December 6, 1945--The Bells of St. Mary’s, with Bing Crosby reprising his Oscar-winning Going My Way role as Fr. Chuck O’Malley, opened in New York City, not only nearly doubling its predecessor's box-office take but going on to become the biggest hit in the history of RKO Studios.
At the Oscars earlier that year, when Going My Way beat out Double Indemnity, writer-director Billy Wilder was so incensed that his pessimistic film noir lost to a work so cheerful that he tripped his rival in the Best Director category, Leo McCarey, as he went up to collect his award.
White Wilder's stature has risen steadily since the 1970s (notwithstanding his awards churlishness), McCarey--with far more successful pictures early in their careers--has gone into comparative eclipse. It’s not surprising, considering how cynical the times have become since then. I recall Mad Magazine's parody of Going My Way, taking the unconventional Fr. O’Malley to his logical conclusion in re-imagining him, for early-Seventies readers, as a radical priest. The title of the satire: “Going All the Way.”
If possible, The Bells of St. Mary’s has divided viewers even more than Going My Way. While critic Joseph McBride has written that he doesn’t want to meet anyone not moved by the finale of Bells, fellow scribe Richard Corliss has reacted in much the same manner that Oscar Wilde did to Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (i.e., “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”) In fact, Corliss has placed Bells on his list of the “Top 10 Worst Christmas Movies.”
Corliss’ choices in the latter can--and should--be strenuously argued (the original, glorious Miracle on 34th Street joins Bells on the list, but not Bill Murray’s unbelievably lame Yuletide satire, Scrooged).
In my childhood, my family watched Bells religiously every year during the holidays on New York area station WPIX. But I hadn’t seen it in years when I caught up with it a year or so ago on cable.
In that vast interval of time, my cynicism--and my impatience with lame films--had grown. But so had my appreciation for McCarey’s artistry, and for his deeply realistic view of tensions between priests and nuns that he hid beneath a cunningly constructed tearjerker.
A generation of film fans was turned onto McCarey’s work (though never realizing it was his) through Nora Ephron’s homage to his An Affair to Remember in Sleepless in Seattle. But there was far, far more to him than that.
Though Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra were great fans, it was a critic-turned-director, Peter Bogdanovich, who offered the most insight into McCarey in a chapter from his collection of interviews with great directors, Who The Devil Made It? Bogdanovich came away from deathbed interviews with McCarey in 1969 with appreciation for his courage and charm in the face of age, overwhelming health problems and imminent death, not unlike what many characters faced in movies made by “the handsome, reckless, crazy Irishman who understood people.” (Bogdanovich's valentine to the early days of cinema, Nickelodeon, even has as its main character an Irish-American character named Leo who breaks into films.)
McCarey, detractors say, never developed a distinctive visual style, nor take one genre to its peak, as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock did with the western and suspense film, respectively. But his comic touch was evident throughout his career, whether he was bringing Laurel and Hardy together for the first time, guiding the Marx Brothers to one of their peak performances in Duck Soup, or helping Cary Grant develop his comic talent in The Awful Truth.
I learned from Bogdanovich’s book, as well as from a Paul Harrill essay on the “Senses of Cinema” Web site, that McCarey was the son of a boxing promoter; that he practiced law, only to give it up because he had trouble defending clients he knew were guilty; that he invested in a copper mine that promptly went belly up; and that a career path more aesthetically pleasant but equally unremunerative—songwriting—led him to the movies. He incorporated all of these life experiences, in one way or another, in his work.
One example comes in The Bells of St. Mary’s, when Sister Mary Benedict attempts, with hilarious results, to teach one of her young male charges how to defend himself. (Several years ago, I saw a variation of this in a rerun of The Donna Reed Show, in which the star tries to teach Paul Peterson the same thing. Wonder where the show’s creators got that idea?)
A couple of other aspects of McCarey’s character might account for why his films haven’t garnered him more attention.
First, his was not a cynical or ironic wit, like Billy Wilder’s or David Letterman, but a humorous style in which the teller of the joke included himself among his targets. This was warm, generous laughter, but hardly the kind of style to which people have become accustomed over the years.
Second, his attitude toward religion lacked the irreverence that has become de rigueur in Hollywood and, sad to say, most of the public these days. Not that his characters—including priests—were wise or goody-two-shoes (clearly, Barry Fitzgerald’s aging pastor in Going My Way is neither), but, all the more because of their emotional frailty, they knew how much they needed God.
It wasn’t only McCarey’s Irish-American ancestry that made him respectful toward religion; it was a personal connection. Ingrid Bergman’s character in The Bells of St. Mary’s, Sister Mary Benedict, was based on the director’s own aunt, who died of typhoid.
That intimate knowledge of priests and nuns enabled McCarey to create situations with far more conflict and edginess than one might expect at first. Consider, for instance, the central situation of Bells: a liberal priest encountering resistance in attempting to get a nun to relax her strict attitudes.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Well, yes, albeit turbocharged with far more explosive subject matter: John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt.
Nearly six decades before the latter film, McCarey was already investigating the latent conflict between the women who ran America’s parochial schools and the male parish pastors who controlled their fates. The latter might have been more worldly, but, as we know now, they were not, in all too many cases, better. Frequently, the pastors got their way not through the triumph of their putative more liberal attitudes, but through the privilege of male authority. On the other hand, the real-life counterparts of Sister Mary, let it be remembered, might not have acted patiently all the time, but it’s hard to conceive of anyone who would when they had to battle every minute of the day to keep the schools going.
(Incidentally, Sister Mary’s school, a firetrap waiting to happen because of chronic underfunding, was recognizable to all too many mid-century Catholics, especially in the Chicago area, which was rocked in 1958 by a fire that destroyed Our Lady of Angels Elementary School, taking the lives of a number of students and nuns--and leading to sweeping school fire-protection legislation all across the country.)
Bells allows the audience to see this conflict at its most basic level, without Doubt’s contemporary, sensational subject: child molestation. Both Fr. Chuck and Sister Mary are warm-hearted, dedicated human beings, but they’re destined to butt heads about practically everything relating to operating the school.
Film fans were led into this realistic treatment of a common situation through a shrewd undercurrent throughout: the sublimated love affair between Fr. Chuck and Sister Mary. Like other screen romances, the course of love for them hardly runs smooth and, in fact, is filled with constant misunderstandings. In the end, the two antagonists finally see each other for what they are--emotionally, if not physically, united--because of tragedy.
Crosby and Bergman understood this subtext. One day, during shooting, they decided to play a practical joke on a priest acting as adviser to the film. Receiving McCarey’s permission for one more take so they could get their farewell scene right, they suddenly engaged in a passionate clinch.
Immediately, the appalled padre rushed forward, tut-tutting that this just would not do…
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