1930s Then and Now Part 4 - One Third of the Nation (1939)

One Third of the Nation (1939) is a window on the world of the late 1930s where the view is clear only because some of the grime has been rubbed off the pane with our fist, allowing us to look out. Some of what we saw then, we see today. The clothes and the speech may be out of date, but the problem isn’t, and neither is the desperation.

Classic film buffs recall 1939 as a marvelous extravaganza, an abundance of well-made and well-loved films, running the gamut between The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and a list as long as your arm of other Oscar nominees. One Third of the Nation is far down in the pack; it doesn’t sparkle much as a social message film with its lukewarm hero and a pat ending and the heroine that seems to drift emotionally (which may echo our national malaise after a decade of Depression). It is not as well-remembered, perhaps, as the giants that the studios produced in that year, but its roots are legitimate and its theme has lasted and it is more relevant today than most of the most beloved films of 1939.

It began as a stage play, one of the experimental works produced by the Federal Theater Project in 1938. Written by Arthur Arent, it was part of the Living Newspaper series which dramatized conditions of the day, this one with a message of the common man versus the big men, including the landlords, about the slum conditions in New York City, how they came to be, how they are maintained, and who profits from them.

Along with its New York run, the play was produced in several other cities across the nation and garnered a great deal of publicity and praise, except by congressional conservatives who were offended by its message. Conservatives were not fond of funding the Federal Theater Project as they regarded it as an incubator of left-wing ideas and dangerous messages—dangerous to them, one presumes—but though it’s been reckoned that actually something like less than 10 percent of its play productions had a left-wing message, nevertheless, Congress decided to quit funding the Federal Theater Project in 1939, and that exciting experiment that kept writers, actors, and directors working during those terrible years in the Depression and that spawned such important works, was killed.

The title of the play, adapted for the movie in 1939, comes directly from the line in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural address in January 1937: “I see one-third of the nation ill-house, ill-clad, ill-nourished... The test for progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

We’re still grappling with that idea.

The movie’s plot diverges a little from the stage play in that it has a less experimental presentation (except for a few scenes when the boy has a conversation with the firetrap tenement that he lives in, but we’ll get to that in a minute). Instead, it follows a more conventional line of the damsel in distress, a hero who comes to her aid, and a happy ending.

The film opens on the East Side of New York with kids playing in the streets, turning on fire hydrants and being chased away by the cops, overshadowed by tenements. We get inside views of one particular building with the walls falling apart so that we are able to see the exposed lathing, of trash in hallways, of railings that need to be repaired. A fire starts in the basement of this tenement building. It quickly spreads and its residents attempt to escape in all directions, stumbling out of doors, scrambling out of windows, from fire escapes that will not hold their weight, screaming. A crowd gathers in the street, the fire department arrives, and we see a line of dead bodies already covered on the sidewalk waiting for the morgue.

As the fire rages, at the top of the building we see a boy climbing a fire escape to try to reach the roof because he is blocked from getting to the ground. The ladder on which he is clinging breaks and he falls to the ground. It is a sickening scene, and through the crowd his sister rushes forward in horror. She is played by Sylvia Sidney, fresh off her gig in a similar environment in Dead End (1937).  Miss Sidney had the chops to play fearless dames, but her sophisticated appearance, maybe just her distinctive beautiful eyes set wide in her porcelain face, left her an aura of glamour no matter what setting.

In the back of the crowd, we see a man in an automobile and his snide, wisecracking best friend, rubbernecking at the tragedy. Leif Erickson plays the hero of the piece, and Hiram Sherman is his pal who, not even before the movie is half over, we want to strangle for his smug, sophomoric arrogance. It was Sherman’s only film, then he went on to a lot of TV and theatre. It’s interesting to note that a lot of players in this movie had few movie credits, but had more career traction in TV and theatre.

Leif Erickson reaches Sylvia Sidney as supposedly helpful people are picking up her brother, who is unconscious, probably suffering from head and neck injuries, and handle him like he was a sack of potatoes.  If nothing else, our ideas about first aid have certainly changed for the better over the decades.

Erickson offers to drive him to the hospital and Sidney is very grateful and goes along. She thinks he means that they will take her brother to City Hospital which is for poor people, but he is taking him to the better Surgeons Hospital. Appalled, she asks “Isn’t that just for swells?”

Leif Erickson is rich. He tells her not to worry, and it is not until after the operation when they find out that her brother will survive but will be crippled that she discovers that Erickson has paid all the bills. She is grateful, of course, but intends to pay him back, though she has no idea how.

