MIRACLE OF THE BELLS (1948)

In a present-day storyline, we accompany Hollywood agent Bill Dunnigan (Fred MacMurray) to Coaltown, Pennsylvania where he is attending to the funeral of actress Olga Treskovna (Alida Valli) who came from a Polish immigrant family, grew up in poverty in this coal-mining town, and was on the verge of stardom after finishing her first starring movie role when she died of tuberculosis the day after shooting ended. Bill runs into a lot of ill will from townspeople who have nothing good to say about Olga's no-good father, but with the help of Father Paul (Frank Sinatra), the priest of a small, dying parish, Bill pulls off not only the funeral but also a PR coup by getting all the churches in town to ring their bells constantly for the three days before the funeral. The studio where Olga filmed her starring role as Joan of Arc has decided to shelve the picture, but Bill hopes the publicity will make the studio head changes his mind. In a series of flashbacks, Citizen Kane-style, we get Olga's story through Bill's eyes: he first sees her as a chorus girl flubbing an audition and he intervenes to get the director to keep her on. Years later, on a snowy Christmas Eve, he runs into her again in a traveling theatrical troupe performing in a small town and the two share a lovely dinner in a Chinese restaurant--where we are first made aware of her chronic cough. Later, Bill steps in to get her the starring role in a Joan of Arc movie when the temperamental star is fired. But before Bill can express a romantic interest in her, she dies (in the beautiful Hollywood style), and he feels compelled to make her last wishes come true: be laid to rest in her hometown and have her movie released. If the bells don't convince the studio, perhaps an actual miracle will.

This didn't get a lot of love from critics when it came out and gets even less now (partly due to the odd nature of the final "miracle"), but I found it inoffensively watchable if completely average in every way from story (based on a novel) to production values to acting. MacMurray is fine and quite sympathetic, perhaps more so than a movie agent character should be, but occasionally he reminds me too much of Walter Neff in DOUBLE INDEMNITY--he calls Olga "Baby" in the same way does to Barbara Stanwyck in the earlier film. Valli is also fine--she certainly looks the part even if she is less convincing as a great unsung actress. Sinatra is roundly criticized as a weak link, but I thought his underplayed performance was very good. Lee J. Cobb is the studio boss and Philip Ahn has a small part in the charming Christmas scene. This is often shown at Christmas because of that scene but it's not really a holiday film, and certainly not a feel-good film. Still, even though at two hours, it’s about 20 minutes too long, it held my attention. [TCM]