There are few more beatific images than the youthful Ingrid Bergman framed by her nun's habit, looking skyward and glistening by candlelight at the end of this 1945 holiday classic. Director Leo McCarey has Bing Crosby reprise his role as Father O'Malley from their film from a year earlier, "Going My Way". Both really reflect the type of films that would more likely show up as TV movies on the Family Channel if produced today, but wartime audiences were obviously in need of such cinematic salves. What is reassuring is how the films remain affecting today if rather unabashedly sentimental.
What sets this one apart is Crosby's natural ease in the role (certainly far more muted than he is with Bob Hope in the Road movies) and having the incandescent Bergman portray Sister Benedict. The pacing is leisurely, as the first part of the film establishes the two stars in their roles before going into the slim plot line, which has the sister hoping a rich curmudgeon named Horace P. Bogardus will donate a new, expansive building to St. Mary's Academy to take place of the rundown old building that the sisters and the schoolchildren inhabit.
McCarey - along with screenwriter Dudley Nichols - both pioneers of screwball comedy, focus on the lightheartedness of the story until a couple of sentimental developments occur. The first has to do with a lonely student named Patsy, who comes to idolize Sister Benedict, to the point of intentionally failing to graduate in order to avoid going back home to her concerned mother and estranged father. The second involves Sister Benedict's medical condition which forces Father O'Malley to make a difficult decision about St. Mary's.
There are fewer songs here than in "Going My Way" - the title tune and another one, "Aren't You Glad You're You?", both sung effortlessly by Crosby and a Swedish folk song performed in a warm alto by Bergman. The soft-centered philosophical discussions between the two leads generate some interesting conflict though nothing that feels irreconcilable by the end. There are also some amusing scenes as well, for example, the kindergarten class unaffectedly improvising the Christmas play and Bergman showing off her pugilistic prowess to a boy beaten up in a fight.
While I much prefer Bergman in her more outwardly seductive roles ("Notorious"), I can see why people wanted so much to see her as the glowing embodiment of good during WWII, even though it is this image that was the harbinger when she was caught in an extramarital scandal with Roberto Rossellini five years later. Crosby always seems to be playing himself, which in this case, is a good thing. Henry Travers, forever Clarence to me from Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life", plays Bogardus with appropriate stubbornness and compromised regret, and Joan Carroll, the least prominent of the Smith daughters in Vincente Minnelli's "Meet Me in St. Louis", gives a solid performance as the conflicted Patsy. This is an understandably well-loved film even if it runs a bit too long.
What sets this one apart is Crosby's natural ease in the role (certainly far more muted than he is with Bob Hope in the Road movies) and having the incandescent Bergman portray Sister Benedict. The pacing is leisurely, as the first part of the film establishes the two stars in their roles before going into the slim plot line, which has the sister hoping a rich curmudgeon named Horace P. Bogardus will donate a new, expansive building to St. Mary's Academy to take place of the rundown old building that the sisters and the schoolchildren inhabit.
McCarey - along with screenwriter Dudley Nichols - both pioneers of screwball comedy, focus on the lightheartedness of the story until a couple of sentimental developments occur. The first has to do with a lonely student named Patsy, who comes to idolize Sister Benedict, to the point of intentionally failing to graduate in order to avoid going back home to her concerned mother and estranged father. The second involves Sister Benedict's medical condition which forces Father O'Malley to make a difficult decision about St. Mary's.
There are fewer songs here than in "Going My Way" - the title tune and another one, "Aren't You Glad You're You?", both sung effortlessly by Crosby and a Swedish folk song performed in a warm alto by Bergman. The soft-centered philosophical discussions between the two leads generate some interesting conflict though nothing that feels irreconcilable by the end. There are also some amusing scenes as well, for example, the kindergarten class unaffectedly improvising the Christmas play and Bergman showing off her pugilistic prowess to a boy beaten up in a fight.
While I much prefer Bergman in her more outwardly seductive roles ("Notorious"), I can see why people wanted so much to see her as the glowing embodiment of good during WWII, even though it is this image that was the harbinger when she was caught in an extramarital scandal with Roberto Rossellini five years later. Crosby always seems to be playing himself, which in this case, is a good thing. Henry Travers, forever Clarence to me from Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life", plays Bogardus with appropriate stubbornness and compromised regret, and Joan Carroll, the least prominent of the Smith daughters in Vincente Minnelli's "Meet Me in St. Louis", gives a solid performance as the conflicted Patsy. This is an understandably well-loved film even if it runs a bit too long.