She is furious at the slumlord who owns the building but will not repair it or keep it maintained. She asks Erickson “Isn’t that murder? Shouldn’t a man like that be in jail?” Erickson agrees, but he will soon learn from his trusted family business manager that he owns the firetrap building. A large slum area of New York has been in his family’s possession for decades.

Mr. Erickson is not the only man in Sylvia Sidney’s life these days; Myron McCormick plays Sam, her longtime beau she cannot marry yet because they have no money. She says of him smiling, “He's sort of left, if you know what I mean.” Sam does not appear to be an agitator or an anarchist, but he is an intelligent and fearless thorn in the side of Erickson and anyone will he thinks makes a profit off other people’s misery.  Miss Sidney’s remark tells us that, like many of the poor, she has no political convictions, and is only concerned with the landlord that won’t fix the light in the hall or the boss that won’t offer a raise; her social concerns are largely about herself.  McCormick seems airy to her because he sees the big picture; Sylvia’s driven by her own personal needs.  The very rich and the very poor aren’t always too far apart in ideology.

There is a brief inquiry with Otto Hulett playing the assistant DA, and Erickson manfully stands up and takes responsibility, against the expressed wishes of his business manager played by Percy Waram and his obnoxious sister, played by Muriel Hutchison. They are intent on protecting the family name and the family dough.

At one point in the hearing, one of the tenants is questioned about the conditions of the building, but it is difficult for him to give an objective report because he lost his wife and children in the fire and he is too shocked, too broken up to want to even discuss the matter. He is an immigrant and whimpers “My little babies.” He is gently told that he can go now.

He looks up astonished, “Where?”

It seems that the rich family of Leif Erickson is legally off the hook because this tenement was built before 1901 and therefore it does not need to adhere to new safety regulations. We are given an insight to the inefficient and bungling bureaucracy which allows this system and we get facts and figures almost like a docudrama in parts. We are told that such firetraps where low-income people live are not rare in the city, that there are over 67,000 of them.

Sylvia Sidney is angry and wants Leif Erickson interrogated on the stand, and he is only too happy to discuss the situation because he has thus far been ignorant about what kind of property his family owns. He has never really been involved in the business. His business manager, Mr. Waram, explains that Sylvia Sidney’s family would have to pay more – mother, father, younger brother, and herself all live in a one-room apartment – which goes for $10 a month rent. If Erickson did all the repairs and upkeep that she demands, they would have to be charged at least $25 a month rent.

Such rents for 1939 actually seem remarkably low for a city like New York. Other towns certainly, but I would’ve thought New York, even its most rundown apartments, would have charged at least $30 a month.

Nevertheless, we see that Sylvia Sidney’s situation is compounded by the fact that she is kind of the Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner of the group. (For those of you familiar with the old comic strip, Winnie supported her mother, her younger brother, and her shiftless father, which is why she was called the Breadwinner.)

I have a Winnie Winkle coffee mug on my desk that I keep pens in. It was a gift. I always had a soft spot for Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner.

Her father played, by Charles Dingle, whom most probably remember as the conniving elder brother in The Little Foxes (1941), is not working and it seems inferred that he is not looking too hard, either.

Erickson comes to Sylvia Sidney’s tenement to see what conditions are like for himself, runs into her boyfriend Myron McCormick, who slugs him and when Erickson falls through a rotten railing, it occurs to him that the place really is a rattrap.

The film takes an interesting turn when her young brother is released from the hospital. He looks hale and hearty, but he walks with crutches and he will for the rest of his life. He is played by Sidney Lumet.

This was young Sidney Lumet’s only movie, though he did small roles in one TV show and a bit part in a movie many decades later, but we know him best as the director of over eighty films. He was certainly a talented filmmaker, but just from this one film he seems a very talented child actor.

We see the slum through Lumet’s eyes more than anyone’s. His friends welcome him home but then they are cruel to him because he is a "cripple." They tease him, they won’t let them play their games; he is too slow for them and the boy begins to spend a lot of time on his own. He sits on the pier watching the other boys swim in the river, he broods outside on the steps of his building. He does not want to go into the building on his first day home, he stays out until quite late because he is afraid and depressed. We know the fire has left him emotionally scarred and he does not want to enter a building which he knows he can be trapped in at any time, especially now that he is not able to walk easily and less able than before to escape in an emergency.

But his anguish is more than that. His troubled soul is absorbing the despair of this neighborhood and the people who live in it, in that building that has seen so many generations of despair. He talks to the building. He tells the building that he hates it and in his imagination the building talks back to him with an eerie voice.

He tells the building, “Look what you done to me.”

