The Miracle Woman (1931) stars Barbara Stanwyck as a con artist Evangelist preacher who is unexpectedly ministered to by someone in need. The title character of the movie reflects its era with an obvious nod to the real-life Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular media evangelist of her day, who reached celebrity status in the 1920s and 1930s, but the similarity ends there. Stanwyck’s “Sister Fallon” has a backstory more mundane and a future more ordinary than McPherson’s lionized life path, but Stanwyck’s incredible adventure brings her, more than her followers, an epiphany and a kind of humble salvation.
Directed by Frank Capra, this was Miss Stanwyck’s second of five films with him. The story is told briskly, with some beautiful camera work, and several of Capra’s tender touches. It is not a story of a woman losing faith or mocking faith; it is the story of a woman deeply disgusted by the hypocrisy of churchgoers. Ultimately, the faith lost and restored is her faith in mankind.
The title card warns us, “The Miracle Woman is offered as a
rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of Religion, seeks to sell for gold, God’s
choicest gift to Humanity—FAITH.” This
is to keep the censors at bay and to reassure audiences that the studio does
not support religious fakes.
We are also reminded of the verse from Matthew, “Beware of
false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing.” That could apply, as it has for millennia, to
the world of politics as well as religion.
But the story about Stanwyck’s character is far more
interesting than the possible rise and fall of a corrupt preacher—we have seen
real-life examples of that to fill a mountain of tabloids—because she is not an
arrogant, greedy, sociopath, someone with whom we could not really identify and
therefore might cheer her downfall. She
is simply a strong but troubled young woman who needs to right a wrong and find
her place in the scheme of things.
The movie starts with the lovely hymn, one of my favorites, “Holy Holy Holy! Lord God Almighty,” and a large church, packed with congregants, as Miss Stanwyck takes the pulpit. She is not the minister; her ailing elderly father is, but he is unwell, and she is standing in for him today to read his dictated sermon. After which, she delivers one of her own.
The church deacons have recently hired a younger man to fill the post as minister, and after twenty years, Stanwyck’s pop is getting the sack. At the point in the sermon where her father quotes the 23rd Psalm (King James version), “The Lord is My Shepherd,” she breaks off because that is where her father left off just before he dropped dead.
The congregation is stunned. She plows ahead with a much more fiery sermon of her own, blasting them for throwing her father away and for their hypocrisy, accusing them of killing him. “The laborer is worthy of his hire—but you wouldn’t pay him what you pay your chauffeurs.” He hadn’t accumulated enough savings in his tenure at the church even for a decent burial. She goes on to threaten to make public the temperance union members who subscribe to bootleggers, and the (apparently many) adulterers among them.
“This isn’t a house of God; this is a meeting place for hypocrisy!”
The congregation runs away from her; they can’t get out of
that church fast enough.
Sam Hardy makes his entrance, a visitor to the church, who
consoles her on the loss of her father and her home (they’re probably going to
want her to vacate the manse pretty quickly now), and offers her a new career.
“Religion’s like anything else—great if you can sell it, not good if you can give it away.”
Aha. Turning the
tables on the “faithful” by feeding into their hypocrisy and profiting from
it. She wants revenge, but is uncertain. He assures her, “You’re not a hypocrite if
you admit it.”
He builds up her new career as a faith healer, an evangelist
who gains a following through radio and through her own theatrical services at
a barnlike church.
We are now introduced to David Manners, a handsome and charming actor who played affable, mostly lightweight leading man roles in the early 1930s, later returning to the stage and eventually leaving acting in the 1950s to write. He is probably most famous for his role in Dracula, released this same year of 1931 and which we covered here. Manners plays a blind World War I vet who will have a profound impact on Stanwyck.
His introduction to us is one of Capra’s skilled emotional moments. We see a woman sitting quietly in her apartment before an open window, slowly rocking her child in a cradle next to her. She looks off, with an expression that is enigmatic; seems to convey weariness and yet serenity, as she listens to Stanwyck preach over the radio. The woman’s vacant expression is fascinating; we don’t know her story, but she is not conveying feelings of being inspired or comforted by the evangelist. Capra could have had her easily rapt, but she is in a world of her own, maybe just enjoying a quiet moment after a morning of housework and never-ending chores and obligations.
Manners leans out from a window above across the alley and asks her to turn down the radio, which she does. Before he pulls his head in, there is a downward shot over his shoulders showing us what the alley looks like and how high up he is. Another deft Capra shot that, though we don’t know it yet, is a kind of foreshadowing, because Manners will contemplate killing himself by jumping out that window in a moment.
As he pulls his head in and we see his apartment, the Army helmet draped over a lamp and various photos and souvenirs of the war, we understand his past, and discover he is blind.
His kindly landlady, Beryl Mercer, brings the mail with bad news—his songwriting efforts fail to get him published. When he eventually returns to the window to consider throwing himself out, he hears Stanwyck’s voice from his neighbor’s radio again. Her sermon has taken a turn into a pure Depression-era keep-your-hopes-up theme, reminding her followers that John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was a blind man.
Manners’ expression softens, and he gently laughs, feeling, if not inspired, then at least a little foolish for feeling so sorry for himself.
