The Miracle of the Bells (1948)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I grew up thinking this was a clinker and couldn't even eclipse Thr Kissing Bandit or Double Dynamite in terms of Sinatra bow-wows; boy, did I get a wrong number. As a Sinatra fan and completist I would have bought a DVD anyway and will do so as and when -let's face it, I own On The Town, The Pride And The Passion, Marriage On The Rocks, and I will buy though not necessarily watch Four For Texas, Sergeants Three when they turn up. But now having seen it on TV I am actively seeking Miracle Of The Bells and not just as a Sinatra fan. I find myself in agreement with the majority of those who have written here and found this to be a warm 'little' film about goodness and faith. Valli is an ideal actress for the lead and Lee J Cobb is fine as a Studio head though a tad on the humane side to be modelled on anyone we know. Very well worth watching.

The two things are, first, Alida Valli's whistling S's whenever she spoke. It wasn't what you sometimes used to hear in Texas speech (no idea what that was about; you don't hear it anymore. Even LBJ used to do it) or the whistling that used to be associated with false teeth. I don't know what it was, but it was certainly distracting. Second, I don't understand why everybody thinks she was so good looking; she was certainly no Garbo and not nearly as good an actress.I have seen The Paradine Case and The Third Man (another of my favorites), and I still don't understand why she was considered so hot at the time. Not all that great looking, not much presence, and not a really outstanding actress. Maybe my impression is not unique, and maybe that's the reason she had such a short career in American films.Am I wrong?

Hollywood during WWII and its aftermath was marked by a series of fanciful but uplifting fantasies involving angels and similar divine interventions; this is certainly among the oddest ones that were made – a blasphemous satire unsuccessfully passed off as romantic whimsy! For a little-seen and mostly forgotten film, this eventually cropped up as a VHS rental in my neck of the woods in the early 1990s but, in spite of my curiosity, I passed on it back then – even though I had always been intrigued by celebrated film critic James Agee's famous dismissal of it ("I hereby declare myself the founding father of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to God"). Consequently, knowing that 2008 marked the 10th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's passing, I made it a point to catch it when it was shown on Italian TV. Given Sinatra's third billing and smallish role as a Polish priest(!) – was he trying to emulate Crosby's award-winning turns in the Fr. O'Malley movies? – it was hardly the ideal fare to mark that very day but that's exactly what I did, the first of 10 planned Sinatras. This was actually his first dramatic role – even if he does get to sing a song…to Fred MacMurray in a cemetery!! The true leads of the film, then, are MacMurray and Italian star Alida Valli: the former is a Hollywood press agent and the latter a struggling theatrical actress (she eventually has a hit with "Girl Of The Ozarks"!) who is imposed on skeptical film producer Lee J. Cobb when his international diva walks out of his current Joan Of Arc production (coincidentally, Ingrid Bergman was portraying just such a role in relatively more lavish surroundings, including Technicolor, at the RKO studios). Valli, coming from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, is afflicted by tuberculosis and eventually kills herself in completing the film (dying on the very next day after the end of shooting!); Cobb is highly reluctant to release a movie with a dead lead in it, but MacMurray – together with that above-mentioned divine intervention – convince him otherwise.Apparently the film is based on the case of Helen Burgess, a 19-year old Hollywood starlet who died before her big break in movies (in Cecil B. De Mille's THE PLAINSMAN [1936]) could bear its fruit. The actual "miracle" is rather preposterous (if plausibly explained) but its effectiveness is undermined by the fact that the bells had already been made to toll (on MacMurray's instructions via Valli's death-bed wish) for three consecutive days(!) – a fact which would certainly have driven even the most devout and gullible of Christians off the wall (and yet, on the big day, we see them flocking in droves to Sinatra's previously forsaken church). The script, while mostly a Ben Hecht 'adaptation' piece, includes contributions from Quentin Reynolds and De Witt Bodeen (which actually extend only to those scenes featuring Frank Sinatra!). Director Irving Pichel had another far more rewarding religious film up his sleeve – MARTIN LUTHER (1953), which I watched for the first time quite recently.

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the fact that this film may be based on a true story makes the whole thing insaner than it really is. The dialogue alone may have you roaring in the aisles. Frank Sinatra as a priest with a priestly voice even sings a song and Fred McMurray towering over Sinatra as he stands next to him tries to act convinced and at times he almost succeeds. The one remarkable feature here is Alida Valli or as she was billed "Valli" trying to sell her as the new Garbo. She is stunningly beautiful. You wouldn't guess it for her performance here but she went on to star for Luchino Visconti in "Senso" and years later for Bernardo Bertolucci in "The Spider's Stratagem" What she's asked to do here is virtually impossible. To makes us care, let alone believe in what she's suppose to be telling us and yet, there is something, don't ask me what but something, that makes "The Miracle Of The Bells" a guilty pleasure of major proportions.