The building taunts him and gloats that it has made victims of its residents for decades. We have a brief foggy flashback to the 1870s when the building was younger, but no less dangerous. We see people in clothes of the time period, a doctor’s visit and the whispered dreaded word: Cholera! The screams of the dying from cholera and their terrified families, which was very common in the nineteenth century in crowded buildings with poor sanitation. The factory town I grew up in had a cholera epidemic, and maybe yours did too.

Lumet threatens the building, “I’ll get you some day. I’ll get you – just wait.”

The scenes with Sidney Lumet staring up at the building, he stares directly into the camera – are haunting and unnerving, his piercing, fevered expression of a child half-crazed with the superior knowledge of someone who knows personally how grim the stakes are. For a kid without a whole lot of screen experience, he’s pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, there are no resources to help, medically, emotionally, not from the city, not from charities, not from his own family. The real burden of poverty is that one is essentially alone.

Leif Erickson struggles with his conscience. Sylvia Sidney struggles with the idea of paying him back for the hospital bill. Erickson’s family struggles with trying to distract him away from what they regard as his naiveté.

At last Erickson wants to make a move to tear down the houses in that section and put up new housing – we assume he means for the selfsame low-income residents, but historically in such cases, usually it’s to gentrify the area and jack up the rents.

Sylvia Sidney believes that he is going to give them a shiny new neighborhood and she is thrilled, and her young brother Sidney Lumet taunts the building, his worst enemy, “They’re gonna tear you down. How do you like that, old stinkpot?”

Unfortunately, Erickson has to humor his sister and he confesses to Sylvia Sidney that it will take time to put these plans into motion. Her disappointment in Erickson is such that she loses all hope and rants to her little brother about her desperation and how things will never change. It is a cruel thing to do to a young boy who is obviously emotionally and psychologically brittle, but nobody is paying attention to him

It puts him over the edge and he sets fire to the building. It goes up like a torch and another crowd gathers and the firemen come and the same old scene is repeated. This time, the building kills the kid brother.

In the dim, gray aftermath, Myron McCormick commiserates and Erickson answers, “The time may come when men like you all realize that men like me are human beings, just the way that I’ve begun to suspect that you are.”

The building is torn down, McCormick and Sylvia Sidney plan to pool their resources as best they can and get married, not wanting to wait any longer. Erickson may be the hero of the piece but he’s not going to play Prince charming to Cinderella and take her out of the ashes, literally. He's still going back to his own kind.

We have a montage scene of new buildings being constructed with playground areas. We are meant to understand that the people living in them will experience a kind of poverty Shangri-La, with the cleanliness and privacy and community spirit with all of them pitching horseshoes and raising their children in the sunlight. It’s not suburbia – nobody predicted suburbia yet – but for a city dweller in a firetrap tenement, it might very well have seemed like the next best thing to paradise. At least the producers thought so.

One segment of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument in Washington, D.C. is devoted to his “one third of a nation” speech.  It is depicted here above in this photograph in the collection of the Library of Congress.

The bronze statues by George Segal, are titled The Rural Couple and The Breadline located in Room Two of the memorial.

We have another legacy: Today, one of the main reasons why people continue to struggle financially and even live in poverty are the cost of healthcare and the cost of housing. We have revisited young Sidney Lumet’s nightmare on a much grander scale. Though most of us who enjoy classic films enjoy the nostalgia of them – we spend a lot of time looking at the furniture, the clothes, the music, the speech expressions as evidence of a long-ago world – for those who are not fans of classic films it is probably more important not to concentrate on these things, but to concentrate on the heart of the message, on the emotion of the story, and thereby finding in these, whom they might regard as hokey characters, a lot more in common than they thought possible.

Come back next Thursday when we conclude this series on the 1930s and their messages for today with Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), and an elderly couple whose retirement has left them helpless, homeless, and dependent on grown children. Take a look at those spinning headlines – they’re from today.

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1930s series:

Part 1 - Gentlemen Are Born (1934)

Part 2 - Our Daily Bread (1934)

Part 3 - Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Girls of the Road (1940).

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Never Wave at a WAC - 1953

“Never Wave at a WAC” (1953) is an improbable confection, more slapstick than sentiment, but in its way shows a military haven for women that is more promising and more egalitarian than the civilian world.  This message is a happy by-product, for most of the film is really just a fun comedy with no pretensions, except those espoused by a delightfully over-the-top Rosalind Russell.

This is our fourth and final film in our series on women in the military.  Have a look here for “KeepYour Powder Dry” (1945), “Cry Havoc” (1943), and “Skirts Ahoy” (1952) which we covered Monday.

