One afternoon in 1967, I went to see Bedazzled with a friend of mine. We thought it was funny, and when it was over, my friend said he was glad that the Supreme Court had ruled that blasphemy in the movies was protected by the First Amendment.  I didn’t know that at the time, but given what we had just seen, I knew he must have been right.

Years later, I read Obscene, Indecent, Immoral, and Offensive:  100+ Years of Censored, Banned, and Controversial Films by Stephen Tropiano.  From this book I learned that in the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), the Supreme Court ruled—in a 9-0 decision—that motion pictures are not protected speech.  Writing on behalf of the court, Justice McKenna said that motion pictures merely represent visually stuff that is already available in books and newspapers.  As a result, they do not warrant protection under the First Amendment.  Furthermore, he went on to say, the power and attractiveness of such visual representations make them “capable of evil.”

In 1948, Roberto Rossellini produced Il Miracola (The Miracle).  As it is only forty-one minutes long, it was originally paired with another movie, La Voce Umana (The Human Voice), and titled L’Amore (Love).  According to Tropiano, audiences in Italy found the movie to be boring, and the Vatican expressed only a mild objection to it.  When it debuted in America in 1950, however, religious authorities were outraged.  Cardinal Spellman objected to the sacrilegious nature of this movie as something Satan himself might have produced.  Efforts to ban this movie reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in Burstyn v. Wilson (1952)—also in a 9-0 decision—that movies were indeed protected speech by virtue of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, thereby overturning the Mutual decision.

From the summary of The Miracle, I wondered why such a fuss had been made.  It was about a simpleminded woman who lets a stranger get her drunk, have sex with her, and get her pregnant.  She thinks the man is St. Joseph and that her pregnancy is by the grace of God.  The people in her village mock her, thinking she is ridiculous.

I decided to watch the movie myself to see what the big deal was all about, but that proved to be something of a challenge. I was finally able to watch it on ok.ru.  This is not the first time this Russian website has allowed me to see a movie not available elsewhere.

Anna Magnani plays Nanni, and Federico Fellini plays the Vagabond.  Nanni is up in the mountains shepherding some goats when the Vagabond passes by.  As soon as she sees him, she says, “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”  She believes the Vagabond to be St. Joseph, saying she knew he would come, how beautiful he is, how she worships him.  In other words, she has been caught up in this obsession with St. Joseph for some time, and all that was needed was for a good-looking guy to walk by and flesh out her delusion.  She wants him to give her his grace and take her to Heaven with him.

Apparently, she has already been telling people in the village that she has had visions of St. Joseph, and they have been telling her she is crazy, saying, “Mad people can’t go to Heaven.”  She says that a voice she heard, which she took to be Joseph, told her to jump off a cliff, but fortunately she realized it was just the devil pretending to be Joseph, wanting her to kill herself so she would not go to Heaven.  But if she does start to fall, she says to the Vagabond that he will take her hand, and together they will fly through the air.

As she rambles on like this, I can see why this movie is paired with The Human Voice.  In that movie, the entire thing is about a woman, played by Anna Magnani, talking to her lover on the telephone, who apparently is breaking up with her.  Just as we hear only her side of the conversation, so too in this part of The Miracle do we hear only Nanni talking, with the Vagabond remaining silent, while continually giving her wine to drink.

As she goes on talking, it becomes clear that her fantasies are sexual in nature.  In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud says dreams of falling or flying have sexual significance.  Even if one is not a Freudian, psychoanalysis was all the rage when this movie was made, and Rossellini clearly assumed that the audience would make that association.

She lies down and unbuttons her dress while speaking of Heaven, her hand going underneath, touching her breasts, feeling her own sweat.  She speaks of how she might have gotten married, but in that case, she says, “I wouldn’t be able to come with you.”

The original language of this movie is Italian, so I can’t be sure about this expression, but the English translation is peculiar, because that is not what you would normally say to someone sitting beside you.  One might say, “I will go with you,” or “You will come with me,” but “I will come with you” would be strange, unless, of course, the word “come” is being used to mean “have an orgasm.”

