Dial “O” For O’Malley

Welcome back, Miss Ingrid…

I don’t know about anyone else, but my parents and I watched a lot of movies when I was growing up, and they were the ones to introduce me to classic Hollywood. They were both born in the early forties and remembered a lot of these movies from their childhood and high school years, so when VHS became a thing we all went a little crazy.

One of the movies I remember seeing  was 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s. I was in high school at the time, and I think my mom and I watched it when my dad was on a business trip. However, I haven’t seen it since, so when Virginie’s blogathon came up I was interested in going back to it.

The movie is, of course, the sequel to the previous year’s Going My Way, and it opens with Father Chuck O’Malley (Bing Crosby) arriving at St. Mary’s school, a ramshackle building that’s seen better days. The last pastor was carried out in a wheelchair muttering to himself. Chuck hopes for better.

Chuck’s first day begins in a rather auspicious way, as he not only leans on the school bell button an hour before school opens, but then he impulsively declares a holiday, which the kids are all over the moon about. His meet-and-greet with the sisters is interrupted by giggles as a cat almost walks off with Chuck’s trademark straw hat, but everyone recovers and returns to business as usual.

Our Father O’Malley’s got a formidable colleague in Sister Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) who has her own ideas of how the school should be run, and the two butt heads in a very amiable way. Still, they have a good working relationship and really respect each other.

Life at St. Mary’s is more episodic than necessarily following a plot. The school is not only outgrowing its current building, but it’s getting too rundown to be usable. The sisters want to move into the building next door and tear down the old one for a playground, but they have to convince the owner, Mr. Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers) to give it to them.

Mr. Bogardus is not sold on the idea. He wants the building for his business, and if St. Mary’s doesn’t do something about their building, the city council is going to condemn it and tear it down. He knows because he’s on the city council. The kids can all go to St. Victor’s, another local Catholic school. It’s fancier and more up-to-date anyway. The sisters aren’t deterred; they’ll just keep praying. Chuck isn’t exactly silent about the matter, either.

The other major subplot is a new student, Patricia Gallagher (Joan Carroll), whose mother, Mary (Martha Sleeper) pleads with Chuck to let her daughter come to St. Mary’s. Her husband left her to establish himself as a musician in Syracuse and then didn’t send for her. That was thirteen years ago. Now her daughter is starting to get rebellious and Mary is hoping Father Chuck can straighten her out.

To say Pat thrives at the school is an understatement. She throws herself into her studies and life at the school. In fact, she loves St. Mary’s so much that she doesn’t want to leave.

Also reluctant to leave is Sister Benedict, who is harboring a secret, but it falls to her pastor, Father Chuck, to help her deal with it. “If you need help, dial “O” for “O’Malley,” is what he tells people.

The Bells of St. Mary’s is remarkable in a lot of ways, one of which is its introduction of the classic song, “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?” It’s what I most remembered going back into it, probably because I’d initially heard it sung by Bob and Big Bird. I think my mom knew I’d pick up on that when we watched the movie.

Seeing it again as an adult, I really enjoyed it for the sheer nostalgia. Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman have a wonderful rapport and there’s a lot of genuine feeling in it. Sure, it’s a wee bit long, plus St, Mary’s is remakably tranquil for a school that drove the last pastor out muttering in a wheelchair, but it’s a lot of fun and has a lot of goodhearted messages. We don’t get to see Chuck doing much beyond general counsel and support; to be fair, it probably would have gotten old to see him conducting Mass all the time, unless the movie was somehow able to work the story around what happens in Mass.

Anyway, it’s also a lot of fun seeing the sisters interacting with the kids and enjoying themselves. Hollywood is always so spotty about its portrayals of religious people, and with a few exceptions nuns are either generally staid and sterile or she-demons in habits, even in Code-era movies. They’re certainly not allowed to be themselves or remember their lives before they became nuns.

The St. Mary’s nuns aren’t burdened by any such strictures; Sister Benedict is free to show one student how to swing a baseball bat and another how to box. This portrayal mystified the famous Bosley Crowther, who called it “incongruous.”

This all could have been due to Leo McCarey drawing from life, as Sister Benedict was based on his aunt, Sister Mary Benedict. In fact, when she was preparing for her role, Ingrid Bergman met McCarey’s aunt and visited a convent. She loved playing Sister Benedict and regarded it as one of her favorite roles.

The Bells of St. Mary’s was the second highest-grossing movie of 1945, and it must have been comforting for audiences who were coming off the Second World War. Like its predecessor, St. Mary’s is very steeped in its time. Also like its predecessor, St. Mary’s shows rather than tells, and it all works. If it had come out ten years later, it could have easily been a TV series. Eighty years later, it still makes a great impression.

For more of the great Ingrid Bergman, please see Virginie at The Wonderful World of Cinema. Thanks for hosting this, Virginie–so glad you brought it back! Thanks for reading, everyone, and I hope to see you tomorrow for another post…

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The Bells of St. Mary’s is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon. It is also available to stream on Tubi and Roku.

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