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I just plain don’t get the sleepy-eyed charm of Bing Crosby. As an actor I find him to be rather indifferent to any part he plays, always looking bored, never investing much in the way of emotional truth, but he did have a very lovely singing voice. Which he seemingly used in every single film he made, didn’t matter what kind it was. And in this sequel to Going My Way he reprises his role as a singing priest with a laid-back demeanor.
The Bells of St. Mary’s is a rambling effort which is by turns cavity-causing sweet, treacle, winsome and confoundingly “heart-warming,” as it tells the story of a priest and a nun who join forces to swindle an elder man out of his property so they can turn it into a new school. And also tells the tale of how the priest and nun manage to marry their two different teaching styles into one middle ground and come to respect one another. That part of the story I had relatively little problems with, although the choice of passing a girl who failed just because it’ll help her self-esteem and parental issues is utterly baffling.
That last bit of story development is essentially all of my problems with the film in microcosm. You see, this girl has come to the school and she has a lot of issues and baggage because her father ran out on them before she was born and left her and her mother completely destitute. So far, this seems pretty believable as a hard-luck case, and, of course, the church would want to help her. But once Crosby is engineering a reunion of her deadbeat father and mother, who it is strongly implied has been forced into prostitution to survive; they suddenly realize that they need to become a happy nuclear family unit. What the hell kind of dream-world is this? A mountainous problem like that would never be corrected so smoothly, and they are essentially shamed into reassembling the family unit. No one was bothered by this story development?
Granted, the whole thing is top-notch as far as filmmaking goes. The cinematography is pretty, clean and has real warmth to it. Of course, making Ingrid Bergman look lovely is probably one of the easiest jobs one could have, but that doesn’t take away from any of it. Bergman, for her part, plays the role with a nice mix of elegance, tenderness and tough-love. She brings a real empathy and humanity to the part. All of the kid actors do a solid job, and are appropriately precocious and adorable.
But these pleasures are hollow and in service of a script that rambles on for far too long. St. Mary’s needed a good trimming to tighten up the plot, or to make it appear as if there even was any singular plot. It’s an episodic thing that occasionally goes back to the fact that the church and school are rundown and need to be replaced. But instead of actually going about and doing anything about it, the nuns just pray for God to give them a new school and the resources to make it work. Isn’t this very thing what the church’s sense of community and collections are for? No matter, soon enough they’ve got their eyes on the new building across the street and they’re off to guilt-trip and out-right lie to an elderly rich man in order to be given the building.
But this movie is still viewed as heartwarming and family friendly because it stars a priest and a nun as the characters grifting an elderly man out of his property. I know that I’ve made it sound like I hated The Bells of St. Mary’s, well, I didn’t entirely. I gave the film a three-star rating because it is technically accomplished and Bergman delivers a fine performance and Crosby croons so very lovely. But like I said earlier, it’s all so hollow. Leo McCarey is probably best remembered for this saccharine mess instead of his 30s comedic classics like Duck Soup, The Awful Truth, Belle of the Nineties, which is an absolute shame. St. Mary’s isn’t a bad way to be remembered I suppose, but it is one of his weaker films.
