I recently quipped that 1943's The Song of Bernadette was "the best Catholic movie ever made by two Jews." Its admirers insist you don't have to be Catholic to appreciate this ("based on a true") story of Marian visions and miraculous healings, so maybe those unexpectedly ecumenical origins explain why.
But I'm not sure they're right. No one can watch this (or any movie) through another's eyes. The Song of Bernadette must surely be baffling and even annoying to most Jews, Protestants, and, frankly, not a few Catholics, no?
The film was produced by David O. Selznick from the surprise 1941 bestseller by Prague-born Jewish writer-turned-refugee Franz Werfel, who explained his inspiration:
In the last days of June 1940, in flight from our mortal enemies after the collapse of France, we reached the city of Lourdes. (...)
I became acquainted with the wondrous history of the girl Bernadette Soubirous and also with the wondrous facts concerning the healings of Lourdes. One day in my great distress I made a vow. I vowed that if I escaped from this desperate situation and reached the saving shores of America, I would put off all other tasks and sing, as best I could, the song of Bernadette.
Imagine what another Jewish "Franz" from Prague — Werfel's rough contemporary, Kafka — would have written about Lourdes. Perhaps, like Zola before them, Kafka would have satirized its crass commercialism. But maybe one reason Kafka is still widely read and Zola is not can be accidentally ascertained from the latter's boast that, even after he'd witnessed two healings there:
"Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle."
Then again, Catholics aren't obligated to "believe in" Lourdes, either.
So why should anyone bother with The Song of Bernadette? True, it's exquisitely made, eloquent, and surprisingly amusing in a Capra-esque way:
But it's still an old fashioned black and white movie about something that may or may not have happened in some Old World village in the middle of the 1800s. So who cares?
The next time you find yourself ordered to deny your core beliefs, not to mention the evidence of your senses — to agree (or pretend to) that men can get pregnant or that humans can control the weather or that a fetus is "just a blob of tissue" — else risk ignominy and perpetual penury, you may have your answer...
Jennifer Jones, in her breathtaking breakthrough role, portrays Bernadette Soubirous, a simple, sickly adolescent, uncomplainingly engaged in the quotidian chores common to dirt poor peasant girls everywhere through the ages — in this case, collecting firewood.
Except one day, she sees and hears a luminous "lady" hovering in a grotto.
(Here and in life, Bernadette never claimed she saw the Virgin Mary per se, although the "lady" declared (albeit ungrammatically), "I am the Immaculate Conception." That particular dogma had only recently been proclaimed by the Pope, ex cathedra. This still-largely-misunderstood teaching had certainly not yet trickled down to little Lourdes, let alone into this illiterate child's mind. One is, again, free to make of this what one will.)
When Bernadette returns to the grotto, the "lady" tells her to dig up dirt with her hands and rub it on her face, to the astonishment of witnesses. Later, a spring erupts in that spot. Bernadette is commanded to tell the world that these are healing waters.
Naturally, none of this is well received. Her parents are angry and embarrassed. The neighbours, scandalized. The authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, warn Bernadette that she risks being locked up at worst and rendered unmarriageable (itself a veritable death sentence) at best. Her already struggling father will be forever unemployable; they'll see to that, too.
Under mounting pressure, Bernadette quietly yet steadfastly sticks by her story, repeating the "lady's" words (by rote, because she doesn't really understand them herself.) She is so guileless, she's not even impatient with these doubters and tormentors. All she's doing is telling the truth. And wouldn't lying be a sin?
This exasperating struggle frays one's nerves as surely as it would in any Hitchcock "wrong man" movie, and it's here that Eve Tushnet's ingenious take comes, somewhat, to our rescue:
The Song of Bernadette follows a classic horror-film structure in order to make a theological point.
Horror movies, especially supernatural ones, often turn on questions of authority. (...)
