One Foot in Heaven (1941)

(On Cable TV, November 2019) An almost wholly unremarkable film, One Foot in Heaven probably gets most of its viewers these days because it was once nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (alongside Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon … but it was a ten-nominee slate that didn’t even include Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve). Much of the film’s episodic structure revolves around a preacher and his family going from town to town, restoring ailing parishes to normalcy before moving again. The topic is ideal to pay respect to a religious leader, with tensions within the family being addressed through an extra helping of faith. Fredric March plays the protagonist in a script adapted from the preacher’s son’s autobiography. It mostly innocuous—while focused around a preacher, the film isn’t particularly insistent on religious matters, offering to viewers the choice to read the film with a secular perspective as a case study in a nomadic figure. From today’s perspective, the film offers a glimpse into a much simpler time where films were aimed at unsophisticated small-town Americans, carried on a light use of the cross and much appeal to all-American values (even if the subject of the biography was born and raised in Canada). It’s hard to get excited one way or the other about One Foot in Heaven—it’s dull but not bad, taking up obvious homilies but not really getting anywhere good with them. Remnants of thankfully extinct social mores carry through—such as the portrait of a man in a loving marriage who nonetheless doesn’t really care about what his wife thinks (in addition of calling her “mother”). The Best Picture nomination is a further piece of evidence allowing us to assess the esteem through which moviegoers (or at least the Academy) regarded the admittedly competent result. But don’t worry—future generations will openly scoff at some of today’s nominees.