Ice Skating Scene (Cary Grant & Loretta Young) - The Bishop’s Wife (youtube link)
Posted on 12/23/2023 3:06:47 PM PST by Twotone
The years immediately after World War Two did not turn on a dime into the long decade of postwar prosperity in America and the West. There were labour problems, political battles, the problem of turning soldiers back into civilians and a war economy back into a peacetime one. And there was the vast social unease and trauma after a war that confirmed that we were capable of anything, including the worst things imaginable.
My previous Christmas movie columns have been romances alternating with comedy or drama – pictures like Holiday Affair (1949) and Remember the Night (1940), where the holidays provide a setting and a set of peculiar obstacles in the way of two people falling in love. This year's Christmas pick is a much more high-minded affair, from those uneasy postwar years.
The Bishop's Wife premiered in New York City at the end of 1947 and went into general release in February of the new year. It was nominated for five Oscars including best picture, director, film editing and score, and won for best sound recording. It was the film Cary Grant made between The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and was remade in 1996 as The Preacher's Wife with Denzel Washington in Grant's role.
The film begins in a city – not a big, recognizable one like New York or Chicago but some mid-sized one, probably Midwestern. (Exteriors were filmed in Minneapolis.) The camera picks out Grant wandering through soundstage holiday shopping crowds covered with soap flake snow, admiring the Christmas windows that were once a major attraction on any main street where the big department stores were located.
Our eye will always follow Cary Grant, and we get a sense that he has some special quality besides the good looks...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
In Kentucky the bourbon that evaporates from the barrel over the years of aging is called “The angels share”
A fine movie...
-PJ
Monty Wooley steals the show.
Watch movie here.
Our favorite Christmas movie.
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