17 Dec The Bishop’s Wife
The Bishop’s Wife, Christmas Classic movie starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven
(1947) Cary Grant stars as an angel who wants to help a Bishop and his wife, played by David Niven and Loretta Young, get their lives back on track. The Bishop is raising funds to build a cathedral and to the dismay of his beautiful wife this project has taken over his life.
The movie was released on December 9, 1947 in New York City just in time for Christmas. Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review the next day reads that it was “very close to being the most enchanting picture of the year.”
No, “The Bishop’s Wife” is not a World War II movie but it has an important World War II connection! When I read in the opening credits that the screenplay was co-written by Robert E. Sherwood, I wondered if that was the same Sherwood who was involved with William Donovan and the OSS.
Yes, it was!
Harvard educated Sherwood was active in Hollywood when William Donovan recruited the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright early on as a propaganda specialist to help put together the COI (Coordinator of Information) which in 1942 became the OSS (Office of Strategic Services.)
During this same period, Sherwood also wrote speeches for President Roosevelt. He and Donovan clashed often and hard. Sherwood tried to turn FDR against the OSS but was not successful in his efforts.
Sherwood worked on two of the WWII movies I have seen: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” and 1946’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay.
In this TCM article you can read about the behind the scenes difficulties with the movie. Sherwood was hired because of his success on “The Best Years of Our Lives” but “Sherwood, whose take on the reality of post-war America was dead-on, was not equipped to handle the lighthearted whimsical narrative concerning a heavenly being sent to mend a shaky mortal marriage.”
Nevertheless, after all was said and done, “The Bishop’s Wife” has lived on as a favorite Christmas Classic for more than sixty years. It was remade in 1966 as “The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. Not the classic as the original is but I read that the soundtrack is the best-selling gospel album of all times.
The Bishop’s Wife on amazon.com
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