Miss Russell plays a glittering Washington society hostess, hobnobbing with the hoi polloi and dropping more names per second than there are in the phone book.  Charles Dingle, who I always associate with his splendid role in “The Little Foxes” (1941), plays her father, who is a Senator. 

We begin at a party in their home.  Roz descends the staircase like Auntie Mame, and the movie could be subtitled “Auntie Mame Gets Drafted”.  She’s fluttery and fabulous, impervious to any standards but her own.  She’s stunning in her gown, with her tall, willowy figure, one of the few grand ladies of Hollywood’s heyday to be equally comfortable in messy physical comedy, which comes later in the movie.

The funniest parts of the film come at the beginning, when we see her in a brisk montage of scenes where she is called upon to fulfill her typical Washington hostess duties, donating an ambulance to the Red Cross, dedicating a water fountain on the Mall.  She glances up at the White House, and sees President Harry Truman in the window, waving at her.  She tilts her head becomingly and blows him a kiss.  She knows everybody.

By the way, the shots of D.C. in 1953 are pretty neat.  Look at the White House without a fence.  The filmmakers must have gotten permission to shoot at the national monuments, denied the crew of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) which we discussed here.

Everybody is “Darling” and everybody is air-kissed, and she is breezy, effective, able to juggle a million things at once, including pausing mid-conversation to pose for a photo, which she does with comic regularity.  Her world is shallow, and she is perfectly at home here.

But our Roz is not without her discontent. Her new beau, an Army officer played by William Ching, is being sent to Paris, along with her rival for his affections played by Hillary Brooke.  Miss Brooke arrives at the party in a WAC uniform, crowing that she, too, has been assigned to Paris.

The party becomes a bust when Roz’s ex-husband, the affable, but too down to earth to be worthy of her chic, Paul Douglas, arrives to retrieve some of his belongings.  Somewhere amid the shouting and the breaking of glass, we learn that they had an impetuous honeymoon camping on an island.  The Robinson Crusoe setting, and their love, made her think he was dashing, instead of just a sloppy scientist, and made him think she was a spirited, can-do girl and not a phony, shallow social climber.

They were both right and both wrong, and it takes a battle over basic training to make them see that.

Papa Charles Dingle thinks Roz should be brought down a peg, and tricks his daughter into joining the WAC, saying he will arrange a commission for her so she can be with her fiancé in Paris.  The idea of captain’s bars from Tiffany’s and a Hattie Carnegie-designed tailored uniform is what appeals to her.  She joins, unwittingly, as a private and finds herself among women who have no idea how important she is, nor do they seem to care.

Except for one, a very sweet ex-model and stripper from New York, played by Marie Wilson.  I inevitably see her as Irma in the radio show “My Friend Irma”, with that distinctive cute voice.  She has escaped from her seedy world, as she really is a nice girl, and wearing not much but fruit in strategic places on her body was upsetting to her.  She seeks the safety of the WAC, where unfortunately she continues to be pursued by a most persistent wolf, a happy-go-lucky sergeant played by Leif Erikson.

I really like Norma Busse in a small role as the sergeant interviewing Marie Wilson.  She is patient, and diligent, soft-spoken, and awkwardly ferrets out Marie’s talents and interests to find a spot for her in the WAC that will match her abilities.  Marie wants to be a spy.  Sgt. Busse is quite comically delicate, both in her surprise, and in her doggedly trying to find a job for this square peg.

Louise Beavers has a very small role as part of Rosalind Russell’s household staff, Regis Toomey shows up briefly as a guest, and Bess Flowers is at the party somewhere, probably dumping hors d'oeuvres into her purse.  You can’t take her anywhere, even if she’s everywhere.

The most auspicious cameo goes to General of the Army Omar Bradley.  I don’t know how he was persuaded into appearing in this film.  The movie was produced by Rosalind Russell’s husband, Frederick Brisson.  Maybe he had the General on speed dial.

Paul Douglas, the ever-reliable everyman of the 1950s, is also actually in the Army, as a scientist working on perfecting protective clothing.  Jealous over Roz’s plans with her new beau, he arranges for her to be one of his “volunteers” for his special arctic gear tests. 

We find Roz in a deep freeze chamber marching halfway across an imaginary Alaska, and enduring the rigors of obstacle courses until the very funny, blithe and whimsical, la-de-dah demeanor she entered the Army with becomes sullen, sour, and suspicious.  The transformation is understandable, but it’s as if we’re watching two people and we’ve lost track of who they are.

