Two nuns arrive in 'Bethlehem' on a snowy night. They approach a stable, and find inside the Christmas Day scene being enacted... until one of the kids kicks another one in the shins and breaks it up. It's a good beginning. The nuns are Loretta Young and Celeste Holm, and the lady painter who lives in the barn is Elsa Lanchester. The nuns are on a mission to build a church, which they approach in quite a strong-arm fashion, commandeering their neighbour's jeep (Hugh Marlowe, a Fox regular), shaming gangster Thomas Gomez into giving them land, bulldozing the local church council, and billeting a dozen French nuns on the locals. And they don't actually get the church built, so it sort of fizzles out a bit. The neighbour turns against them all of a plot sudden, which is a bit annoying, but overall it's good fun, enhanced by people like Dooley Wilson and Mike Mazurki.
Sequence of nun playing fast tennis is somewhat batty.
Photographed by Joe Lashelle, with one of those religio-choral Hollywood scores by Cyril Mockridge.
Steady with that Chateau D'Yquem 1929!
Young had a Catholic upbringing, disapproved of excessive drinking and swearing - you can guess how all that went down when she worked with Mitchum on Rachel and the Stranger (1948)...
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