The point is to show the failure of accepted, modern authorities—science, medicine, government, reason itself. The people who know the truth are the ones least likely to be believed. (...) [F]rom the disbelieved teenagers in A Nightmare on Elm Street to the disbelieved teenager in The Song of Bernadette — authority, in horror, lies with those to whom powerful men do not listen. (...)
The scenes where local officials scheme to prevent worshipers from believing Bernadette are basically from Jaws if the Fourth of July weekend was a new railroad station and the great white shark was our Blessed Mother.
And of course, while Jaws, too, was inspired by actual events, less discussed is that Peter Benchley transposed them onto the plot of Ibsen's 1882 play about a solitary doctor's thwarted attempts to raise the alarm about contaminated water — the very water on which the economy of a spa town entirely depends.
The play's title is An Enemy of the People.
Of course, that's what President Trump calls the mainstream media, but it also happens to be the title of Tommy Robinson's memoir, about his thankless (and worse) efforts to expose the mass rape of teen girls by Muslim "grooming" gangs.
However much we may appreciate them, surely we've also wondered at times why such messengers — however truthful and timely — couldn't also be a bit more... presentable. More worthy.
This question vexes one particular character in The Song of Bernadette. It isn't fair. Why was she chosen: This ignorant nobody from Nowheresville?
This side of heaven, the only "answer" is the corny, comic Catholic one for everything:
It's a mystery.
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Thank you, Kathy, for reviewing Song of Bernadette. Love your movie reviews, as well as everything else you write!
Another movie in the same vein is The Miracle of Pur Lady of Fatima, 1952. As a Catholic, I watched with trepidation, but was pleasantly surprised. These are difficult concepts to articulate to a mass audience. Even the individual who lives comfortably with the firm belief that Christianity is ridiculous, would be touched by this film. Gilbert Roland stars & Max Steiner composes the music.
PS: Any Catholic (or curious) folks who are going on the Alaska cruise: My husband and I are renting a car to visit the Shrine of St Therese in Juneau (about a 30 min drive from the port.) If anyone wants to go in with us, let me know!
According to John 9, in the First Century, some of the Jews in Jerusalem believed that people could be healed by the water at the Pool of Siloam, a pool that received water from the Gihon Spring underneath Jerusalem.
The real irony about religious authorities rejecting a miraculous message from a peasant is that the founders of Christianity were a techton (builder, stonemason, carpenter), fishermen, and a tax collector. Then there was Saul of Tarsus, a worker in canvas (making tents or sails). The authority and power of Jesus of Nazareth was established by his miracles, principally of healing, culminating in reviving people who had died, and finally himself. A modern person who does not believe in those events may call himself a "Christian", but he is not believing the things that were taught by Peter and Paul.
For people who have faith in the proposition that God does not exist, the idea that there is a being so much smarter than us that the being could cause things to happen that cannot be explained by our current version of science, is very threatening to the egos of such folks, who think that THEY are the most intelligent beings in the universe. A mere 160 years ago, atheists were pointing to Darwin's On the Origin of Species as evidence that nature could get along without God, even though neither they nor Darwin understood anything about the structure and operations of proteins in living cells, or about DNA and genetics. They knew nothing about cosmology and the Big Bang, or the size and age of the universe. They knew nothing about the structure of atoms and electromagnetic radiation. They would not have the fuzziest notion of how a smart phone can do all the things it does, including its function as a flashlight, let alone a device that communicates with others around the world, translates languages, tells us our precise location, records moving color pictures and sounds, predicts the weather, and answers our spoken questions. But in 1859 they thought they knew everything that was worth knowing, so the unexplainable could not be real.
well put Raymond. That atheist you describe so well is portrayed in the movie by Vincent Price (need I add, superbly.)
This may seem like a silly aside, but your thoughts on science bring to mind some of the episodes of a delightful Canadian TV show (I know, right??!!) called Murdoch Mysteries, set in the very late 19th century. One of the running "gags" is that Inspector Murdoch "invents" things like the "laptop" and a "microwave" (the size of a den that his underling calls "the potato cooking room") and so on. Of course, everyone laughs off these "crazy" inventions, that will never catch on...
