Yesterday I watched on TCM the movie, All This and Heaven Too. You can read a summary of the plot HERE.
A kind of subplot and very subtle was the difference between the Catholic clergy and religious in France during the time of a monarchy and a Protestant minister, with no identified denomination. Catholics are portrayed as being preoccupied by sexual sins, even if only of the heart, and not other things just as if not more serious. The Protestant minister is portrayed as human, loving, caring and very compassionate and normal. He’s a likable guy because he is human.
The duchess in the movie, is a very horrible person, wife and mother. Yet, due to her royal status and wealth, she has a personal chaplain, a priest, who is portrayed as aloof, supportive of the duchess although he sees what a poor mother and wife she is, and very judgmental of the “nanny” played by Bette Davis who has won the heart of the poor husband of the duchess.
Nuns run the prison in France where the nanny eventually ends up. They are not portrayed as very human, but in a very subtle way.
While these presentations may well be caricatures, most of us who knew religious and clergy prior to Vatican II can say that the lack of pastoral outreach and warmth was often the case with some but not all clergy and religious.
On the other hand, we knew that Protestant clergy were very pastoral, with the people and identified with them like the Protestant minister in the movie, who has a small part but is truly concerned about the nanny and what is happening to her.
The title of the movie, “All This and Heaven Too” comes from a line that the Protestant minister makes in the movie when he says life does not have to be a penance only as a prelude to heaven but that heaven could be lived on earth too.
In the movie, it is not clear if the Bette Davis character is Catholic or not, but she lives her life as a penance and in no way is guilty of adultery or enticing the husband, other than she is kind to his children. But the Catholics around her, from the duchess, to the priest to the Catholic system of justice at that period demonize her as stealing the affection of the Boyer character away from his horrible wife.
The movie based on a book seems to be showing, as a back story, the heresy of Jansenism in Catholicism in France of that period. It is a rigid puritanical approach to sex and enjoying what life has to offer as a taste of heaven on earth.
The duchess who is murdered by her husband who in a fit of insane rage in reaction to her provocations, played by Charles Boyer, is held up by her priest chaplain as a person of virtue who had to endure the affair of the heart her husband was having with the nanny. His affair of the heart is considered the worst of sins not the duchess who drives her husband to kill her because her cold, calculating manner of life and who is a cold wife and terrible mother.
4 comments:
But...two thumbs up? One?
With only a few notable exceptions, the French nobility was notorious for its sexual intrigues and infidelity, followed swiftly by the bourgeoisie in aping the nobility, and cannot help but tie Jansenism to it as both a moral and political reaction to that corruption, and same with more minor protestant groups. Religion and politics were inextricably bound in Europe, most any political problem/conflict was religious, and most any religious problem/conflict was political.
I give the movie a two thumbs up for acting, sets and the realistic feel of a period movie. My only critique is the length of the movie. Some scenes with the children could have been shortened. In this case, less would have been more.
As for realism, imagine a French court summer ball, ballroom lit by candles, heavy quilted clothing, everyone heavily powdered and perfumed, and them all bathing once a year whether they needed it or not....good thing it was on television and not smellevision.
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