Though this film is really along the lines of screwball comedy, it actually shows Rosalind Russell engaging in physical challenges, even weapons firing — activities which were absent from the other films we’ve seen in this series.

We follow Roz as she begins with a physical examination, including a funny bit where she sits on the exam table, smoking, while the doctor tells her to inhale and exhale.

However, reminiscent of “Keep Your Power Dry”, we follow Roz as she silently drives by panties drying on a wash line outside the ladies’ barracks.  Apparently eight years later, there is still some curiosity about WAC unmentionables.

The ladies undergo swimming classes, like in “Skirts Ahoy”.  Like Esther Williams, Roz denounces the suits in preference to her own, saying, “I’m allergic to Army wool.”  It’s cute that she shows up at the pool with an armful of magazines, thinking she is going to lounge.

We also have a dance party scene, where Marie Wilson gets engaged to her favorite wolf, and Roz serves refreshments.

Unlike the physical training for the ladies in the other movies, which was challenging but ultimately character-building, Roz’s extreme training under the sadistic eye of her jealous ex-husband is only demoralizing.  It is not until the end of the film she realizes she had made good here, and that Paul Douglas is the man for her.  We also, as in “Keep Your Powder Dry” and “Skirts Ahoy”, have a board of inquiry scene, but Roz, despite a gallant defense by a contrite Paul Douglas is booted out of the WAC. 

Improbably, but with a charming nod to screwball comedy, she escapes from her beau’s car and leaps into a passing truck with new WAC recruits in it.  She wants to join again, and hopes that, since Paul Douglas is going to be sent to Korea to work on his experiments, that she might be sent there, too.

Unlike “Skirts Ahoy” we acknowledge the existence of a conflict in Korea and that it might pose some danger to Paul Douglas.  Also unlike “Skirts Ahoy”, we see a parade of female military personnel marching in desegregated units.

In this series we’ve seen what amounts to “message films”, even the comedies, because women in the military were new and a conservative public usually eschews the new.  The message of military experience, even a career, being beneficial both to women and society is filtered through some stereotypes of women’s abilities that serving in the military was supposed to smash.  It’s a vicious circle, but one that women, for the most part, have been able to climb out of through decades of service to our country.

I think one of the most inspiring screen messages promoting society’s acceptance of women in the military comes not through these movies, but from a different, perhaps unlikely, source.  This is the movie “Since You Went Away” (1944), covered here, which dramatizes the American home front.

Claudette Colbert is flattered when Joseph Cotten paints a picture of her dressed in a WAVES uniform for a Navy Department recruiting poster.  Well, she’s flattered until she realizes it’s a cheesecake pose.

Her teenage daughter, played by Jennifer Jones, strolls with her boyfriend, played by Robert Walker, and puts his overseas cap on her head.  She says thoughtfully, “If I were three or four years older I could be a WAVE.”

Walker displays no sense of shock or disapproval, bemusement or condescension, only nods, “Yeah, or a WAC.”

These are supposed to be nice, Middle Class Americans, church-going and righteously avoiding the black market, and do not hoard SPAM.  If they act as though women in the military are no big deal, then it must be a swell thing.

But my favorite moment is when, in the crowded train station, we observe a little girl making friendly conversation with an Army MP.

“My mommy’s a sergeant!”

That, as they say, makes it official.

Thanks for joining me on this quick-march through women in the military in World War II and the Korean War-era films. 

At ease.

Come back next week when we get ready for A Very Gumshoe Christmas.

 

The Song of Bernadette (1943)

“The Song of Bernadette” (1943) pits man against miracle in a many-layered universe. The first layer of this complicated universe is the historical 19th century event on which the story is based. Then, there is the book by Franz Werfel and the World War II climate under which that book was written and published. Finally, there is Hollywood, that tries diplomatically to be both pious and frank, spiritual and temporal, to present a money-making story, and yet present it under the auspices of a religious experience.

By filming a story about a miracle, Hollywood created something of a miracle in its own craftsmanship just by what it accomplished and how.


On this Easter Monday, we take a look at Hollywood’s presentation of a miracle and the ironically realistic way it chose to present it. Man is by nature a creature which believes. We have religions and sometimes complicated protocols of faith. We have superstitions, and we have good luck and bad luck, and we have worries and fears and paranoia, and that is all part of what we willingly believe without proof. On the opposite side of man’s nature is an innate skepticism.

Someone who believes in the efficacy of the prayers of his own faith, may disbelieve the efficacy of prayers of another faith. An atheist may disbelieve the efficacy of any prayer at all, and yet wholeheartedly believe in luck, or horoscopes, or that a co-worker who gives him a dirty look is out to get him. It may be the co-worker is just in a bad mood, but that does not shake the belief of the paranoid. A lot of logical, sensible people knock on wood. Even people who believe in nothing believe in something, even if it is only the superiority of their own opinions.

