THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (Henry King, 1943)

There is one compelling aspect of Henry King’s long film of Catholic convert Franz Werfel’s popular novel The Song of Bernadette. This is its portrait of the mass frenzy and greedy exploitation that the peasant girl Bernadette’s claim of unusual visions attracts. Otherwise, it is a lax, disjunctive effort rendered all the more ridiculous by its mishmash of accents. Kenneth Branagh can make that sort of thing work. King can’t.
     Many find offensive King’s making concrete the visions of the miniature “Lady” that the impoverished nineteenth-century Lourdes teenager says visit her. (Beauteous Linda Darnell plays the Virgin Mary, the vision of whom is visible only to Bernadette.) How can we doubt her when we ourselves “see” the same thing? King’s literalness in this regard is grotesque. Reasonably, a combination of boredom and hunger probably explains Bernadette’s “visions,” although it is certainly possible that the actual Bernadette was a liar hell-bent on attracting attention. Adolescents can be that way. Moreover, the soap operatic event of an initially imconvinced and hostile nun’s transformation into Bernadette’s most abject supporter is manipulative no matter how strikingly Gladys Cooper plays the “before” and “after.” Touching, however: the scene where convent-headed Bernadette is told by the farm boy who loves her he will never marry.
     Jennifer Jones, enjoying a second whack at stardom after failing to ignite the screen as Phyllis Isley (her real name) in the 1930s, plays Bernadette. Jones won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for this role, although her “acting” is a classic example of someone’s “playing scenes” rather than creating a coherent character. Jones is good in some scenes, not good in others; but these collected scenes do not add up to a character. Only God could connect the dots of Jones’s silly performance.*

* Jones is even worse in at least four films: Love Letters (William Dieterle, 1945), Duel in the Sun (King Vidor et al., 1946), Madame Bovary (Vincente Minnelli, 1949), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, 1956). She is damn good, however, at least twice: Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953), Terminal Station (Vittorio De Sica, 1953).