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.

Reassessing Going My Way

I think I've mentioned a couple of times in the past that I have a disdain for the movie Going My Way, and that I think it's one of the times the people who vote on the Academy Awards really got things wrong. It's on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and that airing comes up tonight, February 26, at 8:00 PM. As I had it on my DVR, I figured I'd give it another watch to do an in-depth post on it.

Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar, although we first see the other Best Actor nominee, Barry Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, winning the latter. The Academy changed the rules so that this couldn't happen again.) Fitzgerald plays Fr. Fitzgibbon, who's been the head priest at the parish of St. Dominic's in New York ever since the church was consecrated back in the 1890s. The church has a mortgage on it, which the holder, Ted Haines Sr. (Gene Lockhart) wants to call in, and Fr. Fitzgibbon is up there in years. It's to the point where he should probably just retire, so the bishop sends in another priest ostensibly as an assistant but whose real job is to take over. That priest is Fr. O'Malley (Bing Crosby).

Fr. O'Malley has a backstory of his own. He grew up in St. Louis and had to choose between music and the priesthood, obviously having selected the latter. His childhood friend Timothy O'Dowd (Frank McHugh) also became a priest, and is working in a neighboring parish. Anyhow, before accepting the calling to become a priest, O'Malley had a girlfriend named Jenny who was a musical talent herself, eventually joining an opera company and traveling the world. It's that travel that caused her not to receive the letter from O'Malley informing her that he was going to take Holy Orders and could therefore no longer have her as a girlfriend. She goes on to bigger things, changes her name to Genevieve (Risë Stevens) and becomes a singer at the Met, running into O'Malley again.

O'Malley, as the stereotypical newcomer often does, shakes things up as everybody seems to love him. He helps a young woman named Carol get a job; Carol eventually meets Ted Haines Jr. and the two wind up getting married without informing his father. O'Malley tries to sell some of the songs he's written, while bringing some music to the parish by setting up a boys' choir that becomes quite successful. O'Malley does enough good work to make St. Dominic's a going concern again that the bishop decides to give him a parish fully of his own and bring in O'Dowd to work as the new "assistant" to Fr. Fitzgibbon. But there are still a few more twists along the way.

Having watched Going My Way again, I still don't particularly like it, although I don't know that I have quite as much disdain for it as I had in the past. That's in part because I realize now that one of the things the movie had going for it was being released in the middle of World War II, at a time when audiences on the homefront were in need of a movie like this to soothe their discomforts in an age when there was thoroughly stressful news of the war all around them.

However, I will also say that I still hold to my view that the Academy got things badly wrong in selecting Going My Way for the Oscars that it won. Alexander Knox should have been a runaway winner of Best Actor for Wilson, even more so if you think that Crosby and Fitzgerald might have split a few votes. It's certainly not the Best Picture of 1944; that honor probably from a hindsight/revisionist point of view would go to Double Indemnity. From the point of view of 1944, even a homefront picture like Since You Went Away is better than Going My Way. And I still believe that 1944 is the one year that Alfred Hitchcock was robbed of the Best Director award. He was nominated five times and the other four lost to some remarkable directorial work. But his portrayal of mob justice in Lifeboat and doing it on a deliberately limited set in the way he does is really quite remarkable; like Knox, he should have been a heavy favorite.

The other thing working against Going My Way is that it runs a little over two hours. Not only is it syrupy, it's a slow-moving syrup where you want everyone to get on with things. Still, Going My Way was wildly popular on its original relase, so maybe some viewers today will liek it too.

Obey that Impulse

Once again I went looking through the movies Tubi has streaming on demand, and found another Hollywod movie from the Studio Era that was surprisingly unknown to me, and not a B movie either: the 1931 movie Indiscreet, which has nothing to do with the Cary Grant/Ingrid Bergman film of the same title that was released in the late 1950s.

