Sometimes it can be rewarding to revisit a “classic” film you haven’t seen in decades, even if it didn’t impress you much the first time around. A positive review of Irving Pichel’s “The Miracle of the Bells” (1948) at Gary Tooze’s invaluable DVD Beaver — and its stars, Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli and a spectacularly miscast Frank Sinatra — prompted me to grab it from a pile of star-laden films from the old National Telefilm Associates/Republic Pictures library recently released on solid-looking Blu-rays by Olive Films, which has licensed 150 of them from Paramount (including Mark Robson’s “Champion” with Kirk Douglas, William Wellman’s “Magic Town” starring James Stewart, Sam Wood’s “The Devil and Miss Jones” with Jean Arthur and Fritz Lang’s “Cloak and Dagger” starring Gary Cooper, plus more John Wayne films than you can shake a stick at).
“Miracle” was among the earliest Hollywood vehicles with big, then-current stars made available to TV in the early 1950s, when the major studios were still sitting on their backlogs, in anticipation of better licensing deals and, at least for the time being, placating exhibitors who were already suffering from competition.
Among a parcel of 20 money-losers that the Bank of America repossessed from its independent producers (among them “The Dark Mirror,” “A Double Life” and “Letter From an Unknown Woman”) and sold to product-starved TV, “Miracle” was once ubiquitous on the tube, especially during year-end holidays, when NTA packaged it with a couple of other RKO co-productions of roughly the same vintage, the hugely popular “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (which Paramount acquired when it bought Leo McCarey’s production company and threw in as a sweetener when it sold a package of cartoons to NTA) and the box-office disappointment “It’s a Wonderful Life” (another deal sweetner from Paramount, which acquired it along with Frank Capra and his Liberty Pictures partners, William Wyler and George Stevens) drew substantial TV audiences on TV from the outset, at least according to the ratings when it debuted on WCBS’ “The Late Show” in 1953.
“Miracle,” whose nearly two-hour runtime stretched to three when it played in heavy rotation on WNEW’s “Dialing for Dollars” (which interrupted the film with game-show segments as well as commercials) in the late 1960s, is nowhere near as rewarding a cinematic experience as the other two, but it’s interesting in ways (especially about journalism, Hollywood and David O. Selznick) that would never have occurred to me as a teenager. It was adapted — very loosely, reports Bosley Crowther, by the insanely prolific Ben Hecht and celebrity journalist Quentin Reynolds (whose only other significant screen credit was on “Call Northside 711”) from a best-selling novel by Russell Janney. Contemporary accounts quoted by the AFI catalogue says the bidders included James Cagney’s brother and producing partner William, who wanted to make it as one of their independent productions (which also ended up with NTA, and Paramount, eventually) but the prize was won by Jesse L. Jasky, the ousted Paramount Pictures founder who had produced “Sergeant York” and “Rhapsody in Blue” at Warners but had recently switched over to coproductions with RKO, beginning with “Without Reservations” (whose ownership remained with RKO and is now controlled by Warner Bros).
Cagney declined to topline Lasky’s production, and then-freelance star Fred MacMurray ended up playing the protagonist, a cynical Hollywood press agent named Dunnigan who has arrived in a grim Pennsylvania coal mining town to fulfill a deathbed promise to his actress sweetheart Olga (Alida Valli, borrowed from Selznick, just before she was shipped back to Europe for “The Third Man”). As we learn from flashbacks, picked-from-the-chorus Olga died just after completing her film debut, as Joan of Arc, and Dunnigan is here to bury her besides her parents in her birthplace. During a meeting with a young priest, Dunnigan hears a church bell and has an epiphany — he will will have all five of the town’s churches ring their bells for three straight days and nights as a publicity stunt to force the film’s rather Selznickian producer (Lee J. Cobb) — who plans to shelve the film and recast it with an established star — to release it as a tribute to poor Olga’s art (from the evidence in this film, Valli would have made a quite credible Joan).
Played out in a series of gloom-laden flashbacks — “like a two-hour funeral,” Crowther complained, not inaccurately — this movie is every bit as risible as it sounds, especially when statues of St. Michael and the Virgin Mary suddenly turn toward Olga’s coffin during her funeral. Fast-talking Dunnigan convinces the priest, who comes up with a quite plausible explanation for the occurrence, to let the downtrodden locals believe in a miracle. Did I mention that Father Paul is played by Frank Sinatra in his very worst performance? Sinatra’s painful sincerity is bad in way beyond his ludicrous miscasting, which was apparently the idea of his own press agent. Concerned about press reports that Sinatra was consorting with organized crime figures, the flack supposedly even convinced Sinatra to donate his $100,000 salary for the picture to the Catholic Church.
