Ex cathedra

The Bishop's Wife

(1947)

Yeesh! Live by the DVR, die by the DVR. I must have had a zillion chances to record this flick in the days of VCR, but I was never sufficiently motivated. But when I was scrolling through the upcoming movie offerings, I thought, "Oh! The Bishop's Wife! I should record that! After all, it's a Christmas classic!"

Christmas crappic is more like it. OK, you start with a brilliant holiday film from a year earlier, you poach three minor members of its cast (Karolyn Grimes [Zuzu/Debby], Robert J. Anderson [young George/nameless obnoxious kid], and Sarah Edwards [Mrs. Hatch/Mrs. Duffy]) and the essentials of the plot (good man in an impossibly tight spot right before Xmas prays for help and gets sent an angel), and then you screw up everything you possibly can: instead of the most engaging actor on the planet, have the good man played by iron-rod-up-his-butt David Niven; instead of the charming Donna Reed, have the good man's wife played by the quintessentially vapid Loretta Young; and to cap it, instead of a harmlessly bumbling guardian angel played by Henry Travers, cast the sexiest man on the planet as a seductive angel with whom the wife can sorta fall in love, but in a clearly innocuous way.

Ugh! Give 'em credit for this, at least: the great film they ripped off had been pretty much a flop; it took some smarts to know enough to steal from it.

My mother used to watch Young's TV show religiously when I was growing up, which meant that I watched it a lot too. Even as dumb as I was, the attraction was a mystery to me. It wasn't until years later, when I learned that Young had stayed in a miserable marriage because of her inflexible Catholic faith that it made some sense. Now the mystery is: if she was devoutly religious and thus presumably not boning producers left and right, how did she have a career at all? It sure wasn't on her acting skill.