Miracle, The (1959) (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Irving RapperRelease Date(s)
1959 (November 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Warner Bros. (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: C
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
Dramatically, Irving Rapper’s The Miracle (1959) is pretty bad, but Warner Archive’s video transfer of this Technirama production looks outstanding, and the film is not without interesting scenes here and there, and the production values are lush on this largely forgotten religious epic.
Loosely based on the Max Reinhardt-directed 1911 pantomime play, itself filmed in 1912, a remake had been bouncing around at Warner Bros. since the late 1920s, at one point considered as a vehicle for Bette Davis. In 1958 it was revived for the Cinemiracle process, the three-camera system nearly identical to three-panel Cinerama and used with great success on Windjammer (1958), one of the best travelogues of its kind. This was abandoned for the still-impressive Technirama process, basically high-resolution VistaVision made wider with anamorphic lenses. However, watching The Miracle, it’s pretty clear Frank Butler’s screenplay was written with Cinemiracle in mind. Though ostensibly a religious epic, it also features the Battle of Waterloo, a bullfighting sequence, and even singing-dancing (and now politically incorrect) gypsies, all of which were the kind of spectacle one expected in the Cinerama/Cinemiracle films.
Set in Spain circa 1812, the film follows Teresa (Carroll Baker), a postulant at the convent of Miraflores in Salamanca. (One of the other postulants in played by an uncredited Madlyn Rhue.) Exasperating many of the nuns, Teresa steals candles in order to read secular novels and plays like Romeo and Juliet in bed, talks devotedly to a statue of the Virgin Mary, falls in love with Michael Stuart (an impressively tanned Roger Moore), a handsome British soldier, and she sings endlessly, including Greensleeves, which plays a big part in Baker’s How the West Was Won a few years later. How do you solve a problem like Teresa?
Eventually, Teresa runs off after Michael in a storm to marry him, leaving the convent and her “best friend” the Virgin Mary statue behind and, in the film’s best scene, the statue comes to life, steps off its pedestal, and takes Teresa’s form and place at the convent, the nun’s surprised by the Virgin Mary’s/Teresa’s devotion and unaware of her mortal absence.
Of course, this is only a temporary fix, foreshadowing Teresa’s terrible time outside the convent and inevitable return. She’s forced into a life of pickpocketing at a gypsy camp, Michael is presumed dead, Goya paints her portrait (she doesn’t like it) and all her future would-be lovers all meet some tragic fate, as if Teresa was cursed.
The picture is a mishmash of then-popular movie genres—religious epics like The Ten Commandments but more particularly smaller-scale faith films like The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952), historical epics such as Désirée (1954), and the aforementioned Cinerama/Cinemiracle travelogues. Clearly, Warner Bros. had no idea at all how to sell it; posters promised a generic he-man-type action film.
It was an unhappy production, with director rapper verbally abusive toward both Baker and Moore, Rapper particularly unhappy with Baker, cast without his consent. She’s undeniably beautiful and her performance is nonetheless a committed one, but the dialogue throughout is dreadful. When she arrives at a town the French forces are burning to the ground, she frantically asks a passerby, “What’s happening?” The reply: “The French are burning the town!” Moore, unhappily under contract to Warner Bros., fares better; he’s able to exert a little of his pre-Saint/James Bond charm.
Inane as the dialogue is, the burning of that town is pretty epic, as is much of the film, credible as Spain and France on backlot streets and big, impressive sets filmed at the Warner ranch in Calabasas. Its healthy but not huge $3.5 million budget—equal to that same year’s The Nun’s Story—is up there on the screen throughout. The movie’s Battle of Waterloo is hardly on the scale of Bondarchuk’s Soviet epics, but projected on a big home theater screen it’s still pretty darn impressive.
Technirama (and its successor, Super Technirama 70) exposed 35mm tall negative eight perforations (sprocket holes) wide, running through the camera horizontally, like 35mm still camera film rather than standard motion picture film (35mm wide, four perforations tall). This effectively exposed twice the amount of negative real estate, resulting in an image much sharper than standard 35mm releases. The main difference between VistaVision and Technirama was the addition of an anamorphic lenses rendering 2.35:1 wide theatrical prints.
Back in the 1950s, the vast majority of Technirama titles were released as standard 35mm ‘scope prints, but today companies like Warner Bros. can go back to the original horizontal negative and create eye-boggling video masters of incredible clarity and outstanding color. The greatly enhanced picture quality, relative to, say, a 1959 CinemaScope title, is the main draw for a mostly dreary picture like The Miracle. The script may be complete junk, but it sure is fun to look at. The eye wanders and one notices amusing little tidbits, like during a ballroom dancing scene how comically horrible actor Torin Thatcher’s (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) dancing is, like a malfunctioning robot. (Thatcher plays the Duke of Wellington).
Originally released with Technicolor prints, Warner Archive has done an equally outstanding job here. One can especially admire the optical effects; the film has a number of matte shots seamlessly done. Reds and other primary colors really “pop,” even though the costume design is a little ridiculous at times: at one point, Baker wears a dress that’s something like Mrs. Santa Claus at a whorehouse and, in a later scene, her matador lover wears a bright pink traje de luces more appropriate to Siegfried and Roy. The DTS-HD Master Audio may be 2.0 mono, but it’s very good for what it is, enhancing Elmer Bernstein’s score, for one thing. The disc is Region-Free.
The unimaginative extras are limited to a trailer and two Bugs Bunny cartoons, both in high def: Bonanza Bunny and Hare-abian Nights.
Recommended way more for its video transfer and visual sumptuous than the movie itself, The Miracle is a bit of a slog dramatically, but it sure is pretty to look at.
- Stuart Galbraith IV