Agreed 100 percent. So much of the content of THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S is so breathtakingly ridiculous that it's completely ripe for satire, especially in Busch's masterful way. Although I suspect that if you had re-watched the movie recently even without ever having seen THE DIVINE SISTER, you still would have had a very bad reaction to it after all these years. Because it's way beyond dated, it seems now that it was always reprehensibly false, manipulative, and insulting to one's intelligence.
I guess my defense for liking the movie when I first came to know it through showings on TV is that I was SO young at the time, but it's hard for me to understand how any adults could ever have stomached in, even in the 1940s. But incredibly, according to Wikipedia, "The film was enormously popular, earning receipts of $8 million in North America during its initial run, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1945 in the USA." |