I have to admit, whenever "Song of Bernadette" is on I plan on watching "just a little." However I am inevitably drawn in and watch the whole thing. It's an amazing film that should be schmaltzy and over-the-top but never, ever is. A genuine sincerity pours forth from the screen, Henry King's direction was never more sure-handed and the script by George Seaton and Franz Werfel (I'm surprised that Alma Schindler Mahler-Werfel didn't demand a credit) is properly dignified and literate. Jennifer Jones (underrated as an actress) is innocence personified. The supporting players are somewhat typecast but they are also superb in their roles. Vincent Price, Charles Bickford, Gladys Cooper, Lee J. Coibb and (personal favorite) Charles Dingle all shine in their respective parts. Roman Bonhen and Ann Revere are the last word in struggling peasant couples.The near-final scene where Price's bitter prosecutor, Cobb's kindly doctor, Dingle's cynical police chief and Aubrey Mather's pompous mayor try to explain the impact of Bernadette's vision is superb. Say what you will about David O. Selznick, when he was on his game nobody was better.
The studio system was funny. Garson Kanin supposedly said - "The problem with movies as a business is that they are an art form. The problem with movies as an art form is that they are a business." During they great days of the studios they often got it right, creating moving and masterful films like "Song of Bernadette" that also upholstered the bottom line. Can Marvel Studios say the same thing? I doubt it..
So true: It really draws you in. Quality is quality, whatever the film's topic. It just oozes out of this film.
When I was in my teens in Palestine/Israel I read his book "The 40 days of Musa Dagh" Just arriving following the holocaust to Palestine this book left a deep impression on me. I still feel deep anger to the horrors that the Islamic Turkey inflicted on the Armenian for their religion. In a way I compare them to the Jewish People they were the intelligent elite of Turkey. The genocide of the Armenian may have been also a motivation to the holocaust. of WW2 that it is possible to do that and get away with it. What going on in Iraq ethnically cleansing of Jews, Christians, and other minorities shows that it can and will happen. Never again is a hollow promise.
I'm very interested in reading that book now.
Oh Larry ! If that was me I would have at least had a go. Being Catholic I suppose it is blind faith to me, but I am practical, also. Nothing ventured, nothing gained is how I see it. I hope and pray that your condition at least stabilizes or even improves for you. Look after yourself.
Kathy, thanks for the well done column about this film. I've only read about St. Bernadette. Now I'll have to take time to watch this movie.
Thanks so much, Kitty. I'm still on the fence about how non-Catholics will take to it, but as I say, there is some humor and suspense in the basic David vs. Goliath situation. And the movie, esp. in Blu-Ray (as in two of my clips) it is stunning to look at. No expense was spared to, well, create the impoverished village. :-)
Given that God is eternal, and we're small, finite creatures scrambling about the earth for very short periods of time, it makes sense that most of our interactions with God are a mystery to us. We would be foolish to think we could ever fully understand our Creator.
Blimey! About 15 years ago I assisted on the France tour of an American catholic university rugby club.
They had Lourdes in the itinerary. I couldn't believe the crass commercialism....and the sheer volume of it!
The lads trooped down there but I couldn't bring myself to go. I remembered all the popeish paraphernalia of old catholic great aunts. I grew up in the new, rational, technological sixties....when religion was poo pooed (that seems to have been reversed!).
A couple of days later, we had the lads working to spruce up and repair a tiny nunnery.
As a reward....we were all taken down to the crypt.....where a tiny door in a stone wall was unlocked...and a glass fronted silver casket brought out. Behind the glass was a human heart. The nuns insisted that because it hadn't decayed.....it was evidence that it's former owner....the founder of the monastery....was a saint...and they were campaigning to get him recognised in Rome.
