Review of The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
Seen in 2025.
The pace is glacial, the stakes are low, and the celebrity leads are charming, but the main attraction in this weak musical comedy is that it stands as a monument to the Hollywood studio system that produced it. Even though a lot of it takes place in sunlight on a schoolyard, every shot is of a sound stage or a backlot. Matt paintings are used for the most mundane urban backgrounds you can imagine, adding to a gentle sense of claustrophobia.
The script’s angle on Christianity is nonsensical in the same gentle way. It’s meant to be unconventional and cool, but takes a nonthreatening, mainstream path, with the result that it contradicts the religious subject matter and trivializes it so that nobody would be offended by the contradiction. Notably, Ingrid Bergman’s Sister Benedict has taught one boy to turn the other cheek when he is bullied at a Catholic school. Her chastly romantic counterpart, a priest played by crooner Bing Crosby, immediately praises the bully for being a better fighter than his Jesus-like victim. Benedict therefore teaches the victim to fight back, and when her student lands an uppercut on her in training, the sexist joke is that her presumption of teaching boxing as a woman without personal experience of boxing has been duly punished.
If you want to see Golden-Age Hollywood at its most normal in the last few years before Howard Hughes signed its death warrant in 1948, you can do a lot worse, but I snoozed through the finale the first time around, and I do not regret it.
References here: Sister Act (1992).