Change of Habit (1969)

Film: Change of Habit (1969)

Stars: Elvis Presley, Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara McNair, Janet Elliot, Leora Dana, Edward Asner

Director: William A. Graham

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Mary Tyler Moore: click here to learn more about Ms. Moore (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Mary Tyler Moore was an interesting test for Hollywood coming out of The Dick van Dyke Show.  Before Moore, most of the critically-acclaimed actresses of TV comedy had been women who were already well-known in film & radio like Lucille Ball, Donna Reed, & Gracie Allen.  Also, most of the women that were finding success in television were doing so as sitcom mothers, and were therefore older than your average Hollywood leading lady.  But Moore, when Dick van Dyke ended, was only thirty...certainly not an ingenue's age, but considerably to the north of the ages of women like Jane Wyatt & Barbara Billingsley who were getting their big breaks in TV.  As a result, Moore was given a contract with Universal, but despite a series of leading roles, she never got the kind of film fame that, say, Mia Farrow got for leaving Peyton Place at roughly the same time (Farrow being involved in one of the 1960's most sensational celebrity marriages to Frank Sinatra probably helped her cause a bit too).  Moore made a series of forgettable pictures during this time frame, most notably the Oscar-winning hit Thoroughly Modern Millie with Julie Andrews, but by 1969 she was starring in her final leading part for more than a decade on film (thankfully TV still had the role of a lifetime waiting for her), and that movie was one of the oddest imaginable: one where she's a nun, falling in love with an inner-city doctor...played by Elvis Presley.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about three nuns (Moore as Sister Michelle, McNair as Sister Irene, and Elliot as Sister Barbara), who are instructed to go and work as nurses in an inner-city clinic with Dr. John Carpenter (Presley, and yes, that is somehow the character's name if you ever need a good trivia question for a horror fan friend).  They are to do so in plain clothes, and do not tell anyone that they are nuns, which makes some of the neighbors assume that they are a bunch of loose women living together.  John doesn't like them-he thinks they're too "square" and don't understand what it's like being poor and living "in the ghetto" (his hit song is not sung at any point during this movie, but you feel like it's going to be belted out at any moment), but slowly they grow on him, particularly Sister Michelle, who inexplicably (to him) spurns his advances even though she's clearly taken with him.  Eventually, they are called back to the church, with John realizing that he's been pursuing a woman-of-the-veil, but still wants her.  The film ends ambiguously, with Sister Michelle not sure if she will go after John or stay a nun, and goes to pray in a church...where we see John singing gospel music as she solemnly considers her choice.

This is, and I cannot stress this enough, just part of Change of Habit, a movie that's so weird you almost want to like it even if it's terrible.  There's a subplot with a young girl, depicting what may well have been the first onscreen depiction of autism in a Hollywood movie, and McNair's Sister Irene has a whole subplot over whether or not she has betrayed her "Black roots" by becoming a nun in a wealthy Park Avenue parish.  We also have a really disturbing scene late in the picture, where a troubled young man, on the run from the law, attempting to rape Moore, which, I'll be honest-watching Mary Richards in that situation was way too scarring for me & I seriously considered fast forwarding.

All of this is a lot of plot, and none of it is handled well.  The film's sexual and racial politics are clunky, even in 1969, and Presley is actively awful in this picture.  The star persona is still there, but honestly with a bad script and a weak performance, you can tell that he had not learned much about acting in his 31-film career, and this would be his final movie (and the only one where he would play a character with a college degree).  Moore also doesn't know how to adapt to this.  It's hard to imagine watching this, where she's too spunky and doesn't get the material, that she'd have an Oscar nomination and three more Emmys on her resumé within a little over a decade's time.