The fact that it was the former core of an actual human being gave everybody the willies......but also sadness for the unflinching belief of the last two nuns and the African priest.
Maybe they hadn't noticed that the glass and silver box was perfectly sealed and that it was kept virtually refrigerated inside a cold, stone, cellar wall?
I don't know if those lads are still catholic....but what's the story here? Actual events.....or the power of belief?!
I went to a medical lecture where a couple and their nurse discussed the miraculous cure of the couple's son who had a crippling seizure disorder when he was placed in the water at Lourdes.
Like the Bernadette in this movie the parents had a sort of innocence about their faith. It may be that in order for miracles to occur the recipient has to be free of the kind of contempt for God and the faithful that many secularists seem to suffer from.
Some years back, I went with a couple of friends to a Greek Orthodox Church in Queens where an icon of the Virgin Mary was alleged to be weeping. So we stood in line with others wanting to see the "miracle" - and, sure enough, I could see a little drop of moisture at the inside corner of her left eye. So who can say? Condensation in an almost-but-not-quite airtight glass case? I don't think it was a hoax - I think the moisture did occur naturally - some nun wasn't sneaking in there and applying droplets of water - although like everybody else I did drop a dollar bill in the collection box on the way out.
Amazing story, Larry! Yeah, I'm going to side with the "refrigerated" in the wall explanation myself.
St Bernadette's body is purportedly uncorrupted. I am not obligated to believe this is a supernatural occurrence either. And I regret that sometimes we Catholics place a little too much emphasis on such things. Don't get me started on the Shroud of Turin...
I don't think I could deal with the commercialism at Lourdes either. But I wouldn't be able to resist a trip if it were in the cards, all the same.
Yes. I got in trouble with my partner when I got back......I've got a chronic condition in my legs which amounts to being partially disabled.......so she despaired that I hadn't grasped the chance for a cure!
Despite the many thousands of anecdotal stories, the International Medical Committee of Lourdes has a century-long record for rigorous examination of miraculous healings (restricted only by the limitations of medical science itself). Likewise, the "Medical Board of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints" sets the bar appropriately high. More of an emphasis on miracles than martyrdom amongst modern saints - though that may change in the future.
I hope you've been able to find comfort even if you didn't try Lourdes for a cure. My mom came down with rheumatoid arthritis when I was about two. These things are hard to live with, but you seem to bear it well. Good wishes to you for comfort and happiness!
I met Sr. Marie Simon-Pierre at the same medical conference. She spoke. Her doctor spoke and presented records of the aggressive form of Parkinson's Disease she had been suffering from. At the conference she was the picture of health. I wish I could evoke such cures in the patients I care for. Alas, I'm not a saint, not even close to it, but I do pray for them.
Thank you.
Maybe the point for these people isn't establishing causality but expressing gratitude
Kathy, thank you so much for this intelligent, insightful and very interesting review of this great classic film. I enjoy the old movies of the 40's, 50's and 60's, the golden age of cinema as opposed to the mostly degenerate, vacuous garbage churned out these days.
I had heard of this movie and that it was very good and a big success and had won many Oscars and Golden Globe awards. I had not actually seen it. I was so impressed with your excellent review that I looked this film up on You Tube and watched it. I was pleasantly surprised at how close they stuck to Bernadette's life story and how intelligent and witty the script was. The acting was very strong all round. I liked, too, how they gave both points of view from the devout faithful and the secular, bureaucrats such as Vincent Price's pompous authoritarian and Lee.J.Cobb's world weary doctor.
Yes, Kathy, the humour was subtle and funny. I liked how Bernadette, who, when the authorities kept referring insultingly to her as just an ignorant, stupid peasant girl, she would patiently give honest, witty replies to their questions thus embarrassing them. That made me chuckle a few times.