So, we believe, regularly, commonly, without proof. It may be part of our DNA. But at the same time we are skeptical over someone else’s experiences. “The Song of Bernadette” shows these disparate sides of human nature and the clinging onto of human dignity more than it puts forward of one belief over another, or promotes miracles. The film begins with the narrative,

“For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.”

But this is not merely a disclaimer to placate a general movie-going audience of mostly Christians, albeit demographically mostly non-Roman Catholics. It is a simple analysis of human nature. Belief and skepticism may be at opposite poles, in life and in this movie, but they do not represent good and bad. There is nothing bad in skepticism. Skepticism is healthy and beneficial, except when it becomes distorted as a tool for manipulation. The same may be said for belief. It is healthy and beneficial, except when it becomes distorted as a tool for manipulation. This film is remarkably and consciously clear in demonstrating that.

It is the telling of the story, and not the miracle, that is the subject of this post. Such care was taken in the historical accuracy of the southern French village (a realistic set of stone which was also used, I believe, for “How Green Was My Valley”?), in the soaring and evocative music by Alfred Newman, in the clothes, the everyday life of the poor-as-dirt peasantry, in the meaty, articulate script, in the camera work which plays on light and dark with such soul-baring intimacy. This film is an example of craftsmanship at its best. Stark, unflinching, and yet remarkably empathetic craftsmanship. The studio, and all those involved evidently wanted to make not just a money-making film, but a great film. So often we have seen so-called blockbuster movies made at this period, and especially today, where a truckload of money is thrown into a project, but what results is only lumbering over-produced garbage. This film shines with the obviously meticulous care put into it.

The cast is a collection of some of the best character actors of the day, along with a flock of extras as villagers, and a young Jennifer Jones in the title role that made her a star, and won her an Academy Award. About the only weak links are the child actors playing her younger siblings, who seem by the way they speak and carry themselves to resemble 20th century American kids rather than 19th Century European children, but the rest of the cast are true and believable.


Anne Revere and Roman Bohnen play the parents of Jennifer Jones’ Bernadette. Miss Revere was commonly cast in hardscrabble mother roles. How much was due to her scrubbed complexion mottled with freckles and her strong jaw and the flint in her eyes that suddenly turned soft and sympathetic can be guessed at. Most actors are chosen for their roles because of their looks, and sometimes their height. Other actresses habitually played mothers on screen, but did not have Miss Revere’s quality of appearing genuine. Other screen mothers were often only superficially mothers, the kind who came out of the kitchen with milk and cookies. Revere gives us the impression she actually changed diapers, wiped noses, was the hand that rocked the cradle, and sometimes the backhand to the cheek or slap on the bottom.


Roman Bohnen played Jones’ father, an out-of-work peasant at his wits end, beyond hope and failing strength. He is downtrodden and resentful, petty and frustrated, but we see the depth of his love for his daughter when he desperately promises to let her return to the grotto, after having already forbid it, and when he scrambles fearfully into the Royal Prosecutor’s office, where Jones has been taken for questioning, to claim her and take her home. From the time we see him rise up early to beg for a job dumping hospital waste, to the point where he must say a final goodbye to his daughter, in every action, this man’s heart is breaking.

Charles Bickford is the Dean of Lourdes, the village priest who, in his dashing Cavalier-like hat and cape looks something like a superhero before the ragged villagers. The sash on his cassock is cinched firmly about his waist, making the line of his body look lean and rugged, with broad shoulders and he takes his long strides with a lordly bearing. Mr. Bickford, last seen here as Jane Wyman’s father in “Johnny Belinda” (1948), played tough, commanding men who kept their own counsel, and whose role here as the scornful priest who doubts Bernadette and later becomes her staunchest ally, demonstrates his formidable screen presence.

Vincent Price heads the local magistrates who connive to discredit Bernadette. He is the self-important and dangerously ambitious Royal Prosecutor. It is a role perfect for Mr. Price, whose elegant disdain so completely captures this highly intelligent, highly skeptical man. There is a particular facet about his character that is especially memorable, and that is his constant flourishing of a voluminous handkerchief, dabbing at his nose as he makes a gesture or a point about the foolish Jennifer Jones and the idiot townspeople.

“What do you expect from a peasantry fed on dogmas and superstitious nonsense?”

