Holiday movies

The Miracle of the Bells (1948)

2020 was certainly a year that needed a miracle.  Coronavirus pretty much brought the world to a halt, and there was probably more movie watching at home than any other year in history.  So perhaps appropriate to end this blogs entry for the year with two Christmas-themed films.  First up: Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli and Frank Sinatra in The Miracle of the Bells. 

I happened to see the ending of this film when I was a kid and was so struck by its somber emotionality that I've always been curious about the rest of the story.   (Like Laura, the male character spent much of the film talking about a beautiful young woman who's dead,  only unlike that 1943 film noir classic, the woman here really is dead.) This year I finally succumbed and watched the entire movie. It's a perfect example of post-war piety + Hollywood hucksterism. And the perfect man to pull it off was Ben Hecht, basing his screenplay on a best-selling novel but obviously infused it with his unique blend of cynicism, sentimentality, and the dash of mysticism he affected in his middle years.  A critic like Pauline Kael would undoubtedly dismiss it all as Hollywood hokum, the perfect blend of kitsch and Catholicism, but I found it curiously affecting.  It doesn't hurt that the actors are all in fine form: Fred MacMurray playing a similar character as the one in Double Indemnity, only this time he's a nice guy (but still saying "That's right, baby" every 5 minutes); Lee J Cobb, on the nose as the movie producer (and one year away from his career-defining role in Death of a Salesman), Alida Valli, less bloodless than she is in other films (and herself a year away from her greatest film, The Third Man); plus a surprisingly low-key, thoughtful performance by Frank Sinatra as the gentle priest. 

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One can't really it a very good film, but it catches you up in its movieland mysticism -- even Hecht's hard-bitten newspaper reporters get bitten by belief in the "miracle."  (Hollywood's idea of a miracle is an actress who dies before her first movie -- about Joan of Arc, what else? -- premieres but, with the help of press agent McMurray and perhaps the Almighty, becomes a hit so that it can pay for a hospital in her coal-mining hometown which will treat others who get the disease she dies from.)  Maybe I have a soft spot for this film because my own mother, like Valli's character in the film, was a pretty Polish Catholic girl of 20 in 1948. Call this film a very guilty pleasure, but it's not a sin to enjoy it. 

The Bishop's Wife (1947)

And speaking of guilty pleasures, I also saw The Bishop's Wife, which was better than I thought it would be. Since Cary Grant is one of my two all-time favorite film actors the other being Humphrey Bogart), it's surprising I've never seen this film before. But not so surprising when you consider that Cary plays an angel in this film, and I've always been somewhat adverse to angels in movies. So I put off watching this for many years. Once again, I'm glad I finally gave in. Young is more low-key and in control than she was in The Stranger, and Grant is in top form. True, it's more post-war Hollywood piety, but the script by Robert E. Sherwood is intelligent and the cinematography by Gregg Toland is of course superb (there are some very fancy rooms for him to photograph and show off his technique).  David Niven has the thankless task of playing The Bishop's Wife"s husband.  Cary was originally set to play the role of the bishop husband, but after reading the script astutely realized that angel was a far better role and was able to use his box-office clout to grab it for himself). A good Christmas film for those who are tired of watching another version of A Chrisotmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life for the 30th time.

I should note that the ubiquitous Ben Hecht also had a role, albeit uncredited, in the writing of this screenplay. In 1939 he published a volume of novellas titled A Book of Miracles, and it seems in retrospect to have been the beginning of a stage of spiritual interests for Hecht which ultimately led to his valiant efforts, through writing pageants and full page ads in newspapers, to save European Jews during the Holocaust, as well as his later work helping to help create the state of Israel. But for now, his miracles existed mainly on celluloid.

I do hope you appreciate how assiduously I avoid spoilers in my brief commentaries. I barely even mentioned the plot. (It has much to-do about Episcopal Bishop David Niven trying to raise funds to build a cathedral but running into problems with finicky patrons along with his deteriorating marriage.)  As for Cary Grant -- what an angel!

Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

Birds can fly. But they also fly away.  So does youth.

After watching the pseudo-piety and celluloid of the previous two films, it's good to get down and dirty, Tennessee Williams style.  This 1962 adaptation of the 1959 Williams play features superb performances by Paul Newman, Rip Torn, Geraldine Page, and the beautiful young Shirley Knight. Newman, Page, and Torn -- which sounds like the name of a disreputable law firm -- were also in the Broadway production which ran over a year.) Ed Begley Sr. as the corrupt small town mayor, dominates every scene he's in, which garnered him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in this film.  A thoroughly satisfying film experience, and one of the best adaptations on film of Tennessee Williams I've ever seen.  Oh, I forgot to mention that Newman plays a Chance Wayne, a gigolo servicing an aging movie star played by Geraldine Page, who indulges in plenty of sex mixed with alcohol and hashish, whichsomehow got by the Motion Picture Production Code, which was obviously on its last legs in 1962.  Newman is using Page to get a screen test in Hollywood, while she's using him to distract herself from her fear of growing too old to maintain her status as a movie star.  Newman has brought her to the small Gulf Coast Town he grew up in, apparently in order to win the heart of the mayor's beautiful daughter, splendidly played by Shirley Knight, whom he has been in love with for years but unable to marry because of his lack of money and generally low status. Rip Torn, playing the mayor's son and enforcer, is the enforcer, is as crafty and mean as Martin Landau in North by Northwest.

Afterwards I read Bosley Crothers' review published in New York Times when the film was first released. As I expected, he absolutely loathed it. Crothers was a rather moralistic critic and he could not fail to be disgusted by the characters in this film, all of whom are deeply flawed, to put it mildly. Naturally he finds  aesthetic reasons to justify his visceral objection to the film -- you know he's appalled by the drug use, casual sex, and overall atmosphere of dissipation.  Crowther can't imagine that a gigolo as manipulative and vile as Newman could possibly be sentimental enough to still carry the torch for  his early love, the Shirley Knight character named Heavenly.  Chance and Heavenly: sometimes Tennessee Williams could be a bit obvious. But Williams believed that even his lowest characters were worthy of  redemption, and in other films Newman often found redemption with the help of a loving woman, as in The Hustler.  Which gives even this film a spiritual patina of sorts.  (Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said "every saint has a past and every sinner has a future"?). Crowther also found some of the plot contrived, which is perhaps a valid point, since Williams in fact combined two of his one-act plays to make this full length one, and the melding required some contrivances, to be sure.

I read the play years ago and didn't care for it that much at the time, and I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I like the movie because it's been Hollywoodized to some extent.  (Meaning it's taken some of the rough edges off  Williams' play.)  One reason I probably couldn't appreciate it as a teenager is that it's hard at that age to fully understand the desperation of people who are getting older and feeling that the best of life is behind them. Teens don't tend to relate to that.  But the movie is much more exhilarating than I remember the play being.  I think director Brooks amplified some of the political hoopla which is always fun, especially when it's southern and pious and utterly phony. 

And here at last comes a spoiler alert: Richard Brooks, who wrote the screenplay of the film as well as directed it, gives it a happier ending than the original play had. Normally I'm a sucker for an unhappy ending. But at the end of this deeply unhappy year,  unhappy for me and even more so for so much of the world,  I was grateful that this nearly 60-year-old film provided me with a little happiness, however implausible it might have been.