There are deeper themes, too, in this film that show correlation to today: The ridicule and persecution of Christians, today, by many atheist socialists similar to what happened to Bernadette. The great emptiness in many of the leftists who believe in nothing and, so, become nihilistic as in the Vincent Price character. The arrogant, secular bureaucrat who in a hopeless health situation said he had loved no one and nothing, not even himself.
Thank you and well done, Kathy.
Thanks so much for that, Felicity. Your message made my day!
Ooh, ooh, ooh, my suggestion for Mark's Song of the Week: The song Bernadette! Mark could teach us about the Four Tops and the song writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland (the song writing team so nice, they had to use the same name twice). What do you think?
Other than that and praise for Kathy's writing, all I've got are some rather controversial opinions on the Catholic Church and St. Paul (I'm agin both).
Bernadette being chosen is no mystery. Just as Juan Diego, LĂşcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto were also chosen. The least among us are the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Any movie with both Gladys Cooper (from Not That Again, err, Now Voyager) and Charles Bickford (from The Big Country, the best western evah) can't be all bad. There's a wonderful movie with a similar theme (that's not The Nun's Story) with Diana Rigg called "In this House of Brede". It doesn't have healing waters or visions, but it's definitely worth checking out.
In This House of Brede is a terrific book too. Rumur Godin also wrote Black Narcissius
Many people have recommended "... Brede" to me, so one day I hope to get around to it.
I call Charles Bickford "Discount William Holden" and this is very mean of me!
The particular character vexed by God's choice of Bernadette had forgotten his St. Paul (1 Cor 1:27-29): But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.
PS: If the old nun looks familiar, she played Bette Davis' horrible mother in "Now, Voyager," and was nominated for Oscars for both roles.
Gladys Cooper, which you probably knew. One of the great beauties of the London stage in the Teens and Twenties. She also played Laurence Olivier's sister in "Rebecca" and on and on - theater, movies and TV in the US and UK - pretty much right up until she passed away at the age of 83 in 1973.
Indeed. She made several Twilight Zones and I particularly remember "Nothing in the Dark" where a very young Robert Redford plays Death who finally charms Gladys to let go. Slightly different casting from the Seventh Seal, I can tell you.
Thanks for that Calvert. After I read this I tracked down her NYT obit -- what a life!
I read the third volume of Cecil Beaton's diaries - somewhat melancholy reading in itself as he records the gradual deterioration of his health during the last 10 years of his life. He knew everybody; but Gladys Cooper was an especially dear friend. There's a cute anecdote. She came to lunch and talked about how she was standing on a platform waiting for a train, minding her own business, when a cheerful fellow came up and said, "Happy 82nd birthday, Miss Cooper." She ended the story by saying, "I could have killed him." Referring to Chris Hall's "Twilight Zone" episode, there's another one in which she is an embittered, bedridden old lady - never married - who starts getting phone calls with a very garbled voice on the other end. She keeps telling the caller to stop calling and leave her alone. The voice gradually gets clearer and she finally recognizes it as an old beau - now dead - she had refused to marry. The episode cuts to a shot of one end of a downed telephone wire lying on a grave. Now that she knows who it is, she begs him to keep talking and not leave her - but he replies that she told him to leave her alone and he always did what she told him. It ends with her holding the now silent phone, weeping and desolated. Wow!
Wow is right!!!!
Dear Kathy:
What is ungrammatical about: I am the Immaculate Conception?
The Virgin Mary is the result of the Immaculate Conception, not the thing itself. One is a verb and one is a noun.
Live and learn. One thing I've learned as I've lived is to look stuff up before you spout off about it. I was going to jump in here and say, Kathy, Jesus was the result of the Immaculate Conception. But, knowing Kathy to be neither ignorant nor careless, I looked it up. She's exactly right and today I learned something that I'd had wrong most of my life. Live and learn.
The Virgin Mary is the only living human who is immaculately conceived. She is the Immaculate Conception.
I believe it's actually ok... and that Mary is saying she IS the Immaculate Conception... it is something she resulted from but it is also her identity... as the one child of all time conceived by two humans without sin.
