The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)

Directed by Leo McCarey. Starring Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, Henry Travers, Ruth Donnelly, Joan Carroll, Martha Sleeper, William Gargan, Dickie Tyler, Rhys Williams, Una O’Connor.

Long before the continuing sagas of The Godfather and The Lord of the Rings, The Bells of St. Mary’s became the first sequel to earn a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards, acting as a follow-up to the trivial winner from the year before, Going My Way. Bing Crosby returns as genteel but unorthodox Father O’Malley, now assigned to administer an inner city Catholic school run by nuns, one of whom, Sister Mary (Bergman), doesn’t see eye-to-eye with his laidback leniency. They butt heads, but being as gently wholesome and banal as Going My Way was, it’s the kind of battling the Brady Bunch would sleep through. Suffers from many of the same faults as its predecessor—gentility as reverence, pallid and easily-resolved conflicts/dilemmas, an unblemished lead character whose easygoing tolerance is treated as saintly, etc.—and while it moseys along at slightly friskier pace, and a few episodes hold fleeting interest, it stumbles with a blander cohort (Bergman’s nun vs. Barry Fitzgerald’s priest) and a lack of tunes to hold a candle to “Swinging on a Star” or Crosby’s rendition of “Silent Night”. Director McCarey again earned story and producing credits.

43/100