Leave it to Golan and Globus to make a Catholic movie.

In 1858, a 14-year old asthmatic and illiterate girl named Bernadette (Bernadette Soubirous) saw a light with a beautiful young woman inside. You may know the miracle by the town she lived in, Lourdes.

Made two years after Alain Cavalier's Thérèse, this Cannon-produced movie was filmed in both English and French. We may never see what she sees, but we come to believe that in the face of unbelievers, including the church, Bernadette must be telling the truth. Director Jean Delannoy's also made a sequel, The Passion of Bernadette, so if this seems to end before the story does, that could be the reason.

This movie plays non-stop in one of the shrines in Lourdes, so it must be pretty faithful. No pun intended.

This movie gets a lot of details right (or almost right) concerning the life of St. Bernadette. Song of Bernadette was beautifully written, but there wasn't as much effort to be accurate. Hence, this movie is great if you want a clearer idea of the life of this saint, and the circumstances she experienced. She is interpreted quite a bit differently from Song of Bernadette: with an emphasis on her human weaknesses to the point of melodrama. The movie received a PG rating because of some strong derogatory language that is aimed at Bernadette by some who were against her. The movie ends with her entrance into the convent, and the story is picked up in a sequel: The Passion of Bernadette, which I consider to be a better, more focused movie than this one.

When I was in Lourdes, I wanted to see this version, which plays daily at the small movie theatre -- but the theatre had shut down for the season. I finally got to see this on DVD recently. I was aware that the version with Jennifer Jones, "The Song of Bernadette" took quite a few dramatic liberties with the story so I was eager to see how this version compared. The attempt here is to present a more accurate re-telling of both the miracles as well as Bernadette's family life. We don't have the antagonists in this like we do in the original and we don't have much of the dramatic conflicts that drive the original so as a narrative, this doesn't work as well, but the story is told with beauty and simplicity. The settings far more accurately represent what Lourdes really looked like too. I think this is well worth watching for anyone interested in Lourdes.