The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)

Priests and ministers and vicars in film are for the most part portrayed as earnest, friendly, and caring men (and women) who see their parishioners as their flock and try to be there for the community whether it's for the birth of a child, the marriage between two people, or the death of a loved one. One of my favorite portrayals of a clergyman is Simon Callow as the Very Reverend Beebe in James Ivory's A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1986).  My first encounter with a priest was not a happy one.  His name was Father McMahon and he was not overtly friendly or kind. He was stern and a task master.  We weren't a very pious family, but my parents wanted me to have some religious learning so every Wednesday after school, I would attend CCD (Cofraternity of Christian Doctrine) at my local Catholic church.  I was goofing off in line with another kid while waiting to enter the school. Father McMahon did not take kindly to our goofing.  He took us aside and made us wait for everyone else to enter the building before we could.  It left a lasting impression on me that priests were not nice people.

If only I had Father Chuck O'Malley, the irrepressible young singing priest with the straw hat played by Bing Crosby from Leo McCarey's GOING MY WAY (1944) as my religious instructor, my early perception of men and women of the cloth might have been different. It wasn't until I attended college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a Jesuit institution, that I would come across kindly priests and nuns that would return my faith in holy people again.

What's unique about GOING MY WAY is that it's commercial success would quickly spawn a sequel just a year later, also directed by Leo McCarey called THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S (1945) with Crosby reprising his role as Father O'Malley and Ingrid Bergman as his friendly rival Sister Mary Benedict. Sequels back in the Golden Age of Film were uncommon unless you were a Universal horror film like James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN (1931) which would lead to the sequel THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) or Karl Freund's THE MUMMY (1932) which would spawn four MUMMY sequels in the early 40s.  Today, sequels are common and expected if the initial film is a box office success.  GOING MY WAY would make six million dollars upon its release, a huge sum of money for 1944.  Not to be outdone, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S would make eight million dollars, even more than the original which was unprecedented. Although not necessarily a holiday film, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S has a spiritual quality to it that fits right in with the Christmas.  BELLS also has a few connections to Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE that would be released the following year in 1946. 

With a screenplay by renowned screenwriter Dudley Nichols (GUNGA DIN, STAGECOACH) based on a story by Leo McCarey, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S opens with Father Chuck O'Malley (Bing Crosby) arriving at St. Mary's parochial school to visit his friend Father Fogerty.  Only Fogerty has recently been hospitalized. St. Mary's is primarily taught by nuns led by Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) and Sister Michael (Ruth Donnelly).  O'Malley's superiors ask him to step in as pastor of the school while Fogerty recuperates. O'Malley meets the rest of the sisters as well as the boys and girls of the school.  O'Malley immediately gives the children the day off as a holiday, drawing the ire of Sister Benedict. 

O'Malley soon discovers that St. Mary's is a dilapidated, rundown school, badly in need of repair. One of O'Malley's tasks is to determine if St. Mary's should be closed and the kids moved to a more contemporary school. Sister Benedict desires the new, modern building across the street, developed by businessman Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers). Mr. Bogardus wants to buy St. Mary's and turn it into a parking lot for his new building.  If he can't buy the school, he wants the school condemned and the children of St. Mary's sent to another school St. Vickers. O'Malley and Benedict will each try to convince Bogardus to donate his building to become the new St. Mary's. But that battle between the downtrodden and the mighty is only just one of the subplots of the film.

O'Malley meets a down on her luck, single mother Mary Gallagher (Martha Sleeper) who wishes her troubled daughter Patricia "Patsy" Gallagher (Joan Carroll) to attend St. Mary's.  Patsy's father Joe Gallagher (William Gargan), a musician, has been out of Mary and Patsy's life for some time. O'Malley will locate Joe and reunite him with Mary. When Patsy sees her mother with a strange man (she's never met her father), Patsy intentionally fails her final exams. Sister Benedict watches two schoolboys Eddie Breen (Richard Tyler) and bully Tommy Smith (Bobby Frasco) fight on the playground with Tommy knocking Eddie down.  O'Malley's impressed with Tommy's fighting skills.  Sister Benedict takes up Eddie's side.  She purchases a boxing book at the local sports department store and teaches Eddie the fine art of boxing.  When Tommy tries to beat up Eddie again, he's in for quite the surprise.