That was the argument (and you can believe there WAS an argument) when authorities were trying to determine whether or not Bernadette was lying. Sort of like how people argue about the comma in the Second Amendment.
The real Bernadette was much... swarthier than Jennifer Jones; a bit like if Sophia Loren had had a more coarsely featured sister. But obviously, Jones makes you not care, and most viewers wouldn't know the difference.
Whereas the casting for the French film "Therese" (1984) had to be more exact. The face of the real Therese of Lisieux (while prettified by her surviving siblings, following the cloying conventions of late 19th piety), is now more familiar to the average Catholic through numerous photographs. Somehow the director managed to find an actress whose uncanny resemblance to the real woman makes it feel more like a documentary.
"...surely we've also wondered at times why such messengers — however truthful and timely — couldn't also be a bit more... presentable. More worthy."
"Why was she chosen: This ignorant nobody from Nowheresville?"
I Corinthians 1:27: "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty."
Bingo, Sol. This is another reason why, in the Christian influenced West, every person is counted as valuable. And you never know who will end up making a greater contribution. The Darwinian worldly-wise have no use for less than the fittest in their meritocracy although savvy tech companies are happy to hire lower intelligence employees to do repetitive testing of their technology because they don't get bored with it.
Many people are determined to live only within the limits of their understanding. But pushing back those limits is rightly seen, I think, as a spiritual exercise requiring faith and patience. In any case, although we may pride ourselves on our understanding, if we think about it at all, much of what we count as understood is nothing more than rote incantation.
If we view the spiritual realm as beginning at the limit of understanding then even mathematics is a spiritual exercise. I believe I'll take John von Neumann's word for it when he said "in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." If a mathematics genius said that, it gives hope to the rest of us.
With Bernadette, I think the worldly wise feel uncomfortable any time the spiritual concentration of a person's life exceeds five to ten percent. I believe a good balance for the individual to target is fifty percent and a great deal of the problems of our age would dissipate were we to aim for a fifty percent Christian consciousness in our daily life mixed with a fifty percent worldly wise approach to life.
Things would improve if more of us had a fifty-fifty split, but the existential threat perceived by the worldly wise from even a five or ten percent spiritual concentration spawns something only a committed "fool" can break through.
Notice "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world..." isn't simply "foolish things" it's foolish things "of the world" - what the world considers foolish. If the world needs changing, you want to be a fool.
I'd never thought of the horror story angle, but it's very insightful. Another movie that would make a good double-bill with 'The Song of Bernadette' is the 1989 Colombian movie "Milagro en Roma" (Miracle in Rome). The theme is very similar, of a poor man who is forced to exhume the body of his 7-year old daughter who had died 12 years earlier, only to find her completely unchanged from the day she died. The villagers exclaim that this is a miracle and the little girl is clearly a saint, much to the disgust of the worldly bishop who tries to stifle and sweep away the embarrassing incident. Despite clerical discouragement, the common people rally around the father and collect enough money to send him to Rome to see the Pope, in the hope of having his daughter declared a saint. Unlike Bernadette's story, this one ends happily, though not the way anyone expected.
as the daughter of an Italian national mother who was raised in a 14th century city, the only Catholic film to watch every year, mom sat us down in front of it, was Miracle of Marcelino (Spanish: Marcelino, pan y vino) a Spanish film of an old medieval story. Its a tear jerker, or something to deride, depending on your bent.
As someone whose third language was English, (fourth was Latin, in middle school) for me Spanish was a snap. My mother however had German, as well as my French. I loved the film as a child and recently viewed it again. For more nostalgic reasons, the tears flowed. Essentially everything is ultimately about going home.
Great point!
In fact, part of the trivia that didn't make it into my piece is that The Song of Bernadette was one of the first movies to go into regular rotation on television, along with... The Wizard of Oz. :-) That could be an essay in itself!