He wants to know more about the voice on the radio, and his
landlady takes him to one of her services, which he attends as one amused by
the circus-like setting rather than being immediately drawn in. He is not looking for religion; he is just
curious.
The large choir in their sweaters and singing World War I songs like “Over There,” seem more like a college football cheerleading squad than a church choir, but Stanwyck, or more to the point, Sam Hardy, knows the way to catch profits is to catch the most gullible segment of the population, and to catch them, one needs to appeal not to their intellect, but to what makes them feel good, and to put on a good show.
To this end, the curtains part, revealing lions in a large cage. Stanwyck makes her entrance from an upper balcony, walking down a long ramp to the stage below, wearing a white gown, dressed as if she is an angel. She enters the cage (Hardy makes sure the lions have been fed and staff are standing by to shoot the animals if they attack Miss Stanwyck), and begins her call to the faithful, to encourage them to enter the cage with her and be healed.
The hired shill for tonight is drunk and misses his cue, but Manners stands to volunteer. He is not really seeking a cure; he just wants to find out more about Miss Stanwyck and talk to her. He also senses she has been left hanging by no one going up to accept her challenge. His landlady is concerned, “The lions will eat you!”
He responds with easy self-effacing humor, “No, they won’t;
I’ve got a Murad.” I think this might be
a reference to the advertising slogan for the aromatic Turkish Murad cigarettes.
We have another topical reference of the day to vaudeville’s
worst act, The Cherry Sisters, when Sam Hardy berates one of the other hired
shills about her lousy performance, “You ain’t even one of the Cherry Sisters.”
After the show, Stanwyck, in her dressing room, tells Hardy she feels frustrated, like a prisoner, and is growing tired of the act. He insists she continue, partly because they are so successful, and partly because he is growing obsessed with her and is increasingly possessive.
Giving Manners a ride home in the rain—Capra often sets romantic or sensual moments in the pouring rain in his pictures—he invites her up to his apartment and they get acquainted. He amuses her with his toys, a mechanical music toy and a “dancing doll,” and, rather creepily, his ventriloquist’s dummy dressed like a WW1 soldier.
She learns to laugh again and is perhaps touched that his
gentle man, with all his problems, has no malice in his heart, no thirst for
revenge as she has had.
Before she leaves Manners after her first visit to his room, there is sweet moment where she turns to glance back at him, and the camera shifts to David Manners, standing there with something like expectancy, more on our part perhaps than his. He cannot see her looking at him, but he senses she has not left yet.
Stanwyck hesitates, then she goes back to him for a brief, soft kiss.
Her faithful chauffeur, played by Frank Holliday, can cover for her only so far, and Hardy becomes menacing. Their manager, who gets a third of a cut of the offerings and merchandising they take in (Manners had bought a plaster bust of Stanwyck to “see” what she looks like, and she is embarrassed at the tacky merch), is found dead. Later, Hardy will threaten Stanwyck with the same fate if she does not run away with him to the Riviera. He plants news stories that she is going to take a break for her health and travel the Holy Land.
She agrees to go, to protect David Manners from Hardy. She confesses to him that she is a fake, but he comforts her. She "writes" notes to him in fabric on paper so that he can feel the outline of the letters. It must have been an arduous process and looks like a ransom note.
He and the landlady break into the “tabernacle” and to Stanwyck’s
dressing room so he can become familiar with the placement of the items in the room,
to pretend to Stanwyck that his sight has been restored, freeing her to leave, but it doesn’t work.
On her farewell performance, the crowd is overflowing and exuberant, and she is about to confess her fakery to them, when Hardy cuts the lights. It is reminiscent of the scene in Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941, previously covered here) when Gary Cooper is about to “out” the Edward Arnold gang and his microphone is cut in the stadium, and no one can hear him. This was Barbara Stanwyck’s fifth and final film directed by Frank Capra.
A horrific fire breaks out, and people panic, and Stanwyck,
strangely, encourages them to stay and sing, that fire cannot hurt them if they
have faith and believe in God. Perhaps
she has begun to believe her own powers.
Sensibly, they leave the building.
Manners, who wakes up in her dressing room after having been
punched in the face by Hardy, heroically makes his way down to the stage and rescues
her. They are both removed from the scene
outside on stretchers as the crowd recites The Lord’s Prayer.
We jump to many months later, when in New York City, Sam Hardy is working on another scam with a boxer, and he spots Stanwyck on the street wearing a Salvation Army uniform, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with her new fellow Salvation Army colleagues. She is happy, having just read a telegram from David Manners stating a possible operation might restore his sight, but concedes it might not, “Who cares?” He also mentions that the ventriloquist's dummy will be his best man at their wedding. I think he's kidding.
Hardy remarks, “She gave up a million bucks for that? The poor sap.”
The truly religious are servants to mankind, not managers of mankind. Stanwyck has found her redemption. She had never really demonstrated a lack of faith in God; such a question was too difficult for the studio system of the day, even Pre-Code, to examine unless the character could be brushed off as evil and dispatched by the final reel. What she needed to overcome was her cynicism over mankind, which I think is a more interesting subject to explore; it leads far more easily to corruption.
The Miracle Woman can currently be seen on YouTube.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
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