The most fun scene in the movie comes earlier, when the Dunnigan invites the local press in to tell them Olga’s poignant story — dying of tuberculosis she contracted as a child in the generically-named Coal Town after what she thought was her moment of triumph. The reporters, no dopes, know he’s fishing for free advertising for the unreleased movie but hear him out as long as he keeps supplying them with booze. MacMurray is always more interesting in his less sympathetic roles (“Double Indemnity,” “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Apartment”) and his flack is right down there with those played by Edmond O’Brien (in the not dissimilar “The Barefoot Contessa”‘) and Jack Carson and Lionel Stander in the first two versions of “A Star is Born.” Hecht has populated his movie with cynics, including Harold Vermilyea as a wonderfully money-grubbing undertaker named Orloff who runs a bar next door to his funeral parlor, where in the most jaw-dropping scene he signs up pallbearers for Olga at $2 apiece. Everyone’s on the take in Coal Town — even the priest at the town’s largest church charges Dunnigan twice the going rate for ringing his bells. Of course, our anti-hero is kiting checks.
Cobb’s Selznick stand-in (Hecht was one of his favorite screenwriters), when appraised of the supposed miracle, rolls his eyes and remarks that “God” has never helped him promote a movie before (you wonder if the real Selznick, who was known to bombard the makers of films with his loan-out stars, advised on this one). The producer’s ready to announce that he’s signed “Genevieve James” to replace the late Olga as Joan. The name is clearly a play on the real Selznick’s wife and muse Jennifer Jones, who repotedly was one of the actors angling to play Olga in “Miracle” (After all, “The Song of Bernadette” shot her to stardom). Another aspiring Olga was recent Selznick contractee Ingrid Bergman, who began shooting her own “Joan of Arc” at RKO just as “Miracle” was winding down production. When she and her director/lover/producing partner Victor Fleming began running out of money, they rented a standing set at RKO to use for the sequence of Joan’s burning at the stake. According to Fleming biographer Michael Sgraow, it was built — you guessed it — for “Miracle of the Bells.”
And there was a real-life death connected with “Joan” too: Fleming, who directed Selznick’s “Gone With the Wind,” on which Hecht had served as a script doctor during marathon benzedrine-fueled sessions with the producer, with who he also collaborated on Selznick’s swan song, the “A Farwell to Arms” starring Mrs. Selznick. Hecht, an ardent Zionist, would revisit Christianity (and premature death) with more box-office success in the equally schmaltzy but vastly less cynical “Miracle in the Rain.”
The Fox Cinema Archives manufacture-on-demand program — which has been releasing big blocks of titles a couple of times a month — shifts to a weekly schedule for releases beginning today (the Warner Archive Collection followed a similar trajectory in its early history). Today’s releases (I don’t see them available anywhere yet, including Fox Connect) are Roy Del Ruth’s “Tail Spin” (1939) starring Alice Faye and Constance Bennett; Henry Levin’s “The Gambler From Natchez” (1954) with Dale Robertson and Debra Padget and a MOD reissue of Nicholas Ray’s “The True Story of Jesse James” (1957) with Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter, previously available on an out-of-print retail DVD.
May 21: Henry Hathaway’s “White Witch Doctor” (1953) with Susan Hayward, Robert Mitchum; Harmon Jones’ “Princess of the Nile” (1954) starring Paget and Hunter; Louis King’s “Powder River” (1953) with Rory Calhoun, Cameron Mitchell; and Maury Dexter’s “Young Guns of Texas” (1962) with James Mitchum and Jody McCrea.
May 28: Howard Hawks’ “The Road to Glory” (1936), at last, starring Frederic March and Warner Baxter; Fritz Lang’s long-awaited “Western Union” (1941) with Robert Young and Randolph Scott; Harmon Jones’ “The Silver Whip” (1953) with Robertson and Calhoun; and Rudolph Mate’s “The Siege at Red River” (1954) starring Van Johnson and Joanne Dru.
