Jennifer Jones plays Bernadette Soubirous, the young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. I must say right up front that I am not religious at all. Yet I have been moved by religious films, notably The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Gospel According to Matthew. Obviously both are foreign films. Frankly, I can't think of any Hollywood films offhand that I believe tackle religious matters very well. Pretentious of me? I don't know, maybe. I just think that Hollywood is way too in awe of it. I don't necessarily need the style to be skeptical, just muted. In The Song of Bernadette, there's no doubt whatsoever whether the girl is seeing the Virgin Mary or not (hilariously played by a pregnant Linda Darnell, which, as much as I like her as an actress, is undoubtedly blasphemy, even to an atheist like myself). Everyone who believes Bernadette is a wonderful person. Those who doubt her are mean, though some of them are forgiven by accepting her later on. The worst case of this is Vincent Price's character. You can see the horror movies in his future in this performance. The real-life person he plays, Vital Dutour, was a devout Catholic. As he's the big baddie in this movie, he's made into an atheist. Okay, I should just suck it up. The film itself isn't too bad. It's well directed by Henry King, and very well shot. I wasn't that impressed with Jennifer Jones. This was her first performance under that name, though she had made several films as Phyllis Isely previous to this. She won the Oscar. Ingrid Bergman should have won for Casablanca that year, but instead she was nominated for For Whom the Bell Tolls. She still should have won. Bergman turned a completely useless character, the only flaw in Hemmingway's otherwise masterful novel, into a flesh-and-blood human being. Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier also deserved it more (I haven't seen Joan Fontaine in The Constant Nymph or Greer Garson in Madame Curie). Jones is okay, but her little kid act gets monotonous fast.
Review of The Song of Bernadette
