Mary's bells

I think I've mentioned it before, but there's some lore in my family about how much my father hated the movie The Bells of St. Mary's. He was about seven years old when it came out, and was attending a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx, so of course the nuns took the kids to the theater to see this uplifting movie. Anyhow, some months back TCM ran this in a double feature with Going My Way, since The Bells of St. Mary's is in many ways a sequel to Going My Way. Not having seen either in their entirety, I recorded both, I reviewed Going My Way in conjunction with a subsequent TCM showing, and now am getting around to scheduling my review of The Bells of St. Marys.

Bing Crosby returns as Fr. Charles O'Malley, although he's pretty much the only character from Going My Way who shows up here. At the end of the previous movie Fr. O'Malley was being transferred from his old parish, so as The Bells of St. Mary's opens, he's showing up at his new assignment, the titular St. Mary's. This parish has a parochial school attached to it, but it's run by nuns who cannot lead Mass. The Mother Superior running the school is Sr. Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman), who rather incongruously is a Swedish-American nun, which makes you wonder when and why she converted from Lutheranism. The two get off on the wrong foot when one of Fr. O'Malley's first acts is to give the students a day off so that he can discuss with the nuns how to run the school

St. Mary's is in a parlous state, being an old building in need of significant repairs and having a lot of students who can't exactly pay a big tuition to attend. Indeed, the parish even sold off an adjance plot of land at some point in the not too distant past to wealthy businessman Horace Bogardus (Henry Travers). Bogardus is busy building a shiny new building on his new plot, and is presumably hoping the parish will have to close down so that he may be able to purchase the plot of land on which St. Mary's sits. Fr. O'Malley, meanwhile, sees the building under construction and gets to go inside it. He realizes this building would be perfect for the new St. Mary's school, and sets about using his gift of gab to try to convince Bogardus that the building would make a wonderful bequest.

Set against the backdrop of what's going to happen to St. Mary's parish are a couple of other subplots. One involves a new student at school, Patsy Gallagher (Joan Carroll). She's being raised by a single mother, Mary (Martha Sleeper). Mary has a sad story: she was married to an itinerant musician, who felt that he couldn't support a family on his musician's income and basically decided to abandon his wife and young daughter. Mary hasn't provided Patsy a very good life, but perhaps St. Mary's could take Patsy on as a charity case and do something? Fr. O'Malley, for his part, sets about trying to find Joe Gallagher for one of the climaxes.

There's also poor Sister Mary Benedict, who starts feeling unwell and finds out that there's something much worse going on with her, which will probably necessitate her having to leave the parish, although everyone else involved wants to avoid telling her how bad things really are. Of course everything works out for everybody in the end, since this is an avowedly Catholic, family-friendly film.

The Bells of St. Mary's isn't anywhere near as bad as my father would have you believe, although in his defense I can see why he'd have a negative opinion of it. Dad basically didn't have a choice in watching the movie and, while I can see it being described as wholesome and even family-friendly, the idea of a seven-year-old boy liking it is something that tests belief. The Bells of St. Mary's is also quite sentimental, at times way too sentimental for its own good. It also runs a bit slowly, at a touch over two hours. So although there's nothing that parents should find particularly objectional about The Bells of St. Mary's, it's also not something that's going to have strong appeal for young children 80 years on.