The Miracle Woman - 1931

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 23^rd 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 need for revenge is fading away, and this is noticed by Sam Hardy.  He trails her with a jealous heart.  She rebuffs his advances.

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.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

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The Dark Angel (1935)

“The Dark Angel” (1935) is perhaps one of the first films set during World War I that does not carry themes of the wastefulness of war or the tragedy of the political failings of that war, despite the tragic experiences of the leading men, two soldiers. It does not present the soldiers of that war as dupes or victims of heartless or corrupt governments. It seems to be one of the first films that depicts the soldiers of that period as romantic heroes, and that war as a romantic and noble gesture, albeit a doomed one.

The Lillian Hellmann screenplay tells the story of three friends from childhood, a winsome girl growing up in a genteel English country home, and the two boys who are her playmates. The two boys are cousins, and she has a crush on one of them, leaving the other to quietly nurse his own crush on her.

Years later they grow up to be Merle Oberon; Fredric March as the boy she loves; and Herbert Marshall as the boy who wishes he were Fredric March.

The cinematography is all stock Hollywood images of what the English countryside should be: picnics in a sheep meadow, a breeze playing at the curtains, a roaring fire, mannerly servants, and a sense of noblesse oblige.

Then the Great War breaks out and the two young chaps (played by much older actors) manfully take up their duty as officers. Mr. March is still in his matinee idol period of his career, still exuberantly boyish and occasionally mugging. It is a wonder to consider that in ten years’ time he will be the tired, war-weary middle-aged American sergeant returning to his family in “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946).

Home on leave, Fredric March and Merle Oberon decide to wed. Herbert Marshall, with his stiff-upper-lip is particularly moving as he congratulates them while stifling his own sense of rejection. A quick wedding is made impossible when the boys are recalled to the frontlines. Merle Oberon accompanies Fredric March on a secret tryst to spend one last night with him at a seaside inn. It is interesting in scenes like these, in films like these, to observe the delicate balance Hollywood struggles to keep when deliberately trying to create an atmosphere of romantic desire and yet maintain an aura of innocence. As the night grows on, and sense of dread increases as they sit in a darkened room hours later, cuddling by a window with distant sounds of cannon fire, we are left to imagine for ourselves whether or not they have consummated their love. The Code of the day decrees that while such an occurrence could be suggested for minor characters even if not graphically shown, nevertheless it could not even be suggested if the happy couple are to remain the film’s hero and heroine. It is an amusing and cowardly bit of fence sitting.

A snide gossip later jokes about Mr. March’s romantic last night with some woman, to a shocked Herbert Marshall, who is appalled that March would take up with another woman while being engaged to Merle Oberon. There is a split between them, doubt, suspicion and resentment grows while we are given the iconic image of English World War officers boarding a fog-enshrouded transport ship in their trench coats. (The trench coat was named for the place where English officers wore their all-weather long coats - the trenches.)

So miffed is Herbert Marshall with what he perceives is his junior officer Fredric March’s swinish behavior, he denies him temporary leave, after which March, spitefully volunteering for a dangerous mission, is lost on the battlefield after a big explosion, and presumed dead.

Marshall blames himself, confesses his guilt to Merle Oberon, who in turn confesses that it was not some trollop that Fredric March chose to amuse himself with his last night on English soil, it was her.

The movie could have ended here with this O. Henry type ending and we could have had a different story, but a further melodrama is added when Fredric March turns up in a hospital, blind.

After his rehabilitation, he chooses not to return home and be an object of pity, but hides out in a country inn where his suicide attempt is aborted by three nosy children who have never seen a blind man before. (Fay Chaldecot plays the engaging little girl with a charming natural quality.) From his encounter with the kids, and subsequent afternoons amusing them by telling them stories, he becomes a successful children’s book author. Not as successful as J. K. Rowling, but enough so that he can buy a little cottage of his own in the country and grow roses.

Meanwhile, Mr. Marshall and Miss Oberon, who comfort each other after the loss of their friend, get engaged. By this time it is more or less foregone that they will meet with Fredric March again, and Miss Oberon will dump Mr. Marshall for her old love. Poor old Herbert Marshall. His quiet nobility and silent pain is more affecting than all the romantic promises and occasional overacting both by boyish Mr. March and the lovely Miss Oberon.

More Hollywood England is applied with a trowel for good measure: a fox hunt, teatime, the strains of World War I songs, a benign village vicar. All we are missing is a blustering retired “Major” and a Cockney chimney sweep.

“The war did something to me. I’ve changed,” Fredric March tells us, no less a fact for not being very original. What is poignant about the film is that the sense of resentment for the war, the rueful disgust, is not displayed here as it is famously illustrated by films like “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), and most other films made from the end of World War I to the early 1930s.