Gloria Swanson is the star here, playing Gerry Trent, a woman who God only knows how she's able to support herself. It's likely off the back of her aunt Kate (Maude Eburne), although she and her kid sister Joan (Barbara Kent) talk about having come from Oklahoma to New York, and Joan was able to go off to Paris too. In the meantime, Gerry found a boyfriend in Jim Woodward (Monroe Owsley), but dumped him because he's boring. The dumping happens as the movie opens; Joan, for her part has a nice enough guy Buster Collins (Arthur Lake) who is interested in her, but Joan seemed to merely want to be friends, which might have had something to do with her going off to Paris.

At any rate, Gerry having recently broken up, she's given a bit of advice by Buster, who has her read the hot new book Obey That Impulse by author Tony Blake (Ben Lyon). It's one of those "modern" books, with new and presumably scandalous ideas about love and marriage. Gerry likes the book, and meets Tony. Naturally, she likes Tony as a man too, and the two fall in love. They even talk about marriage, despite Gerry's worry that if Tony hears about the previous relationship with Jim Tony might not want her any more. She needn't have worried, at least not about that. Gerry soon finds she's got a lot more to worry about.

That's because Joan returns from Paris. She talks about the most wonderful American expat she met during her time in Paris, and how she's in love with him. And then she introduces Gerry to that man. You probably already guesed it, but that man is Jim Woodward. Oh dear. How to get Joan to be no longer interested in Jim, since Gerry thinks of him as bad news for her? Her first idea is to make Jim and his family believe that some insanity runs in the Trent family, so Gerry goes to a big fancy party at the Woodward place and tries to act nuts. That doesn't work, however, so she tries another tack, which is to buttonhole Jim and get him to believe that perhaps Gerry still loves him and it's Gerry who is the right sister for him. The problem with this, however, is that Tony is liable to come across Gerry pitching woo to Jim and conclude that Gerry was being dishonest about the relationship when she first informed Tony of it.

Indiscreet is an interesting enough movie that probably wouldn't be remembered at all today if it weren't for the fact that Gloria Swanson is the lead. She was big in the silent era, before the pictures got small, and would go on to revive her career with the role that probably made her most famous, that of Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. Take Swanson out of Indiscreet and who would think of it today. It's not a bad movie, although it doesn't feel overly original. It also feels very dated, and not just because of its provenance as an early talkie with all the technical things that implies.

Still, I think fans of early talkies will enjoy this version of Indiscreet.

Love Affair

There are two movies airing back-to-back on TCM that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before, which is why the first one is getting a mention a day and a half or more before it actually airs. That one is the 1939 version of Love Affair, which closes out what TCM considers its September 21 schedule at 4:30 AM September 22.

The movie opens with a bunch of radio broadcasters doing news reports on how a famous French artist, Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer), has gotten on a boat out of Naples heading for the US. There, the artist and playboy is finally going to settle down, as he's set to marry socialite Lois Clark. Also on the boat is an American nightclub singer, Terry McKay (Irene Dunne), although what she was doing in Europe is a bit of a question. She too is engaged to be married back in the US, to Kenneth Bradley (Lee Bowman).

As you can guess even if you haven't seen the famous remake An Affair to Remember, Terry and Michel are going to meet on the boat. This happens when Terry accidentally winds up with a radiogram that was addressed to him. She feigns not knowing him, and since the two are traveling alone, they decide to dine together. They even begin to fall in love, which is of course a big problem since they're both engaged to other people and because of how well-known Michel is; anything that could be seen as not being faithful could present huge problems for him once he gets to the States.

They do have a chance to spend some time alone, however, when the ship stops for an afternoon in Madeira, a Portuguese possession in the mid-Atlantic. There, Michel's grandmother Janou (Maria Ouspenskaya) lives, she having decided to remain there because her French diplomate husband died while serving in the French diplomatic corps. Janou and Terry talk, and the implication from the talk is that Terry and Michael are obviously right for each other, despite being engaged to other people. Grandma knows best, even when she knows nothing of outside pop culture.

