8 / 10
Official trailer
The Bishop’s Wife is Henry Koster’s 1947 American Christmas fantasy depicting an Episcopal bishop who prays for help raising money for a new cathedral and receives a visiting angel named Dudley, who arrives to assist with the bishop’s spiritual problems instead of his fundraising ones. Cary Grant plays Dudley. David Niven plays Bishop Henry Brougham. Loretta Young plays Julia Brougham. Monty Woolley plays Professor Wutheridge. James Gleason plays Sylvester. Gladys Cooper plays Mrs. Hamilton. Robert E. Sherwood and Leonardo Bercovici wrote the screenplay from Robert Nathan’s 1928 novel.
Samuel Goldwyn produced and RKO distributed the film. That was released in December 1947 to capitalize on the Christmas season. Few Christmas films charm me the way this one does. Grant and Niven play off each other beautifully, and the film justifies its sentiment. My reservation is that the stretch of Dudley escorting Julia around town goes on longer than it needs to, and Loretta Young is given more to react to than to do.
The film’s central reversal is its most daring choice.
The Bishop expects an angel will help him raise cathedral money. Dudley arrives and spends almost no time on fundraising. Instead Dudley becomes Julia’s escort, taking her ice skating and lunch shopping and to her old friend’s home, while Henry watches with growing jealousy. The film is technically about answered prayers, but the answer isn’t what the petitioner asked for.
Koster’s direction holds the romantic-triangle implications without ever resolving them into the affair the structure flirts with, and Grant’s performance as Dudley does the impossible work of being charming enough that Henry’s jealousy is plausible while remaining sufficiently angelic that the romance never quite materializes.
Cary Grant as Dudley
Grant was originally cast as the Bishop. Goldwyn switched him to Dudley three weeks into production, and the decision is the film’s foundation. Grant’s Dudley works somewhere between flirtation and chastity, charming Julia while never committing to anything that would justify Henry’s worst suspicions. I can’t picture anyone else walking that line, and I love watching him do it.
Grant’s typical romantic-comedy charm is subtly altered for the role. Dudley doesn’t pursue. Dudley assists, observes, anticipates needs, and gently moves people toward better versions of themselves. The performance shows Grant’s range better than many of his more famous romantic roles do.
For Writers
Charm calibrated for ambiguity is harder than charm calibrated for romance. Grant’s Dudley succeeds because the audience can’t tell whether he’s in love with Julia or merely loving her in some larger way.
David Niven as the Bishop
Niven’s Bishop Brougham is the film’s emotional center despite Grant’s higher billing. The role requires Niven to portray a clergyman whose obsession with construction has separated him from his wife and his parish, and whose prayers have been answered in a way that exposes everything he’s lost. Niven plays the diminishment with real pain.
The Christmas Eve sermon, written for him by Dudley while Henry slept, gives Niven the film’s finest scene. Niven delivers the sermon as a man who knows he’s delivering someone else’s words about himself, and recognizes the words are true. The performance makes the film’s spiritual claim better than any other element.
The sermon is the scene that lifts this film to an 8 for me. Niven’s face as he reads words he knows are about him moves me more than any bit of angelic trickery the film could have staged.
For Writers
Spiritual material works on film when actors play recognition instead of revelation. Niven plays the sermon as a man already changed instead of a man being changed.
The Production Switch
The film’s troubled production is part of its history. Goldwyn began with William A. Seiter directing, fired him after a few weeks, brought in Henry Koster, and replaced Niven with Grant in the Bishop role before reversing that decision and giving Grant the Dudley part instead. The reshoots cost Goldwyn considerably and the final film bears no visible scars of the process.
Robert E. Sherwood, the screenwriter, was a former Roosevelt speechwriter and three-time Pulitzer winner. The screenplay’s quality and the production’s recovery from chaos depend considerably on Sherwood’s structural work. That gave Koster a sturdy template to assemble from after the personnel changes. Knowing how messy the production was makes me like the finished film more. I’d never guess from the screen that anybody had been fired, and I give Sherwood most of the credit for that.
For Writers
Production rescues depend on screenplay quality. Reshoots can’t save a weak screenplay. A strong screenplay can survive major cast and director changes if the rest of the work serves the script.
Craft Note
Koster was a German émigré who had directed Deanna Durbin’s early Universal musicals before moving to higher-profile assignments at Goldwyn and Fox. His direction here’s warm without being cloying, sentimental without being saccharine. Hugo Friedhofer composed the score. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards and won one, Best Sound Recording. It was remade as The Preacher’s Wife in 1996 with Denzel Washington in the Dudley role and Whitney Houston as the wife.
Does The Bishop’s Wife still hold up?
The Bishop’s Wife gets its 8 from me for its three central performances and the real spiritual seriousness Sherwood’s screenplay brings to material that could have been merely whimsical. It loses a little in the middle, where the outings with Julia run long, and that’s the reservation keeping it below a 9. The 1996 remake has a fine Whitney Houston performance and little else, and the original remains the version to revisit.