In three years after this film was made, the Nazis would invade Poland and begin World War II. Already the seeds were being sewn in Spain and Ethiopia, and Manchuria and Korea. You can almost sense in this film the new era to come. Even if one were not able to predict the coming war, there was evidently a atmosphere, as evident in this film, of rehabilitation over the former resentment of War I, and even a sense of wistful nostalgia for the romantic past of 20 years ago. Even men who were really were victims of war, like the character played by Frederic March, blinded in battle, would no longer be seen as dupes and victims, but as romantic heroes.

This is also one of the first films which shows a man with a physical impairment not being an object of pity. He is shown here living independently on his own, earning his own living, and still the preference of the woman he loves. Contrast this with the sweet but utterly helpless blind World War I vet played by David Manners in “The Miracle Woman” (1931), who is more dependent on those around him.

Another irony to the film is that Herbert Marshall, whose character is unscathed by the war, actually served in the British armed forces in World War I and lost a leg. His film career, like his previous stage career, was performed, unknown by most audiences of the day, on a prosthetic leg.

Barbara Stanwyck - 100th Anniversary

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Barbara Stanwyck. The body of her work is impressive. She was one of the best actresses of her day, sometimes called the greatest actress who never won an Oscar. Granted an honorary Oscar toward the end of her life (at the time she still had yet to perform in the television miniseries “The Thorn Birds” which would garner her a third Emmy), Stanwyck lived a very private life. Orphaned at a young age, learning her trade as a chorus girl in the seamy atmosphere of clubs and vaudeville, the intelligent and intuitive Brooklyn born Ruby Stevens eventually became a hit actress on Broadway, was the highest earning film actress of 1944, and worked well into her 70s on television. Her career spanned many media, and she adjusted to each.

She played an enormous range of roles. No other actress of her day played as many varied types. Few other actresses of her day could lose themselves in a role as she did.

Iconic actress of the period, including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford leaped off the screen and commanded attention, and a great deal of publicity when they were off screen. As fine actresses as they were, one rarely can watch their films without being able to forget it is Hepburn or Davis or Crawford. They assumed their roles; they did not lose their own strong personalities in them. Barbara Stanwyck, on the other hand, never played the same person twice. Even her string of fallen women were different from each other.

Phyllis Dietrichson of “Double Indemnity” was nothing like Stella Dallas. The precocious sexpot of “Baby Face” is light-years away from Elizabeth Lane in “Christmas in Connecticut,” who was nothing like Sugarpuss O’Shea in “Ball of Fire.” Miss Stanwyck was lauded by her peers as hardworking and affable, a favorite with directors, but where the intensity came from that shot forth from her as Lulu in “Forbidden” or Florence Fallon in “The Miracle Woman” is still unknown to us. She came to screwball comedy late, but made it her own. Her villains were realistically evil, not cartoons of evil, so much so that they even earned our understanding. She came to westerns late, and that became a favorite genre. She came to television, when as an older woman film parts were more scarce, and made it her medium. She clearly adapted, and learned along the way.

Miss Stanwyck is especially fun to watch in ensemble scenes. She works well with other actors, seeming to enjoy the give and take of the process, where some other stars of the day were more given to posturing and not sharing the spotlight if they could help it. She was quick with a quip, quick on the trigger, and quick to learn.

She appeared different from her peers, even in the way she would handle the smallest scenes. In “Meet John Doe” her younger sisters come upon her working at her typewriter, and wanting her to play with them, tip her chair over and dump her on the floor. One of them attempts a headstand on her abdomen. I’d like to see anybody try that with Joan Crawford. And live.

In “Forbidden” she bathes her toddler, played by Myrna Fresholt (talk about your natural actresses) who continues to babble over Stanwyk’s dialogue, so Stanwyck, with humor and gentleness ad libs her own dialogue to fit what the child is doing. This happens again in the scene in the car with Adolphe Menjou and the child sitting between them, babbling during their tense scene.

Much of “Stella Dallas” is a revelation, and has been discussed on this blog before (see entry May 17, 2007). There is much to discuss about Miss Stanwyck’s work, but none of it can be summed up easily. She was enormously versatile, herself a work in progress. It is hard to imagine anybody else playing the roles she played, and yet, it is irresistible to imagine her in roles that were played by others. Taking nothing away from either Gloria Swanson or Bette Davis who were excellent respectively in “Sunset Blvd.” and “All About Eve,” what would Stanwyck have done with those roles?

She had never been directed by William Wyler. What would it have been like for her, who was one of those best-on-the-first-take actresses, to have worked with “forty-take Wyler?” What kind of partnership would that have been?

This is the conundrum of Barbara Stanwyck’s film career. Even though she opened herself up and showed extraordinary emotional depth, there is the feeling that there is still more, that her personal intensity, and talent for making us believe, is endless. No matter how many times you’ve watched the film.

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