June 4: Delmer Daves’ remake of “Bird of Paradise” (1951) starring Paget and Jeff Chandler; Jean Negulesco’s “Lure of the Wilderness” (1952) with Jean Peters and Jeffrey Hunter; Joe Newman’s “Red Skies of Montana” (1952) with Richard Widmark and Hunter; Henry King’s “King of the Khyber Rifles” (1955) with Power and Terry Moore; and King’s “Untamed” (1955) starring Power and Hayward.
June 11: Archie Mayo’s “Confirm or Deny” (1941) starring Don Ameche and Joan Bennett; Leonide Moguy’s “Paris After Dark” (1943) with George Sanders and Brenda Marshall; “The Fighting Lady” (1944), a Technicolor semi-documentary directed by by famed photographer Edward Steichen, and co-narrated by Charles Boyer and Robert Taylor; Raoul Walsh’s “Marines, Let’s Go!” (1961) with Tom Tryon; and Herbert Coleman’s “Battle at Bloody Beach” (1961) with Audie Murphy.
(Update: Fox advises that “King of the Khyber Rifles,” “Untamed,” “The True Story of Jesse James” and :Hard Contract” are letterboxed. “Young Guns of Texas,” “Battle of Bloody Beach” and “Marines, Let’s Go” are pan-and-scan, and all of the other titles are being presented full frame).
Back at the Warner Archive Collection corral, volume six of the “Monogram Cowboy Collection” arrives today with half a dozen vehicles for singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely: “Riding the Dusty Trail” (1945), “Lonesome Trail” (1945), “The Rangers Ride” (1948), “Range Renegades” (1948), “Silver Trails” (1948), “Brand of Fear” (1949). Plus four singles from the Monogram/Allied saddlebag: Lesley Selander’s “Stampede” (1949) with Rod Cameron and John Mack Brown, who also star in Selander’s “Short Grass” (1950); Lewis D. Collins’ “Wild Stallion” (1952) with Ben Johnson and Edgar Buchanan; and “Rider on a Dead Horse” (1962) with John Vivyan and Bruce Gordon. All that and Gordon Douglas’ previously-announced “Sincerely Yours” (1955), starring the immortal Liberace.
On the retail front, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has announced the Aug. 6 debut of the four-title “Charlie Chan Collection” on DVD. Sidney Toler stars in only one of these Monogram Bs, Terry Morse’s “Shadows Over Chinatown” (1946). Roland Winters takes over as the sleuth in Derwin Abrahams’ “Docks of New Orleans” (1948) and a pair directed by William Beaudine, “Shanghai Chest” and “Golden Eye” (both also 1948). Mantan Moreland and Victor Sen Yung are in all four films, which are being offered with no extras. This is a followup to WHV’s “Charlie Chan Collection” (2010), the studio’s last DVD set with all new-to-format titles. Presumably the new set does not carry a “Volume 2” designation because its predecessor was released under the apparently defunct TCM Spotlight label.
Sony, which continued its Columbia Film Noir Classics series through the TCM Vault Collection label when the retail DVD market went south, has scheduled a fourth volume for release on Aug. 6. The titles are Joseph H. Lewis’ “So Dark the Night” (1946) with Steven Geray; Robert Rossen’s “Johnny O’Clock” (1947) starring Dick Powell and Lee J. Cobb; Gordon Douglas’ “Walk a Crooked Mile” (1948) starring Dennis O’Keefe and Raymond Burr; Douglas’ “Between Midnight and Dawn” (1950) with Edmund O’Brien and Mark stevens; and Alfred Werker’s “Walk East oN Beacon!” (1952) starring George Murphy. Such niceties as commentary tracks disappeared with retail DVDs, but Martin Scorsese is back with an introduction on behalf of The Film Foundation, which has a co-presentation credit.
On the Blu-ray front, Fox is debuting an upgrade for Rouben Mamoulian’s “Blood and Sand” (1941) starring Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth on July 9, followed by Mate’s “The 300 Spartans” (1962) starring Richard Egan, on July 23. The following week, a pair of Marilyn Monroe classics gets the high-def treatment: Henry Hathaway’s “Niagra” (1953) with Joseph Cotten and Joshua Logan’s “Bus Stop” (1956)co-starring Don Murray. Elvis Presley’s debut, Robert Webb’s “Love Me Tender” (1956), with Egan and Paget top-billed, also makes its Blu-ray debut on July 30.
