Pluskylang Great Film overall

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

vogun-17563 The clue is in the title, this is a religious movie, and I half expected Pat O'Brien, Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracey to turn up. I watched, as I read some glowing reviews here, and about half way through I realised that the people who liked this so much were probably church goers. If that's you or what you like then please watch, you will enjoy I suspect.This had all the feel of a film noir movie but all was white where there is normally black. The story unfolds as the film develops and is told in retrospect. Instead of bad things happening, good things occurred, except that a character develops what MAD magazine once called old movie disease (in their pastiche on Love Story), which turns it into a weepie (or a cringefest). This is the type of film they were referring to. There were unintended laughable moments such as when Frank Sinatra starts to sing. You can't have him in your movie and not get him to warble something surely? There was also a courting scene where they spend Christmas Eve in a Chinese Restaurant, with no other customers or staff other than the owner, who interloped with them on their date. The Asian man came out with some zen type wisdom, then was given a St Michael charm. Another amusing unintended amusing moment was when the temperamental actress playing Joan of Arc storms out and within seconds the wannabe turns up with exactly the same hair as the Joan of Arc actress and I did a double take and had to check that the two parts were not played by the same actress. Uncanny? The film did have enough tact to not immediately suggest that they play the role, and gave it a few minutes before the dots were joined up when the actress just happened to know the JofA soliloquy, which I must say Alida Valli delivers with aplomb.I've never been convinced by Fred MacMurray, and it's the same here for me, he really is too nice. Perfect casting then perhaps, for this film? Double Indemnity was his zenith (where he just about didn't spoil the film for me). Lee J Cobb gives another sterling performance, and shows us some real acting, thank goodness. Production levels are good here, but this really is a Hollywood movie about the Hollywood industry, in a rag to (not quite?) riches way, in that a girl from the sticks makes good, with all the rough edges rounded off.

clanciai This is an impressing story that gets constantly more interesting as it develops. It starts in mild sadness as Fred McMurray comes to a rather sordid and backward Coal Town with a coffin in order to bury it there, as that apparently was the last wish of the deceased. In flashbacks her story is gradually revealed, and as the tragedy unfolds of a film star who got the chance of her life to make Joan of Arc to only die for it, the additional plots start to gather, involving tremendous complications piling up at Coal Town, where Frank Sinatra as a poorer parish priest gradually starts to play a part - he even gets the opportunity to sing a song. Well, the plot thickens and gathers momentum and grows to affect the whole of the United States, as also Lee J. Cobb as Fred's producer reluctantly is involved. The amazing phenomenon of the film is how it gradually develops into something of a cathedral in structure involving many people and many plots and subplots, and there is no surprise anywhere, not even any real miracle, everything is logic and natural and can be explained, as even Frank Sinatra honestly enough stands up to the naked truth, and still there is something of a miracle about it all, as all these people without any intention of their own get included in the fabric of destiny as it weaves its web around them all, finally even bringing Lee J. Cobb to his knees. It's an amazing film and story in all its simplicity and very touching basic humanity - the scene in the Chinese restaurant is my favorite and a marvel of humanity in itself. This is no legend, and there is nothing supernatural about anything here, but it's simply a very human story presenting the magic of life as it could happen anywhere and fill everyone with wonder in the pure incredibility of reality. This is a film to discover, enjoy - and love.

MARIO GAUCI Hollywood during WWII and its aftermath was marked by a series of fanciful but uplifting fantasies involving angels and similar divine interventions; this is certainly among the oddest ones that were made – a blasphemous satire unsuccessfully passed off as romantic whimsy! For a little-seen and mostly forgotten film, this eventually cropped up as a VHS rental in my neck of the woods in the early 1990s but, in spite of my curiosity, I passed on it back then – even though I had always been intrigued by celebrated film critic James Agee's famous dismissal of it ("I hereby declare myself the founding father of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to God"). Consequently, knowing that 2008 marked the 10th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's passing, I made it a point to catch it when it was shown on Italian TV. Given Sinatra's third billing and smallish role as a Polish priest(!) – was he trying to emulate Crosby's award-winning turns in the Fr. O'Malley movies? – it was hardly the ideal fare to mark that very day but that's exactly what I did, the first of 10 planned Sinatras. This was actually his first dramatic role – even if he does get to sing a song…to Fred MacMurray in a cemetery!! The true leads of the film, then, are MacMurray and Italian star Alida Valli: the former is a Hollywood press agent and the latter a struggling theatrical actress (she eventually has a hit with "Girl Of The Ozarks"!) who is imposed on skeptical film producer Lee J. Cobb when his international diva walks out of his current Joan Of Arc production (coincidentally, Ingrid Bergman was portraying just such a role in relatively more lavish surroundings, including Technicolor, at the RKO studios). Valli, coming from a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, is afflicted by tuberculosis and eventually kills herself in completing the film (dying on the very next day after the end of shooting!); Cobb is highly reluctant to release a movie with a dead lead in it, but MacMurray – together with that above-mentioned divine intervention – convince him otherwise.Apparently the film is based on the case of Helen Burgess, a 19-year old Hollywood starlet who died before her big break in movies (in Cecil B. De Mille's THE PLAINSMAN [1936]) could bear its fruit. The actual "miracle" is rather preposterous (if plausibly explained) but its effectiveness is undermined by the fact that the bells had already been made to toll (on MacMurray's instructions via Valli's death-bed wish) for three consecutive days(!) – a fact which would certainly have driven even the most devout and gullible of Christians off the wall (and yet, on the big day, we see them flocking in droves to Sinatra's previously forsaken church). The script, while mostly a Ben Hecht 'adaptation' piece, includes contributions from Quentin Reynolds and De Witt Bodeen (which actually extend only to those scenes featuring Frank Sinatra!). Director Irving Pichel had another far more rewarding religious film up his sleeve – MARTIN LUTHER (1953), which I watched for the first time quite recently.

Miles Charrier I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the fact that this film may be based on a true story makes the whole thing insaner than it really is. The dialogue alone may have you roaring in the aisles. Frank Sinatra as a priest with a priestly voice even sings a song and Fred McMurray towering over Sinatra as he stands next to him tries to act convinced and at times he almost succeeds. The one remarkable feature here is Alida Valli or as she was billed "Valli" trying to sell her as the new Garbo. She is stunningly beautiful. You wouldn't guess it for her performance here but she went on to star for Luchino Visconti in "Senso" and years later for Bernardo Bertolucci in "The Spider's Stratagem" What she's asked to do here is virtually impossible. To makes us care, let alone believe in what she's suppose to be telling us and yet, there is something, don't ask me what but something, that makes "The Miracle Of The Bells" a guilty pleasure of major proportions.