The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943)
For the first hour or so, The Song of Bernadette is a tough slog. An unapologetic hagiography of the young woman whose visions of the Virgin Mary transformed the French town of Lourdes, its script is never less than on-the-nose and its director, studio journeyman Henry King, does little of real interest with it. The most intriguing moment in the first act might be the title card that introduces the film’s star, Jennifer Jones, and announces she is on loan from David O. Selznick, with whom the 23-year-old, married screen saint was having an affair.
Jones is kind of fascinating to watch, though. She moves like a dancer, and despite the countless soft-focus close-ups, her entire performance is in her body. She won an Oscar for her work, which reminds me, oddly enough, of the uproar that greeted Emmanuel Schotté when he was awarded the acting prize at Cannes for L’Humanite (Bruno Dumont, 1999) — two of the cinema’s great holy idiots.
What elevates Bernadette, though, is its interest not so much in the miracles themselves but with their effect on a community. The Church, the State, the Simple Folk, the Gentry, and the Cold Rationality of Science are all personified by an ensemble of brilliant character actors in supporting roles. Lee J. Cobb, Vincent Price, Charles Dingle, Gladys Cooper, and Charles Bickford all show up and give their lines more life and color than the words probably deserve. King, for his part, also opens things up a bit in the second half of the film, organizing space vertically (there are an unusually large number of floors and ceilings visible throughout), which is a nice cinematographic analog both for the social strata of the town and for the heavenly/worldly dichotomy.
The following stills are a series of shots (with an elision between the fifth and six) that represent King at his best. Here, the town has gathered to witness one of Bernadette’s visions, during which Mary tells her to dig in the dirt. I love the artificiality of the rear projection in the third shot, and the final image, in which she’s being led away as a mad woman, is a fairly brilliant summary of the film’s arguments. Note its emphasis on the gendering of power. (The Song of Bernadette was shot by frequent John Ford collaborator Arthur Miller, so I’m wondering how much credit he deserves for the parts of the film I like.)
