Watch The Miracle Woman For Free

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Barbara Stanwck really lets loose with her frustration and anger in this film's opening scene, as only she could. As she rails at the congregation from a pulpit, a reverend stands in the crowd and implores her to remember she's in the house of God. "What God? Who's God? Yours? This isn't a house of God! It's a meeting-place for hyporcrites!" she screams in reply.Now, it is a little hard to believe when she then turns around and becomes a hypocrite herself, under the guidance of a con-man played well by Sam Hardy. The scenes of her evangelizing to the masses and over the radio are a little slow at first, but the film grew on me. What really makes it is Stanwyck falling for a blind man (David Manners) who was helped by one of her sermons. The scenes between the two are charming and romantic, including him doing some ventriloquism so that he can have his dummy express his feelings, and her playfully singing "The Farmer in the Dell" in a funny voice and breaking up laughing. That bit is so naturally it seems like we're seeing Stanwyck in her home, impromptu. She also sends him letters made with cut-out, raised letters so he can read them, which I thought was touching. David Manners is reasonably good at playing blind, and seems to get better as the film goes on, keeping up with Stanwyck. Frank Capra is a great director, and uses interesting camera angles, slow pans to show a character's gaze, and cuts to minor characters making comments about what they (and we) are seeing. He can really put a finger on what touches us, for example, when Manners elaborately prepares himself so that he can pretend he's got his vision back, but Stanwyck eventually sees through him. Capra also builds to dramatic moments towards the end, though he's unfortunately heavy-handed in the expressions of 'true faith'. I'm not a big fan of that, but for me, the film is a love story, and about the miracle of love, more than anything else.

Many of Capra's films point out the nobility of small town America, but here he seems to be doing just the opposite - bringing to light how one small town has just fired their preacher for the unpardonable sin of aging and hired a younger man to replace him without a backwards glance to the consequences to the displaced older man. The old preacher dies dictating his last sermon. We don't see this but we hear it from his daughter Florence played by Barbara Stanwyck. The farewell sermon she gives the parishioners has them walking out - or should I say running - as she calls them murderers, thieves, adulterers, closet drunks - being the preacher's daughter she knows where the bodies are buried and she tells them. A con man is in the congregation for some reason and he says if she wants to get even - and rich - she should run a faith healing con on this same type of small town hypocrite. The world is full of them according to her mentor. The plan works - Florence is as fiery as a fake preacher as she was as a real one and soon the two are rolling in dough with the help of lots of paid fakers. What makes it easy is that the crowd seems to be there for a circus more than a sermon and they do certainly get their money's worth and ask no questions. However, Florence soon has double trouble on her hands. It turns out that her mentor has a darker side than she figured on who keeps her on a very short leash, and then there is the appearance into her life of a man who was blinded in WWI - David Manners as John, a failed songwriter, who claims one of her radio sermons kept him from jumping from his high rise apartment window to his death.What is good about this film? Stanwyck of course. Just a couple of years after sound came into films the lady is fire and ice with the spoken word. Plus even in these early films Capra is visiting the themes of depression, class warfare, suicide, the forgotten man, the power of the individual, and the madness and fickleness of the mob - all which show up in his later efforts.What holds the film back is the rather unexplained relationship between Manners' and Stanwyck's characters. There just doesn't seem to be any reason for them to be together other than that each would be completely alone in the world as far as human comfort goes without the other due to their isolated existences. In spite of that, their relationship and scenes together are believable.Overall, this film does a good job of exploring the fact that for those who lose their faith, it's usually not God that's hard to love but rather the people He created due to their overall indifference towards anything outside of their own little world.

A young – and gorgeous – Barbara Stanwyck steals the film as a fire-and-brimstone evangelist whose initial cynicism at the hypocrisy of the churchgoers who discarded her elderly preacher father for a newer model is eroded by the love of a blind man (David Manners). The story is one that couldn't have been told in the manner it is a couple of years later when the code was enforced, which is partly why the film is so fascinating: so few pre-code films are broadcast on TV these days – the vast majority of films shown on TV today are no more than 20 years old – that they are intriguing to watch to discover why the censors got so worked up about them.The film is a bit talky in parts, especially in the scenes shared by Manners and Stanwyck, but the subject matter is strong enough to overcome these moments. Capra's work is assured and the script is good. While the film may not appeal to a modern audience, it stands as a fine example of superior studio product from Hollywood's golden age.

This was another example of why the Hays Code was put in as anti-religious movies were on the increase, along with everything else you see and hear in films today. Here we see a minister and followers (both mainstream and charismatic) made to look stupid and corrupt. Over 70 years later, Hollywood still thinks that's the only kind worth showing on screen. (Do you see good ones, like Billy Graham, ever on film?)Supposedly, this story was based on a real-life female preacher named Aimee Semple McPherson. In the film, we first see a man who dies while writing his last sermon. He had been booted out of his church because he was too old and they wanted a younger man. The daughter (Semple, played by Barbara Stanwyck) goes up to the pulpit, starts to read the partial sermon, then tells what happened to her father and tells off the congregation, calling them all kinds of names. That part, frankly, was very dramatic and interesting to watch.But then the film starts to get carried away with its agenda of a fake evangelist. A huckster, who happened by when Florence "Faith" Falon (Stanwyck), talks the bitter woman into getting back at people by using her biblical knowledge to be an evangelist, earn a lot of money and bilk the public with fake healing and the like. She does just that.She gives sermons at her "Faith Temple" that are so New Age and unlike anything you would really hear - whether she was faking it or not - that it's an insult for anyone who knows what sermons sound like. They also make the people in the audience so corny and so unlike anyone that would attend a service that it, too, is ludicrous.Only non-church goers would believe the stuff in this movie.Note: before the film began, a disclaimer was put on screen with a quote from the book of Matthew warning people to beware of "false prophets." Well, I agree, false prophets have always been with all and always will be, but I also warn people to be aware of false propaganda they see in movies! Like those false teachers, don't believe everything you see on screen.