She quotes part of Matthew 1:20:  “Joseph, son of David, be not afraid to take Mary as your wife because that which is conceived in her…”  She does not finish the quotation, which continues, “is of the Holy Ghost.”  In addition to assuming that the Vagabond is Joseph, she is identifying with the Virgin Mary, but she is suppressing the part about the Holy Ghost. She does this to avoid making a distinction between St. Joseph and the Holy Ghost.

Jesus is the Son of God.  Now, if the Bible said that Yahweh impregnated Mary, that would force us to imagine Yahweh and Mary having sex.  So, the author of Matthew availed himself of the idea of God as pure spirit in order to avoid such imagery.  Nanni wants to have sex with the Vagabond, thinking him to be Joseph, but if he is just Joseph, that would be nothing more than having sex with a man.  On the other hand, the Holy Ghost, all by itself, would not be able to satisfy her lust.  So, she combines Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, with the Holy Ghost, the real father.  In that way, having sex with the Vagabond can be experienced as having sex with God.

She continues:  “My St. Joseph.  Throw away my body and take my soul.  Throw it away without any clothes on.” Shortly after that, the screen goes dark. Presumably, they have sex, after which she falls asleep.

When she wakes up, she descends the mountain with her goats, and at the bottom, she runs into Brother Raffaele, who is a monk.  She asks him, “Tell me, saints can appear to us, can’t they.”

He assures her they can, saying, “I always see the Madonna.  She appears whenever she wishes.”

Nanni asks if she is pretty, and Raffaele says, “She’s beautiful.”

So, like Nanni, he sees a saint of the opposite sex, and just as Nanni thought Joseph was handsome, he thinks the Madonna is beautiful.  We cannot help but suppose that, like Nanni, he has sexual fantasies with his own favorite saint.

At this point, another monk shows up.  He is a bit more realistic, saying in his twenty years at the monastery, he has never had a vision or seen a miracle.  Brother Raffaele says he is crazy, and Nanni becomes angry.

What follows is a strange scene.  Nanni is in church.  She steals an apple from another woman’s basket and then goes outside and eats it.  All I can figure is that this is an allusion to the original sin, provided we assume some common misconceptions.  Biblically speaking, the forbidden fruit was not specified as being an apple, though it is often identified as such.  Furthermore, a lot of people think that the sin in question was sexual.  But that cannot be because the Bible makes it clear that Adam and Eve were married, and there is nothing sinful about a married couple having sex.  Nevertheless, the apple has come to represent the forbidden fruit of sex.  So, Nanni is being associated with Eve. The apparent implication might seem to be that her having sex with the Vagabond was sinful, and indeed, that is the attitude of the people in her village when they find out she is pregnant. In defending this movie, however, Rossellini refers to Nanni as a “demented woman” who deserves our pity, rather than as a sinful woman who deserves our condemnation.

Nanni’s pregnancy would be scandalous enough given that she is not married, but since she insists that her pregnancy is a miracle, brought about through the grace of God, people make fun of her.  Because she identifies with the Virgin Mary, we can only imagine what would have happened had Joseph not married Mary and made an honest woman out of her, so to speak.  That is, imagine if Mary had remained single and had gone around telling people that she was great with child because the Holy Ghost had come upon her.

Nanni is mercilessly ridiculed by people as she walks down the street. They throw stuff at her, and someone puts a washing basin on her head, which reminded me of the crown of thorns put on the head of Jesus on his way to being crucified. Just as I was thinking that this might all be in my imagination, Nanni says, “My God, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” which is essentially what Jesus says in Luke 23:34.

In addition to suggesting that the real Virgin Mary was, like Nanni, delusional, or rather that the entire thing was made up, and that people in general are foolish to believe in such stories, this movie also says that the message of Christianity, which is all about love, charity, and forgiveness, is a fraud and that the Christians in her village are cruel hypocrites.

In the end, Nanni climbs up to a church at the top of a mountain, so high up that I couldn’t help but wonder who would go there.  And, indeed, it is deserted.  It is there that she has her baby.  The End.

According to Tropiano, Cardinal Spellman inspired protests to chants of, “This is the kind of picture Communists want.” And Martin Quigley, who worked closely with Joseph Breen, the man in charge of enforcing the Production Code, argued that this movie was part of a Communist conspiracy to destroy religion.

Maybe that’s why it was only on that Russian website that I was able to see this movie.