The Song of Bernadette

Er, not that song of Bernadette

One of the movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation a few months back is The Song of Bernadette. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow morning at 3:10 AM (or overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

I have a feeling that the basic story is already reasonably well known. Bernadette Soubirous (Jennifer Jones) is an adolescent girl living with her siblings and poor parents (Anne Revere and Roman Bohnen) in the town of Lourdes in southwest France in the mid-19th century. Bernadette goes with a couple of her sisters to go fetch some firewood, something which requires crossing a creek. Because she's sickly, she has to stay behind while the others cross the creek. It's there that she sees an apparition of a lady that doesn't identify itself.

She doesn't want to tell her sisters, but they saw Bernadette acting strangely when they returned, so they know something's up and get her to tell about the vision, which they promptely report to Mom, Way to keep a secret, girls. And unsurpisingly, word is going to get out to the rest of the town.

Meanwhile, the apparition, which of course only Bernadette can see, has told her to keep coming back to the grotto where she first saw it because the apparition is going to appear again every day for the next 14 days. Bernadette goes, and others start following her.

However, there are people who don't like this, notably the local prosecutor Dutour (Vincent Price). As for the Catholic Church, well, let's just say that figuring out whether something is a miracle is highly political as well as religious. When it comes to a powerful person the Church wants to canonize, such as recent Pope John Paul II, they'll come up with a way to declare the existence of a miracle come hell or high water. But if some dumb schlub like Bernadette claims to see something, the Church is going to drag its heels and try to come up with every possible scientific explanation for the supposed miracle because they don't want the skeptics proving them wrong. And this puts local priest Fr. Peyramale (Charles Bickford) in a bind.

Of course, we know what happened, which is that the Church eventually declared the events miraculous and that Lourdes would go on to become one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites. Bernadette would go on to become a novitiate and die young thanks to her chronic asthma (in the movie, it's changed to a combination of tuberculosis and a tumor that's probably cancerous).

The movie states openly at both the beginning and the end that if you believe, no explanation is necessary, and that if you don't, no explanation is possible. As for the movie, it's clearly on the side of the believer; after all, the movie lets us in on the apparition, which reminded me of the dream sequence in Sparrows. But while the movie is reverent, I didn't find it obnoxiously so.

Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for Best Actress, but to be honest I felt like she didn't have a particularly difficult role to play. Multiple people received supporting acting nominations and frankly they all deserved it. Best among these is Gladys Cooper as Sr. Marie-Thérèse, a local nun teaching Bernadette at the beginning who shows up at the convent at the end. She's clearly deeply envious of Bernadette to the point that I was going to comment on her being a jerk. But she gets her comeuppance at the end of the scene and has a powerful resolution. Bickford and Revere also received nominations.

The Song of Bernadette is a well-made movie in the style of pre-TV era Hollywood biopics, and is certainly worth a watch. The TCM Shop lists it as available on what looks like a dodgy DVD, while Amazon has it available on streaming video.