Bogardus begins to feel the stress with delays for his building not to mention guilt from the gentle prodding of Sister Benedict to donate his modern edifice to the school.  Bogardus's physician Dr McKay (Rhys Williams) advises Bogardus to get some rest. O'Malley checks with Sister Benedict on Patsy's grades. Benedict won't pass her for graduation. Benedict has a fainting spell after O'Malley tells her he's recommending St. Mary's be torn down. After Dr. McKay checks on Benedict, he reports back to O'Malley that Benedict has a mild case of tuberculosis and should go to a warmer climate to improve. O'Malley runs into Bogardus on the street, helping lost dogs and assisting old ladies onto the bus. Bogardus has a change of heart.  He's donating his new building to St. Mary's.  Sister Benedict has a change of heart when she learns Patsy failed her exams on purpose and meets Patsy's parents.  She makes an exception. Patsy can graduate with her peers.  O'Malley tells Benedict why he's transferring her due to her prognosis which brings joy to Benedict. What looked to be a very bleak finale transforms into an uplifting denouement just in time. 

Although Bing Crosby is arguably the star of THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S after the previous success of GOING MY WAY, Ingrid Bergman steals the film as Sister Mary Benedict, the tomboyish nun who teaches boys how to box and girls how to hit a baseball. It's funny how Hollywood treated Bergman.  I don't know if it was because she was European, Swedish, or had a child out of wedlock after an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, but Bergman's early career had her playing women of ill repute or loose morals.  In Victor Fleming's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941), Bergman plays a prostitute.  In Michael Curtiz's CASABLANCA (1943), she was Ilsa Lund, loving two men at one time during World War II.  In Alfred Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS (1946), she's an immoral party girl who sleeps with a former boyfriend turned Nazi to help the U.S. government find out his secrets.  

It makes sense that Bergman may have wanted to change her image a bit by playing a nun (okay, a beautiful nun) with no romantic love interest or sordid past for THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S.  Yet Bergman's not your typical nun.  She's described by one of her fellow sisters as a former "tomboy." She played baseball before taking her vows.  Sister Benedict has a competitive streak to her. When young Eddie is beat up by the playground bully (and praised for his fighting ability by Father O'Malley), Sister Benedict takes up Eddie's cause.  She buys a book on the fine art of boxing.  In the film's best and funniest sequence, Bergman teaches Eddie how to jab and weave before throwing a knockout punch. When Eddie practices with her, he accidentally punches the good Sister. There is no finer sound in film than the sound of Ingrid Bergman laughing, even if it's in pain. It's a priceless scene.

When you have two red hot movie stars like Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in a film, you expect fireworks in the chemistry department.  Don't expect that in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S.  There is absolutely no sexual tension between the two actors and rightly so.  One is a priest, the other a nun. Instead, the two characters have a friendly rivalry, a good-natured battle of the sexes. O'Malley bends the rules a little bit. Benedict follows the rules. It will take a little time for O'Malley and Benedict to warm up to each other, always in a humorous way.  In the end, both O'Malley and Benedict will come away with a newfound respect for each other. 

I can see why Bing Crosby won Best Actor for his role as Father O'Malley in GOING MY WAY.  Crosby plays the benevolent priest with just the right tone.  He's never too funny or maudlin. O'Malley is a little unorthodox in his methods but in a homespun way. O'Malley's the All-American young man from Missouri who has chosen the path of God over sports or becoming a doctor. Most of the Bing Crosby movies I've seen, he plays smooth talking entertainers like in Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) or wise cracking regular Joe in THE ROAD TO MOROCCO with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. Singers who become actors are initially typecast in comedies or musicals or musical comedies. At some point, they want to show their dramatic side.  THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S is Crosby's chance to play a dramatic character who happens to sing a little. 

