OVP: Joan of Arc (1948)

Film: Joan of Arc (1948)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Francis L. Sullivan, J. Carrol Naish, Ward Bond, Shepperd Strudwick, Gene Lockhart, John Emery, Leif Erickson, Cecil Kellaway, Jose Ferrer

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Supporting Actor-Jose Ferrer, Costume Design*, Cinematography*, Film Editing, Art Direction, Score...the film also won an Honorary Award for "distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral statue in the world community," an Oscar producer Walter Wanger refused to pick up in protest of the film missing out in the Best Picture category)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we started our time devoted to Ingrid Bergman with For Whom the Bell Tolls, her first Oscar nomination.  As this series is focused on only films I haven't seen, we're going to skip over some crucial movies in Bergman's filmography today, but I want to give you an idea of where we were at at this point in her career.  By 1948, Bergman was one of the biggest & most celebrated stars in Hollywood.  She'd won her Oscar for 1944's Gaslight, and had massive hits in the form of Spellbound, The Bells of St. Mary's, Saratoga Trunk, and Notorious (two of which were directed by our mascot for the year, Alfred Hitchcock, but we'll talk more about them next week).  Basically, at this point in Bergman's career, she was untouchable-one of the most important stars in Hollywood, and the most beloved.  It made sense, therefore, for her to play a literal saint onscreen in Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc...and it would set up what would become one of the most crushing moments in celebrity worship a few years later when all of this would come crashing down as Bergman endured one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the Golden Age.  We'll get to that in the coming weeks...but first, let's look at Joan of Arc.

(Real Life Doesn't Need Spoiler Alerts) The film is a biopic loosely based on the life of Joan of Arc (Bergman), a teenage girl (Bergman was 33 in the film, playing someone who was 19...and she doesn't look nineteen so this plays as a bit ridiculous, yes) who sees visions of saints that say she must unite France and crown the Dauphin (Ferrer) as the king, uniting him against the British.  She inexplicably does this, using a private conversation with the Dauphin to convince him that he should put his army in her command.  After a series of victories, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII of France, but this comes at a price as he begins to argue with Joan, who thinks it is God's will that she unite France & drive the English out of Burgundy.  When she is captured, Charles does little to help her, and she is sentenced to death, burning at the stake.  It's worth noting that the film starts with Joan canonized (so even if you don't know what's coming, you know history celebrates her), which in 1948 was a fairly recent event-Joan of Arc wasn't canonized until the reign of Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

The film itself is kind of a textbook definition of what the Joan of Arc story is-there's not a lot of differentiation from what we know today, and in many ways this might have been one of the main ways the story infiltrated the American subconscious, particularly for non-Catholic viewers.  As a result, it's historically interesting but the plot reads as routine to a modern audience.  It doesn't help that Bergman is once again playing a sainted character with little variation.  Joan is steadfast & devout, which might make for appropriate conversation in a CCD class, but doesn't work in a two-and-a-half-hour movie.  Joan of Arc is proof once again that the Oscars rarely understood what made Bergman so captivating onscreen.  AMPAS regularly skipped over some of Bergman's most interesting work (Casablanca, Notorious) in favor of pious women who make use of Bergman's gorgeous, rich speaking voice but have little to say with it (not just Joan, but also For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Bells of St. Mary's, Anastasia, and Murder on the Orient Express).

The rest of the nominations are a mix.  The Cinematography, Art Direction, & Costuming are all great.  The lighting is good-we see an evolution from what really made Song of Bernadette sing here to have Bergman shot in a near perfect alabaster, as if some scenes are plucked out of an oil painting, and the set decoration is impressive if not quite differentiated enough to be truly mesmerizing (you're not going to be confused into thinking this isn't a soundstage).  The scoring is run-of-the-mill, which might work in a different year but 1948 had a lot of really excellent music so this just sort of sits there (it's hard to remember even moments after you see the picture).  The editing, well, it's long & repetitive, and it doesn't really know what to do with most of its scenes with men-in-power trying to take Joan down, particularly Ferrer's work as the Dauphin.  Ferrer as an actor is the opposite of Bergman-he generally seemed to overplay his hand, but here he might be a bit too subtle to make his king standout, and I left shocked that they noticed him (this was his screen debut).  There's something there, I'm not going to deny it (it's clear that Ferrer has a plan-of-action with his Dauphin, a weak-willed man of privilege who has no concept of how to be a great leader the way that Joan seems to be able to muster with no training), but a solid intuition below the surface cannot overcome that it just doesn't present onscreen.