Film, Religion and the First Amendment

There’s been a lot of reflection lately on films with religious themes and the kinds of controversy they’ve generated among filmgoers, critics, clergy and the public. Works such as HAIL MARY (1985), THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988), and DOGMA (1999) have all had re-looks in light of the current controversy over Mel Gibson’s recently released PASSION OF THE CHRIST.

A film that has received almost no attention but which should not be ignored is the 1949 Roberto Rosselini (director). Federico Fellini (screenwriter) allegory THE MIRACLE. This 47-minute film starred Anna Magnani as a simple-minded girl who, one day while tending goats in the Italian hills, beds down with a man whom she believes to be St. Joseph, her patron saint. When she finds herself pregnant and tells local villagers that she is to deliver the Messiah, she is scorned and finally rejected altogether. Alone, she delivers her baby (only heard, not seen) in an empty church.

THE MIRACLE opened in New York City at the Paris Theater on December 12, 1950. Shortly afterwards, Catholic War Veterans picketed the film. The New York State commander of the War Veterans, Edward T. McCaffrey, was also the New York City Commissioner of Licenses, and after viewing the film he declared it “officially and personally blasphemous.”

McCaffrey’s office ordered the Paris Theater to remove the film from its program or risk losing its license. On January 7, 1951, Francis Cardinal Spellman and all his diocesan priests took to the pulpit to read a statement that declared THE MIRACLE “sacrilegious” and “a mockery of our faith.” They said the film should be titled “Woman Further Defamed by Roberto Rosselini,” a reference to Rosselini’s out-of-wedlock affair with Ingrid Bergman during the making of STROMBOLI in 1948.

The Catholic Church of New York maintained that the film ridiculed its belief in miracles. But New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther said the film offered a “vastly compassionate comprehension of the feebleness and loneliness of man.” Others saw the film as yet another pointed statement by post-war Italian directors about institutional insensitivity to human need in times of crisis. The New York Film Critics voted it the Best Foreign Film of 1950.

Despite critical acclaim, on February 16, 1951, the license to exhibit THE MIRACLE was revoked. The legal battle that ensued took 16 months to work its way through the courts, with the primary issue being whether the film was sacrilegious. On May 26, 1952, in Burstyn v. Wilson the justices of the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of THE MIRACLE. It was the first time the court had granted First Amendment protection to a motion picture.

In the precedent case of 1915, Mutual Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court had declared motion picture exhibition to be “a business, pure and simple” that could not be “regarded as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.”

But in the 1952 case, Justice Felix Frankfurter stated in his concurring opinion in support of the plaintiff film company: “[The] fact that motion pictures are a large-scale business conducted for private profit, does not prevent them from being a form of expression whose liberty is safeguarded by the First Amendment.”

THE MIRACLE controversy was a major moment in motion picture history. And given what was going on at the House Un-American Activities Committee-McCarthy investigations of Hollywood, the ruling in favor of the film was a timely protection of future freedom of expression on the American screen.

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.

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