The Miracle (Blu-ray)

Intended to catch the same devotional audience that had helped make The Robe such a phenomenal hit, Warner Bros.' long gestating talkie adaptation of Max Reinhardt's 1912 theatrical blockbuster The Miracle had a lot of money thrown at its 1959 big screen incarnation that updated the story from the Medieval to Napoleonic era, but there's more old school Hollywood professionalism than love in it. A notoriously difficult production, with a wildly miscast Carroll Baker constantly at odds with director Irving Rapper, who was in turn constantly making his contempt for her co-star Roger Moore known on the set, and coming after the same producer's version of The Nun's Story had offered a more realistic and hugely successful, both critically and commercially, tale of a nun doubting her faith a few months earlier, it didn't help that it opened on the same week as Ben-Hur to terrible reviews and, while not exactly a disaster, largely faded from public consciousness. (That said, in the days when only a panned and scanned VHS and no legit DVD release were available it received far more requests for a letterboxed remastered release than the studio's more notorious nun movie.)

The story, it must be said, makes more sense as a Medieval mystery play: a postulant nun falls in love with a soldier and, when she leaves the convent to follow him and falls in with a band of gypsies (here led by Walter Slezak and Katina Paxinou), its statue of the Madonna takes her place until a chain of tragedies…

I got this title because I'm a big Carroll Baker fan, and for the Elmer Bernstein music score. It's a rather ludicrous, pious melodrama, but the location photography and production design make it a highly entertaining product of its time. It's too bad it wasn't originally released in stereophonic sound like some of Warner Bros. other Technirama productions.