It’s often instructive to see films that take well-loved and long-established folk myths and give them new twist, especially if they’re from a culture not always synonymous with that myth. And then there are films like René Cardona’s Santa Claus, as bizarre a take on the most pervasive Christmas folk story of them all as you’ll ever see. Cardona and his co-writer Adolfo Torres Portillo seem to have taken the very basic idea of Santa Claus (jolly fat man in a red suit who delivers presents to children on Christmas Eve) and made up a wild story about him with little understanding of the predominantly European mythology that surrounds him.
Their version of the character (a slightly sinister, constantly chuckling José Elías Moreno) lives not at the North Pole but in a castle in the clouds, one of at least three structures seen floating above the earth and is assisted not by faithful elves but by a small army of young children who seem to permanently live with him. We’re introduced to this brood in an interminable sequence at the start of the film in which Santa mimes (badly) at an organ while the kids perform songs in their native costumes. There’s a whiff of national/racial stereotyping in this sequence and some of the non-white nationalities are represented by clearly white kids. The two representing the United States, dressed in cowboy costumes, seem particularly perplexed by it all and keep stumbling over their song.
The bulk of the story involves a vengeful Lucifer (represented by an off-screen voice) who holds some sort of grudge against Santa, dispatching his most mischievous devil Pitch (José Luis Aguirre ‘Trosky’), to sabotage Santa’s annual toy delivery mission by making children do evil things and leaving him vulnerable to being seen by mortals. Santa is assisted by Merlin (Armando Arriola ‘Arriolita’) who supplies him with a sleep-inducing powder and a magic flower that renders him invisible, and is well stocked with a variety of bizarre and often unsettling machinery, including devices with eyes on stalks and giant lips. As Christmas Eve approaches, Pitch steps up his campaign of mischief and Santa is in grave danger of finally being exposed.
Portillo tries his best to bulk up a story that is, by definition, a rather thin and almost defiantly uncinematic one (man delivers presents around the world in a single night) but his ideas are inane and will leave audiences shaking their heads in disbelief rather than engaging in Santa’s predicament. The film spends a lot of time on exploring the minutiae of Santa’s world (Pitch disappears from the plot for great stretches) and throws in a lot of extraneous, newly minted mythology that merely adds to the confusion. Santa’s sleigh, for example, is drawn not by the traditional band of reindeer but by a team of clockwork creatures that will be turned, vampire like, to dust if exposed to daylight. If they’re not creepy enough, the notion that Santa spends the rest of his year spying on young children as they sleep should provoke more than a few shudders.
Portillo throws in a half-hearted attempt at social commentary – glum little Lupita (Lupita Quezadas) is targeted by Pitch who tries to tempt her to steal a doll; despite being terribly poor, Lupita resists but a rich kid fairs no better and although he has all the material possessions he desires, is estranged from him parents. Then there’s the trio of not poor but not exactly wealthy kids in the middle who are easily led astray by Pitch and are who “rewarded” by Santa wit a lump of coal each. But it’s all very clumsy and ill-conceived and at the climax becomes unbearably maudlin.
Cardona seems to have set out not to celebrate the simple magic of the Santa Claus story but to terrify his target audience. Alongside those creepy reindeer and weird machines we get Lupita’s terrifying nightmare featuring hideous dancing mannequins and a brief trip into the bowels of Hell itself. It’s all weirdly unfestive throughout yet has became something of a staple of Yuletide viewing in the States in a cut-down, English-dubbed version prepared by K. Gordon Murray and bizarrely reportedly won the Golden Gate Award for Best International Family Film at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1959. It may not be the worst Christmas film ever made (both Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) and Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972) are harder work than this) but today it looks, at best, naive, at worst, deeply troubling.
The EOFFTV Review 