But, of course, the two young ones are engaged to other people, so instead of breaking off their engagements forthwith they make an agreement to wait six months, and then meet each other on the observation deck of the Empire State Building to see if they're still in love. They are, but as Michel is on the observation deck, Terry finds herself unable to make the appointment because she gets hit by a car and seriously injured, with no way to contact Michel. She gets noticed singing while in a sanatarium recovering, which gets her work teaching music to children, and a bit of a life of her own. But of course she and Michel are going to run into each other again, aren't they?

The only real problem with Love Affair is the fact that it's one of those movies where pretty much everyone already knows what's going to happen because the movie itself is well-known, and has an even better-known remake, An Affair to Remember. I have a feeling that the movie would have carried a lot more emotional impact in 1939 when it was first released, both because of the relative originality and because the world was in a lot of tension with the run-up to World War II about to break out in Europe.

In any case, Love Affair is anchored by fine performances from both Boyer, who's excellent at romance, and Dunne, who could play either elegant or comedic. The supporting performance from Ousepenskaya is quite good too, and director Leo McCarey handles the material deftly. So despite the fact that Love Affair may suffer a bit from the weight of expectations, it's still an extremely good movie.

Once Upon a Honeymoon

When the US entered World War II in December 1941, Hollywood joined the war effort, and there were a lot of films from 1942 that give the feeling of either being rushed into production or as though events of the day overtook the events of the film. One such movie that made a bit more sense to me as I was thinking about people in Hollywood wanting to do their part for the war effort is Once Upon a Honeymoon.

The story opens in Vienna in early 1938. As always, if you know your history this was the time when Austria "decided" (not that they had much choice) to merge with Nazi Germany in what is known as the Anschluß. The movie begins just before Austria voted itself out of existence, and surprisingly there are ex-pats who seem oblivious to what's going on. Namely, that's Kathie O'Hara (Ginger Rogers), a showgirl from Philadelphia who wound up in Vienna and fell in love with a German Baron, von Luber (Walter Slezak) and is planning to marry him in spite of the political situation.

Someone more clued in to the political situation is American correspondent Patrick O'Toole (Cary Grant), and his nominal job is to get an interview with O'Hara because of the wedding. Kathie is famously not giving any interviews, so O'Toole has to get up to all sorts of ruses. The baron, however, is wise to all of this. Meanwhile, the political merger is completed, and the baron is called off to business in Prague, capital of the then still independent Czechoslovakia. Kathie obviously goes with him, while O'Toole follows.

History tells us that the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was the next to fall, with the Sudetenland being annexed outright in the fall of 1938 and the rest of Bohemia and Moravia becoming a protectorate in early 1939 with Slovakia being a nominally independent puppet state. After all these events, von Luber goes off to... Poland! Baroness von Luber and O'Toole follow, with O'Toole finally having figured out that wherever the Baron goes, another country is bound to fall, and that the Baron is obviously a no-good Nazi. But can O'Toole get Kathie to become a good American and turn on the Baron?

Obviously, since the movie was released in 1942, you know that Kathie is going to wise up and do her part for her country, although with the number of countries that fall to the Nazis, she's also going to have to do quite a bit of moving around Europe with her husband. O'Toole, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to expose the true nature of the shadowy Baron. Along the way, O'Toole and O'Hara get mistaken for Jews and sent to the Warsaw ghetto, and then get directly get clued in to American intelligence when they're in Paris.

I read quite a few negative reviews of Once Upon a Honeymoon, and it's easy enough to see why somebody would draw that conclusion about the movie. Much in the same way that the characters have to wing it in moving around Europe, so it feels tht the screenwriters were writing as events dictated, even though everything that happened in the movie would have been a good two years before the movie actually started filming (IMDb says filming started in June 1942, which is a good six months after Pearl Harbor).

It's also definitely not the best film any of the principals involved with the movie made, although I'd also say it's decidedly not the worst. It's just a bit of a mess because it feels like the morale boost is the thing here, above and beyond any story line, which is a bit of a shame, because there are movies out there which do a much better job of giving a great story first and then the morale boost (To Be or Not to Be comes to mind).