The Bells of St. Mary's Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

The Bells of St. Mary's Blu-ray Movie Review

Going Their Way.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 1, 2013

Well, now that Hallowe’en is over, that can only mean one thing, right? It’s Christmas! Chances are if you’ve wandered into your local home improvement store (as I did mine actually a few weeks ago), you’ve already been greeted by rows of artificial Christmas trees, gigantic inflatable Santas for your front yard, and any other manner of holiday accoutrements. The home video market is certainly no exception in this regard, and mailboxes of those who, like I do, get product just a bit before retail street date, are filling up with supposed Christmas themed material. The 1945 Leo McCarey opus The Bells of St. Mary’s really isn’t even that “Christmasy”, though it was originally released in December and contains a sweetly nostalgic and humorous Christmas Pageant done by some cute kids in an urban parochial school which is overseen by Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby, reprising his Academy Award winning role from the previous year’s Going My Way) and managed by Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman). St. Mary’s has fallen on hard times and is in fact in danger of being condemned, which in this case comes dangerously close to a municipal jurisdiction simply enforcing its right to eminent domain, since the City Council is run by a local gazillionaire named Mr. Bogardus (Henry Travers, who would go on to a certain kind of immortality the following year in a “real” Christmas film, playing Clarence the angel in Frank Capra’s It's a Wonderful Life). Bogardus has already snatched up the adjoining property from St. Mary’s, an area that was once the facility’s playground, and has built a gleaming new building that would have done The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark proud. Now Bogardus has his sights set on the actual grounds of St. Mary’s, though Sister Mary Benedict and her fellow nuns are praying nonstop that Bogardus will actually see the light and donate the ultramodern new building to them. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a moment of divine inspiration, to figure out where The Bells of St. Mary’s is going, and the film gets there with a minimum of fuss and bother. What may strike some modern day cynics as at least a little eyebrow raising is how decidedly dated and maybe even politically incorrect the film is at times. (One has to recall the McCarey went on to helm what is generally considered one of the most hyperbolic of the flurry of anti-Communist films that cropped up in the early fifties, My Son John, and while The Bells of St. Mary’s certainly gets nowhere near that film’s outright hysteria, it does have a few “questionable” moments couched in a much more homespun way.)

Crosby became the first performer to be nominated twice for Best Actor for playing the same role in two different films, a feat which wasn’t duplicated for decades afterward, and even then without the consecutive year nominations that Crosby attained. His Father O’Malley is pretty much the same easy going if slightly (male chauvinist) pigheaded man he was in Going My Way. Here he’s not up against Barry Fitzgerald’s Father Fitzgibbon, but finds himself in a series of minor skirmishes with Sister Mary Benedict, who has her own patented brand of stubbornness. The two clash in their preferred manner of handling two different issues with the student body, and it’s interesting to note the varying ways two different problems are approached. When O’Malley and Mary Benedict interrupt a schoolyard scrape between two young boys, O’Malley actually praises the kid who comes out on top, while Mary Benedict goes out of her way to assure little Eddie (Richard Tyler), who got the short end of the stick (and/or fist), that he showed the true Christian spirit by turning the other cheek (even if that cheek then got punched). In one of the film’s most celebrated sequences, Sister Mary Benedict then thinks better of her decision and actually gives little Eddie boxing lessons. It’s obviously played for laughs, but this is one of the elements that some may find particularly odd about The Bells of St. Mary’s. First, there’s a Priest pretty much congratulating one little boy for beating up another one (telling Sister Mary Benedict “it’s a man’s world out there” in the process—yikes!), while a nun then goes on to promote bodily harm as the story progresses. One of course has to view these plot points through the prism of 1945 society, before the “politically correct” police descended to proclaim to all who would listen (and maybe even to those who refused to listen) what and what not was “acceptable”.

The other major subplot involves a young girl named Patsy (Joan Carroll) whose distraught mother Mary (Martha Sleeper) chases after Father O’Malley one day and begs him to watch after her girl as she, as a single working mother whose husband more or less ran out on her years previously, can’t. There’s just the whiff of scandal hinted at in this particular element, though perhaps not in the way modern day audiences might expect. Sister Mary Benedict starts quizzing O’Malley on Patsy’s background and comes to the quick conclusion that she’s from a “broken” home, which of course is creating all sorts of emotional turmoil in the girl. This subplot also bears some comedic fruit, especially when O’Malley attempts to help the girl get passing grades and she more or less quotes him verbatim when she writes a paper about the five senses. There’s also a strangely sanguine resolution to this story when O’Malley finds the long lost father and husband, reunites him with his erstwhile family, and things seem to be hunky dory, with nary a thought given to the years of abandonment which have gone before.

Still, The Bells of St. Mary’s is a simple, heartfelt paean to a simpler time, when the United States was just emerging from the depths of World War II, the lines between good and evil were clearly drawn, and there was an inherent hope for a brighter, more peaceful, future. The film will probably seem corny and hackneyed to younger folks, and if one is being completely frank, this follow-up really has not aged nearly as well as Going My Way. That said, Crosby and Bergman are in top form, sparring with other gently but pointedly, and the kids are absolutely adorable. The moral lessons here are only too obvious, but they’re delivered sweetly and with a fair share of emotional impact. It may not really be Christmas, after all, but The Bells of St. Mary’s can help to get you into the spirit of the season no matter what time of year it is.

The Bells of St. Mary's Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Bells of St. Mary's is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. This is an "interesting" presentation from Olive, one that has some peculiar anomalies and inconsistencies but which most fans of the film will probably find generally pleasing. One non-transfer related oddity is the inclusion of the same "mask" over part of the credits which was on previous home video releases, something that reportedly obliterates RKO's name (this has long piqued my interest, especially since whoever did the masking did a fairly sloppy job of it, allowing the block to continue for a second or so into the actual cast credit card that follows). The transfer itself has some of the same issues that have accompanied previous home video releases, including some anomalies like gate weave and pretty messy edit bumps from frame to frame. There are also noticeable shrinkage or warping issues, sometimes in just part of the frame (watch in the background as Bing first walks into St. Mary's courtyard, where the trees seem to be about ready to up and walk out of the place). There are a couple of transfer specific issues that struck me as at least marginally different from previous home video outings. This version has a somewhat erratic grain structure. At times grain looks normal and healthy, but it ebbs and flows here in a fairly divergent way. There is also some peculiar hanging grain at times, to the point where faces can occasionally look a bit "dirty". Contrast also seems slightly inconsistent and in fact looks boosted to me some of the time (I'm wondering if perhaps this presentation was cobbled together from different sources), making some of the film too dark looking. All of this said, generally speaking the image here is quite decent looking, with well modulated gray scale (even if I personally found the blacks pushed a bit too much at times). There is certainly an uptick in clarity and sharpness over the DVD, but it may not be at the levels that some might hope for or expect.

The Bells of St. Mary's Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Bells of St. Mary's features a nice sounding DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that ably supports both the dialogue and the charming sung elements (including the Oscar nominated "Aren't You Glad You're You", written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, the same team that had won the Oscar the previous year for "Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way). While this track shows the typical boxiness of this era's recording techniques, there are no dropouts or other serious damage to report.

The Bells of St. Mary's Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

The Bells of St. Mary's Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Bells of St. Mary's doesn't quite muster the same delightful combination of humor and pathos that its predecessor Going My Way did, but it's still hugely enjoyable, buoyed by the effortless charms of Bing and the more mannered emotionalism of Bergman. This Blu-ray has a few video issues that may slightly distract from that enjoyment, but otherwise this release comes Recommended.