Cary Grant Patches Lives and Steals Hearts in The Bishop's Wife

I was in high school when The Preacher's Wife hit theaters. Though I'd wanted to see it back then, I didn't get around to it until this year. My mom, meanwhile, had been hearing good things about The Bishop's Wife, on which the former is based, so once I kicked off my Christmas movie watching with the angelic Denzel, I figured I might as well move on to Cary Grant.

The Bishop's Wife is directed by Henry Koster and written by Leonardo Bercovici and Robert Sherwood. The first major difference between the two movies is that this 1948 film is in black and white, a condition I always find gravely disappointing, but if the movie is engaging enough it stops bugging me after a little while. This one is. The second significant difference is that while every major character in The Preacher's Wife is black, every major character in this movie is white.

It's a very different sort of setting, and David Niven, as Bishop Henry Brougham, has a decidedly aristocratic air. He's English, detached from his family and lives in a mansion, where he is attended by servants, one of whom is played by Elsa Lanchester, who I know as sourpuss nanny Katie Nana in Mary Poppins. So when Dudley (Grant) shows up with his little bag of angelic tricks to help Henry get control over his life, I couldn't help but think this movie has as much in common with Mary Poppins as with The Preacher's Wife.

I found Loretta Young more engaging than Whitney Houston in the role of the wife, Julia, who supports her husband's ministry but is beginning to feel neglected. She's a warm, passionate woman, and her vivacity increases in Dudley's presence. In this original version, Dudley has always been an angel, an entirely different order of being from humans, and he's been averting calamities for centuries. He's hobnobbed with ancient royalty, but he's never before become so entranced by a woman that he actually wishes he could stop being an angel. It comes to that in this movie, and Julia is the one who must ultimately decide the course of Dudley's future.

The plot is pretty similar overall. In both films, Henry is pressured by someone very wealthy to agree to the building of an opulent cathedral. In this case, it's elderly Mrs. Hamilton (Gladys Cooper), who seems cold as ice but whose past hides a private pain that Dudley is uniquely qualified to unlock. He oversteps his bounds a bit by taking Julia to a restaurant of great importance to her and her husband and spends an idyllic evening ice skating with her in the park.

Because this Dudley is an angel in a truer sense of the word than Washington's Dudley, he does a lot more than change just the Bishop. He has a profound impact on several minor characters who don't have counterparts in the remake, including world-weary cabbie Sylvester (James Gleason) and atheistic history professor Wutheridge (Monty Woolley). Of course, because he's Cary Grant, he has a different sort of impact on every woman he meets. All the swooning gets a little silly after a while. And I get the impression that these ladies were not acting.

It's hard to say which of the two films I liked better, as there were aspects of each that I preferred. While I would much rather watch The Bishop's Wife in color, the movie is vibrant enough to make up for it, much like its contemporary, It's a Wonderful Life. While Bishop Henry is no George Bailey, we want his life to turn around, and it sure is fun to see just how that happens.