Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1947

The Contenders:

The Bishop’s Wife
Crossfire
Gentleman’s Agreement (winner)
Great Expectations
Miracle on 34th Street

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1947

The Contenders:

Henry Koster: The Bishop’s Wife
Edward Dmytryk: Crossfire
George Cukor: A Double Life
Elia Kazan: Gentleman’s Agreement (winner)
David Lean: Great Expectations

Send Me an Angel

Film: The Bishop’s Wife
Format: Turner Classic Movies on big ol’ television.

For the last few years, every time that Christmas has come along, I have considered watching The Bishop’s Wife and have always run out of time, just never getting around to it. With the number of movies I have left on my Oscars lists, it’s unlikely that I’ll have anything left other than movies I can’t find next December, so if I wanted to watch this at a time when it would be topical, it was pretty much now or never. Fortunately, this is exactly the sort of film that gets played on Turner Classic Movies in December, so I recorded one of the instances and watched the film today after a holiday get-together with my family.

It’s easy to put this in the same sort of vague category of Christmas movie as something like It’s a Wonderful Life because there is a strong supernatural component here. Specifically, there’s an angel who shows up and drives the plot. That angel calls himself Dudley (Cary Grant), and he has appeared to assist Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven), who is trying to build a new cathedral. Now, Brougham’s denomination is never stated as far as I know, but he’s clearly not a Catholic bishop because he’s married to Julia (Loretta Young) and they have a daughter named Debby (Karolyn Grimes).