The New Pictures, Dec. 10, 1945

The Bells of St. Mary’s (RKO-Radio)is Author-Director-Producer Leo McCarey’s Ave-singing sequel to his highly successful and heavily Oscared Going My Way. Bells doesn’t ring with quite as true a pitch. Even with Bing Crosby’s lackadaisical agility, Bells somehow lacks its predecessor’s style and grace. Most important missing ingredient: Barry Fitzgerald. Most important compensations: Ingrid Bergman and a five-year-old friend of McCarey’s named Bobby Dolan.

In Father O’Malley’s (Crosby’s) new parish, Ingrid Bergman is the nun in charge of ‘St. Mary’s Parochial School. Sister Bergman’s school is a firetrap. Rich old Mr. Bogardus (Henry Travers) is putting up an office building next door and wants to have St. Mary’s condemned so that he can use the property for a parking lot. But Sister Bergman and her nuns pray night & day that mean old Mr. Bogardus will see the light and give up his fine new chromium and steel office building to the school. Father Bing is frankly skeptical of the nuns’ childlike faith—until a Hollywood miracle proves him wrong.

None of the good things in the picture has much to do with the story. The best of them is the children’s Nativity play, in which Bobby Dolan, son of the picture’s musical director, doubles in the roles of St. Joseph and narrator. Bobby, catching his breath with a long wheezing intake, says, “Oh—this is Mary and I’m Joseph. And we came to Bethlehem to see if we can have some place—find some place to stay. And that’s all you have to know really.” In the stable, an angel sits on a ladder and wise men and shepherds stand by and wonder as the Christ Child—an 18-month-old— stands up and waves to the audience from a clothesbasket. The play’s “dialogue” was made up by a group of kindergartners after Director McCarey gave them the rough idea. McCarey claims “it was one of the most difficult sequences” he ever directed. But it was worth the trouble.

As Sister Benedict, Ingrid Bergman manages to combine beauty, great good humor and saintly dignity even while swinging a baseball bat. Taking her role seriously, Actress Bergman played it without make-up (with no damage to her good looks), visited parochial schools to see how nuns actually behave, wore ballet slippers under her robes to perfect a gliding step. Bergman fans, delighted that their idol is currently appearing in three hit pictures, will have a hard time choosing a favorite from the nun in Bells, the New Orleans cocotte in Saratoga Trunk and the lady psychiatrist in Spellbound.

Good shots: Bergman teaching a small boy to box; Crosby adding to his singing repertory of Latin with O Sanctissima, and embellishing the nuns’ dingdong chorus of The Bells of St. Mary’s with a low-down “Ring dem bells!”

Yolanda and the Thief (MGM) transforms a slender, wide-eyed little Ludwig Bemelmans fantasy into an overstuffed Technicolor musical. Full of candy-box surrealism and extravagant nonsense, the picture is wasteful in many ways, but most notably in its misuse of Fred Astaire’s talents.

Astaire, now 46, has generally accepted the footloose bachelor roles which allow him to wander about a set until he finds a surface suitable for dancing. This time he is cast as a lovable scamp: an embezzler masquerading as a guardian angel. The plot complications allow him little time for dancing. Most of what there is comes in a pink dream sequence designed for interpretive ballet. His movements in this unfamiliar medium are limited to a cautious shifting of the feet and a waving of the arms. Finally he is ensnared in gauze and virtually immobilized.

The setting is in a country that looks Latin American. The heroine is a beautiful, fabulously rich girl named Yolanda Aquaviva (Lucille Bremer), who lives in a convent and believes in her guardian angel. When she leaves the convent to take care of her endless estates, she goes home on the very train that brings Embezzlers Fred Astaire and Frank Morgan into her country. Astaire scales a garden wall, hears Yolanda praying to her guardian angel to help her out of her embarrassment of riches, and decides to impersonate the angel. Before the inevitable festival scene arrives, the overfed plot gets tangled in its own blue gauze.