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On the one hand, The Song of Bernadette is far too long and meandering for its own good, one the other hand, it’s one of the few films that tackle faith and devout belief with kindness and solemn respect. Perhaps it’s a bit too solemn though, as Bernadette can feel an awfully lot like a proselytized screed. Even worse is a persistent thrum of the film working as blatant and open Oscar bait, as if it were daring the Academy to not reward it for the sentimental treatment of its story.
What saves The Song of Bernadette from folding under its own weight is the strength of Jennifer Jones’ leading performance. This is an interior performance built from the inside out, and it would be easy to exclaim mystification over her Oscar win for such a quiet performance. Yet for all of her guilelessness and gentle-nature, there’s a core to Jones’ Bernadette that is tough. She’s also consistently girlish and ordinary, and it’s quite lovely how Jones refuses to embalm Bernadette before her time. It’s easy to admire these exterior choices, but she knocked me out in a handful of moments that would have played much differently in another actress’ hands.
First, there’s a moment where Bernadette learns that a village boy has always loved her, but has chosen to not pursue a relationship with her after watching her become an exalted religious figure. Jones merely smiles sadly, looks down, and hands him a flower while saying goodbye. She continues her quiet, smaller choices, but it’s the action going on behind her eyes that capture you. For one brief moment Jones allows her Bernadette to imagine an entire happy married life with this boy while simultaneously watching it immediately dissolve in front of her.
Another great moment is Bernadette’s death scene. It’s not hard to picture another actress going big and raging against the dying light, but Jones merely whispers and asks for prayers with such an emotional conviction and piety that it’s a little unnerving just how unshakable this girl is in her faith. Jones is playing this for real as the film cues up swelling strings and a heavenly choir. This may have been intended as an underlining to what the star was doing, but it creates a dissonance between Jones’ quaking vulnerability and acceptance of death and the melisma and histrionics of the score. Frankly, I knew about fifteen minutes into this that I probably would have voted for her too if I was an Academy member in 1943, and Jones’ refusal to play into the melodramatics of the big moments clinched it for me.
Jones’ plain, ethereal beauty makes it nearly impossible to imagine 20th Century Fox contract players like Anne Baxter, Gene Tierney, or Linda Darnell in the role. Darnell does wind up in Bernadette playing, of all things, the Virgin Mary that comes to Bernadette throughout. On paper this should mark Bernadette as an unintentional camp classic since Darnell’s bad girl screen imagine (and pregnancy) would undermine the role, but there’s no camp to be found here. Even more extraordinary, perennial good girl Loretta Young wanted the part, and didn’t get it. But it just underscores the earnestness on display if a sight like that can be played straight and accepted as such by the audience.
So thank the maker for Vincent Price’s nonbeliever and Gladys Cooper’s vicious, jealous nun in supporting roles. A quick glimpse at the 12 Oscar nominations this thing gathered included understandable nods for Anne Revere as Bernadette’s earthy, conflicted mother, and less so for Charles Bickford’s spiky, nervous Father Peyramale. Bickford is fine, but the character’s transfer from polite but hostile clergyman to supportive witness is too fast, and part of the problem with Seaton’s script is in how it frequently mishandles or slips up numerous narrative beats. But there’s a consistency in Price and Cooper’s characters and a natural progression within them that is strongly felt both in the writing and the performance.
This has to be one of Vincent Price’s best roles, and he’s the one that I wish had gotten the nomination here. He’s a man who views faith as superstition, Bernadette’s visions as mere hallucinations, and the fervor around it all as hysteria. He never plays a single moment with malice, and he gets a few shots at injecting droll humor into the proceeding somberness of the film. This all comes to a head in his climatic scene of shaken faith and mortality. He knows he’s dying of cancer, and he goes down to the grotto where he quietly says allowed for Bernadette to pray for and forgive him. There’s a tremendous amount of contradictory emotion and feeling here, much of it startlingly mature and ambiguous for such a white elephant production.
While Gladys Cooper’s vicious nun is revealed to be a woman who is jealous of this young peasant girl’s religious visions and eventual martyrdom. Cooper has a one-two punch of a venom-filled monologue followed by a dry-heave of repentance that just reminds us of how great and seamless a character actress she was. She manages to project so much using only her voice and eyes in her searing monologue against Bernadette, and then contort us to understanding where it all comes from as she prays for forgiveness. That forgiveness scene is really something as her back to us the entire time so all we have go on is the tremble in her voice and loaded pauses and stop/start rhythms.
It is in performance that the greatest joys of The Song of Bernadette can be found, as the surrounding film is good, but not great. It never quite succumbs to the goopy, eye-rolling sentimentality of the likes of The Bells of St. Mary’s, but it never wrestles with faith in as complicated and expansive a way as something like The Last Temptation of Christ. But the center cannot hold for nearly three hours, and the film wanders too far at times to retain your attention. Still, there’s a graceful, intelligent film about faith somewhere in here that’s worth a look, and you’ll get to watch Jones, Price, and Cooper deliver three performances that rank high in each of their careers.
