This is a very pleasant film for the Christmas season, worth its standing as a seasonal favourite, even if it's outdated and clearly a product of far more innocent times, which makes certain aspects of the plot quite unbelievable to 21st century viewers.
The story is fairly straightforward: the desire to save St. Mary's, an old and run down Catholic school run by nuns. Bing Crosby offers a good performance as Father O'Malley, sent in by his ecclesiastical superiors to run the school with a mandate apparently to sell the school to a businessman (Bogardus, played by Henry Travers) who wants to turn it into a parking lot for his new office building. Meanwhile the nuns, led by Sister Benedict (Ingrid Bergman, in what I thought was the standout performance of the movie,) are praying that Bogardus will actually donate his new office building for the school to relocate in, trusting that faith can, indeed, move mountains.
It's an interesting enough movie, even if the plot suffers from certain unrealistic elements - primarily the ultimate fate of the school and the subplot revolving around the relationship between young Patsy's (Joan Carroll) parents (Martha Sleeper and William Gargan) which just seems too "easy" given the history between the two. I have to say, without giving anything away to anyone who hasn't seen the movie, that the ending (revolving around the health of Sister Benedict) seemed to me unnecessary and neither fit with the rest of the movie nor added anything to it.
Still, watching this movie is a pleasant holiday tradition to start. 7/10
The story is fairly straightforward: the desire to save St. Mary's, an old and run down Catholic school run by nuns. Bing Crosby offers a good performance as Father O'Malley, sent in by his ecclesiastical superiors to run the school with a mandate apparently to sell the school to a businessman (Bogardus, played by Henry Travers) who wants to turn it into a parking lot for his new office building. Meanwhile the nuns, led by Sister Benedict (Ingrid Bergman, in what I thought was the standout performance of the movie,) are praying that Bogardus will actually donate his new office building for the school to relocate in, trusting that faith can, indeed, move mountains.
It's an interesting enough movie, even if the plot suffers from certain unrealistic elements - primarily the ultimate fate of the school and the subplot revolving around the relationship between young Patsy's (Joan Carroll) parents (Martha Sleeper and William Gargan) which just seems too "easy" given the history between the two. I have to say, without giving anything away to anyone who hasn't seen the movie, that the ending (revolving around the health of Sister Benedict) seemed to me unnecessary and neither fit with the rest of the movie nor added anything to it.
Still, watching this movie is a pleasant holiday tradition to start. 7/10