Director Leo McCarey's career had an interesting path.  Unlike many of his contemporaries who would direct two or three films a year like Michael Curtiz or Howard Hawks, McCarey turned out one film every couple of years which may explain why most of his films are acclaimed and well received.  He took his time with his story and characters.  McCarey's early hits include the riotous musical comedy DUCK SOUP (1933) starring the Marx Brothers and the screwball comedy THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937) with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. But McCarey would prove to be an innovator as well. McCarey directed the romantic comedy LOVE AFFAIR (1939) starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. He must have liked the story (or needed a hit later in his career) so much that McCarey would remake LOVE AFFAIR 28 years later changing the title to AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957) with bigger movie stars Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in the leads. And as we talked about earlier, GOING MY WAY with Bing Crosby would be so successful that McCarey would quickly follow that film up with a sequel THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S inspired by his own aunt who was a nun who helped to build the Immaculate Heart Convent in Hollywood, CA. Sequels were not the norm in the 1940s.

McCarey is not a suspense director like Alfred Hitchcock, but he definitely draws out the happy endings to the very last moment.  In AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, the two lovers who meet on a cruise ship and promise to meet each other in New York after they reach port never connect due to an unfortunate accident to one of them. McCarey waits to the last few minutes of the film to finally reunite Grant and Kerr (or Boyer and Dunne depending on which film you like). In THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S, he puts characters in difficult situations that seem heartbreaking with no hope in sight.  Patsy fails her exams on purpose and Sister Benedict has to flunk her, ending Patsy's hopes of graduating in front of her mother.  Father O'Malley tells Sister Benedict he's transferring her away from St. Mary's at her happiest moment, just after Bogardus donates his new building to the nuns. Only at the last moment does McCarey allow Sister Benedict to learn Patsy could have easily passed her test and failed the exams on purpose. She lets Patsy graduate with her peers.  And Father O'Malley realizes he needs to tell Sister Benedict her getting sent away is for health reasons, not for anything bad she did.  Phew!  Happy endings but not until the final frame. 

In an unusual piece of casting, character actor Henry Travers who we normally see playing fatherly characters in films like Raoul Walsh's HIGH SIERRA (1941) or Alfred Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) plays the heavy Horace P. Bogardus in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S although he's more grumpy than sinister. It's fun to watch Sister Benedict work her slow magic on Bogardus, turning him from greedy developer to kind philanthropist.  But Bogardus is not one hundred percent saintly as he reminds Dr. McKay that his donation of his new building to the school is a tax write off.  More about Travers in a moment. THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S would be the last film for two actresses appearing in it.  Joan Carroll who plays the troubled student Patsy Gallagher would retire after BELLS which is a shame. Carroll had a distinctive face and appeal but moved on to a perfectly normal life.  Carroll's other well-known role was the middle sister between Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS in 1944.  Martha Sleeper who plays Patsy's down on her luck mother Mary Gallagher would not make another movie after THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S although she continued working in the theater and later was successful in the costume jewlery business.

There are a couple of connections between THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S and arguably the most famous Christmas movie of all time Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE which came out a year after BELLS in 1946.  Henry Travers who plays against type as the curmudgeon building developer Horace P. Bogardus in THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S would be cast by Capra as Clarence the friendly angel who gives James Stewart a second chance at life in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. It might be Travers most famous role and it's probably no coincidence he appeared in it as McCarey and Capra were friends. And check out the movie theater in the fictional town of Bedford Falls in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. The movie listed on the theater marquee is none other than THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S. 

Some final trivia tidbits. Although GOING MY WAY was made at Paramount and made them a ton of money, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S was made and released by RKO Studios.  Maybe Paramount Studios didn't believe in sequels at the time, a miscalculation by Paramount with BELLS surpassing GOING MY WAY'S success and gross receipts. GOING MY WAY would bring Oscars to both Leo McCarey for Best Director and Bing Crosby for Best Actor at the 1945 Academy Awards.  But not to be outdone, Ingrid Bergman would win Best Actress Award that same year for her performance in George Cukor's GASLIGHT (1944).  THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S had three new Academy Award winners in its pedigree. 

THE BELLS OF ST MARY'S is not your typical Christmas movie.  Except for one Christmas sequence where Father O'Malley and Sister Benedict watch the young children of the school practice a Nativity skit, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S takes place outside the holidays.  But THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S has all the hallmarks of the holiday season. It's about compassion, sacrifice, doing good for others, and love for your fellow man and woman (or boy and girl).  There is no better Christmas gift to receive than that.