At times he looks foppish waving the hanky, and at other times, it is as if he is using it to steal scenes, and it becomes an almost funny prop, along with his ever-present allergy symptoms. It is only late in the film we notice with an ominous sense of foreboding that his voice has grown hoarse, and that his raw throat and troublesome sinuses, which he writes off as influenza, is actually a serious illness. Contrasting the lighter earlier scenes of the scene-stealing foppish hanky, it is a shock to learn now he has throat cancer.

Charles Dingle, so delightfully wicked as the rascal older brother in “The Little Foxes” (1941) plays another devious role here as the chief of police, and Lee J. Cobb as the kindly and scrupulously objective village doctor rounds out a very strong supportive cast of town officials.


Gladys Cooper, so impressive here as the envious, bitter nun who first presents as Bernadette’s stern school teacher, and then her mistress of novices in the convent, conducts a master class on acting just in the convent scenes alone when she confronts Jennifer Jones about her supposed sightings of the Lady. Miss Cooper’s dark eyes burn in her wan face, emitting her particular venom for Jones through those eyes. Then a convulsion of emotion rips out of those remarkable eyes as we see Cooper has an epiphany of her own when Jones reveals proof of her agonizing illness that she has borne with quiet patience. Miss Cooper’s character takes a complete turn, and she melts almost like the Wicked Witch of the West, but not from water, from the sickening knowledge of her own deformed reflection in the mirror of her soul.


Jennifer Jones is Bernadette, from every nuance cast in stillness, even from her screen test. It is a famous Hollywood anecdote that among all the actresses trying out for this much-sought-after role and who were told to gaze at a stick held above the camera, Jennifer Jones, according to the director, was the only one who saw the Lady.

We can easily believe it. Her quiet sense of wonder is exquisite in this film. In the scene where she sees the Lady for the first time, there is a really very long moment of her fixated, unblinking stare into a kind of paranormal light cast during the Lady’s presence. In subsequent encounters, Jones’ child-like characterization is so complete that her fascinated gaze reminds one of the way a child will turn, eyes wide and unblinking, to the TV, absolutely absorbed by a toy commercial. If you’ve ever tried to talk to a child when a toy commercial is on, you know how exasperated Bernadette’s parents are when they cannot make her disregard her rapture for the Lady.

But her stillness, her economy of gesture and movement does not keep her from growing as a character, and this is another remarkable aspect to her work in this movie. She begins as a somewhat diffident, frail girl, a poor student who everyone, including herself, refers to as stupid. Her personality enlivens under the presence of the Lady, and we begin to see in her a sense of joy, a sense of wonder, and an occasionally comical common sense.

When questioned by the authorities on her lunatic behavior of pretending to wash herself with dirt, and falling to her knees, eating wild scrub plants like “an animal”, Bernadette replies, “Do you act like an animal when you eat salad?”


It is another Hollywood anecdote that when it came time to film the scene where the Lady asks Bernadette to wash her hands and face in a stream which does not exist, and eat some nearby plants, director Henry King wanted Jones to only pretend. Miss Jones insisted on digging into the ground with her hands, smearing dirt on her face and shoving the weeds into her mouth and eating them.


There was some debate at the time as to whether the film should show an image of the Virgin Mary to whom Bernadette is speaking, or, since nobody but Bernadette saw the vision, to leave it out. There is probably equal logic and merit on both sides, but having the movie-going audience see the vision as Bernadette sees it at least steers the story away from having us, along with the villagers, believe Bernadette is a lunatic. We are then free to focus on the villagers’ and the Church’s skepticism, and not our own.

Nobody believes her, and she is harassed not only by civil authorities, but most especially by the Roman Catholic Church. Even Charles Bickford, the priest who begins by threatening her with a broom and later becomes her protector, never really swallows the story completely. He is at last convinced of her sincerity and her innocence, but to believe that the Virgin would deign to make an appearance in such a lowly, filthy place to such a miserably nobody of a girl, is ridiculous. He is skeptical.

“Christ was born in a stable,” counters Bernadette’s formidable aunt, who chastises her parents for their lack of support and demands that the girl be allowed to visit the makeshift grotto in the town dump. When the spring water that wasn’t there suddenly appears, and a couple of people are healed by washing in it, a horde of people needing to believe in something show up, and keep showing up, and so do the concessionaires. The town prospers in the parasitic cycle of public relations and commerce.

