maria when she stumbles upon an abandoned baby in a manger display inside a church.

I really like the opening premise. It has the potential to be a great Christmas story. The movie does get stuck in soapy writing and some clunky story flow. The writing is a bit too messy. I don't like the melodrama. It's a great redemption story and nothing should detract from that.

A well done low budget film. The things I like about the low budget independents made in Hollywood's heyday is that they stray a bit off the beaten path with sets, actors and script.

Storywise this film tells the usual story of a bad girl (Margo) with a heart of gold ( she's a stripper) who finds a child and wants to bring it up as her own. But in the meantime she has to ditch the bad man ( Lyle Talbot - yet again a fine bad man) and hook up with the good man ( Walter Abel). Will she succeed ?? She gets help from a drunken doctor ( William Collier Sr in a good humorous performance), a cranky landlady (Jane Darwell) and assorted B girls.

Where the film takes interest is in the small detail - a stripper with a heart of gold, a "single" mother, a wife leaving a husband in a matter of fact way and Afro-American and caucasian audience members at a strip club sitting side by side watching and cheering at the display.

Where the film wins out is with director Steven Sekely's tight direction and obvious sincerity. The scenes with Margo and child standing before the blessed Virgin in church are effective.

A pleasant way to spend an hour and a bit.

Despite the generally positive reviews on IMDB, I really disliked "Miracle on Main Street"...a film with some good acting but some godawful writing.

When the story begins, Maria (Margo) is a hoochie-koochie dancer. While VERY tame by most standards, supposedly her dancing is hot and the cops want to arrest her and her sleazy manager (Lyle Talbot). They take it on the lam and things start to get weird. When Maria goes to church, she finds a baby with a not pinned to the blanket--saying that the mother doesn't want the boy and asking whoever finds it to care for the child. Maria has no way to pay for the child's upkeep but decides to keep it anyway. While all this is hard to believe, it gets much worse. There is a weird marriage, a new guy who is rich and loves her as well as a shootout with police...and much more! See the story and see what I mean.

The three leads (Margo, Lyle Talbot and Walter Abel) go very well as does Jane Darwell in a supporting role. But the plot has everything but the kitchen sink tossed into it...and the number of twists and turns becomes ludicrous after a while. It's a shame, as I don't think any actors could have made this mess of a script realistic or enjoyable. It didn't 'warm my heart' as one reviewer stated...it just gave me heartburn!

When the cops close down Lyle Talbot's kootch show, he and wife/dancer Margo try rolling a drunk..... who turns out to be a cop. They scram, with Talbot disappearing and Margo running into a church, where she finds a baby. She takes it home and her life begins to change.

It's one of the movies that Grand National produced in order to get out of Poverty Row, and they went under before they could release it; Columbia picked it up. While it has an interesting story about redemption, and some good performances by Walter Abel and William Collier Sr., Margo's performance seems off, not helped by her low affect and singular voice. Don't blink or you'll miss Dorothy Devore in her last screen appearance.