Miss Jones is at last made to understand that through the tumult she has caused, her life can never be the same again. She is offered both sanctuary and grinding servitude in a convent, and we see another aspect of her growing maturity as she says goodbye to the village boy who appears to have a crush on her. There is no fully developed romance between them, but the film intimates that there would be if only Bernadette could be left alone. A sweet, and deeply sad moment, when he stops her carriage with an armload of flowers as she is leaving for the convent, (that appear to be cherry blossoms?) and vows that he, too, will never marry. She snaps off a sprig of pure white blossoms and hands it back to him, and it is almost as if they are blessing each other in a kind of wedding ceremony for a chaste marriage.


When Bernadette arrives at the convent, she meets up with her old nemesis Gladys Cooper, and when that mean little nun walks through the door, we are perhaps even more shocked and depressed about it than Bernadette is. There is another wonderfully still, yet evocative moment, when left in her room alone, her “cell”, Jones glances around with a frozen expression and limpid eyes that gaze with a different, more foreboding sort of wonder. The cell is actually far more clean and comfortable than the home she grew up in, but here we see she is terrifyingly alone. We see a crucifix mounted on the bare whitewashed wall over her shoulder, and we wonder if the Lady has left her all alone forever, too.

We might comment with amusement that the vision of the Lady was actually played by a pregnant Linda Darnell, but that’s been noted so often that I think all of the really clever jokes and remarks have already been made, certainly nothing I can top.

Even here in the convent, Bernadette is still brought before Church commissions, made to testify over and over to what she saw. Even Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed, but Bernadette is more steadfast. She insists she saw what she saw. It is not a martyr’s courage that makes her declare this, only her simplicity and a lack of street smarts in knowing how to lie.

At the very end of the film, as Bernadette lay dying, she finally sees her Lady again, who beckons as if coming to her for a hug. Miss Jones once again makes us believe everything in her heart when she calls out to the vision that nobody else sees, “I love you…I love you!”

The musical score, a beautiful piece of art in itself, is suddenly covered by a male voice over at the end with a recitation from the “Song of Solomon”, which I always thought was a rather odd way to the end the movie. It’s one of the more beautiful passages from the Bible, but it never seemed appropriate to me to use here, at least until listening to the bonus track of commentary from the 2003 restoration DVD of this film. It is explained that the composer of the score, Alfred Newman, saw in his mind that the movie was really a love story between Bernadette and her Lady. A sweet way to look at it, and makes the words from the Song of Solomon as Bernadette is being encouraged by the Lady at the end of the film,

“Arise my love, my fair one, and come away….”

seem well used.

A note on this commentary track: we’ve commented before on this blog about how disappointing some DVD commentary tracks are, but this is not one of them. Delivered by historian Donald Spoto, Newman biographer Jon Burlingame, and Jones biographer Edward Z. Epstein, the commentary to this film is truly excellent. Mr. Burlingame covers the towering score by Alfred Newman, Spoto covers the historical setting, and their remarks are scholarly, spoken with clarity and articulate passion, as well as in voices, particularly in Mr. Spoto’s case, that are resonant and pleasing. It’s always enjoyable to hear someone speak well. Mr. Epstein’s comments are more superficial, but if one is unfamiliar with the life and career of Jennifer Jones, he provides a useful background. All three gentlemen’s remarks dovetail neatly.

Bonus tracks aside, the restoration of the film on this DVD (available from Amazon here) is worth the price alone, so vivid and sharp is the visual quality compared to any old television screenings you may have seen in the past.

The commentary underscores the idea that this film represents a many-layered universe, in this case, history and Hollywood. They ruminate on Franz Werfel, a Jew escaping the Nazis who on his escape route discovered the story of Lourdes and wrote a book on Bernadette, who had been canonized as a saint only fairly recently, in 1933. The notice at the very end of the film reminding us to buy war bonds is actually jarring; so deeply have we been sent into the19th century that a reminder of the present is a shock.


The film shows realities of poverty, of religious leaders who dismiss the idea that a sign of heavenly grace can be bestowed on anyone other than themselves, and of civil authorities who are threatened by the raising up of a peasant class until they find their own way to exploit it. These are realities as ancient as mankind, and as current as today’s headlines.

“She’s a religious fanatic, and every time religious fanaticism steps forward, mankind steps backward,” Vincent Price declares in this marvelously literate script. We may agree.

“You should be thankful, Bernadette, you did not live in former times” a spiteful Gladys Cooper tells her with delicious malice, because she would have surely been burned at the stake. Very true.

And Miss Cooper asks the most meaningful, the most fatal question of all, the same question all the clergy and all the authorities, and all the villagers ask quietly to themselves in their most private thoughts,

“Why then should God choose you, not me?”

Bernadette doesn’t have an answer to that one, and 20th Century Fox wisely refrains from providing one, but we don’t really need an answer. The question itself is thought-provoking enough.