Classics in a Christmas Classic: The Bishop’s Wife

Theatrical poster for the American release of The Bishop’s Wife promoting main cast including Monty Woolley’s role

There are endless lists of best-loved Christmas films. Even if Christmas doesn’t feature at all in your culture or interest, simply because these films are repeated every year, time and again, on television and in the cinema, and referenced so often, it would be difficult to be entirely unaware of them. Vintage American classics of the genre range from It’s a Wonderful Life through to The Bishop’s Wife. But the shorthand of ‘Christmas film’, together with a rough idea (perhaps) of the main plot of a specific film, may still conceal unexpected nuggets of greater, or equal, interest, that are far more rarely discussed, and thus far less well-known.

An excellent case in point is The Bishop’s Wife. A conventional paragraph summary would state that this is a classic American black & white Christmas set redemption comedy from 1947 starring Cary Grant and David Niven. It would pretty much say it concerns a much put-upon new bishop, Henry Brougham (played by Niven) desperate to gather the funds for his new Cathedral. The bishop prays for divine guidance, and gets given a meddlesome angel called Dudley (played by Grant) with ideas of his own. The harried bishop soon wishes Dudley would be entirely gone again! It’s extremely funny, and a lovely, heartwarming film in which it all works out in the end. 

But the main plot isn’t the only thing of interest.

Dudley has a bit of a universal effect, shall we say, on everyone else around the bishop too, much to the bishop’s chagrin.  This goes from the bishop’s own wife (Julia) and young daughter, to the household staff, friends, members of the congregation, and beyond. 

One old friend of Julia and Henry’s is Professor Wutheridge (played by Monty Woolley). This highly sympathetic and avuncular supporting character appears throughout the film. He has been saying he’s writing his new greatest history of Rome since Gibbon (whose multi-volume work on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was highly influential) for a good twenty years already.  But, actually, he’s written nothing at all, because he just can’t think of anything new to say in it.  

Naturally, due to Dudley’s intervention, he is presented with a new story and angle on it all to do with Cleopatra VII's visit to Rome and Julius Caesar, and he's off!  Even better, he’s assured that he will finish his book, is supplied with never-ending refreshment, and develops a sudden ability to read texts no one else has been able to translate (so, definitely all your Christmases come together, you may think!). 

Now, there’s no historical basis in the detail of the content of the sub-plot as presented (though Cleopatra is known to have stayed in Rome as guest of Julius Caesar in 46BCE).  But, as very little is actually known of the visit, it makes it an interesting and substantially blank setting to play in, and this is a lot of fun. 

Robert Nathan.  Robert Nathan estate,

There are other interesting things about this sub-plot though. Take the Professor for instance. Now, the Professor wasn’t always a Roman historian at all…  The 1947 film of The Bishop’s Wife is based on the earlier novel, The Bishop’s Wife, from 1928, by Robert Nathan (a prolific American writer). The novel has pretty much the same central plot idea that the film develops, but has a substantially different sensibility, characterisations, and a much smaller cast of characters and settings. 

There’s still Professor Wutheridge as a main supporting character throughout, but here he’s George Herman Wutheridge, Lanyarde, professor of Semitic Languages at the University. This Professor is the author of several books – but they’re all on rites, purifications, and festivals (and they’re also books that no one has actually read). But he’s still very learned, and a source of advice for major characters. Present him with an angel and he’s instantly trying to fact check and elicit the truth on topics of academic debate from a being who was actually around at the time! This version of the Professor is far more expert in the Ancient Near East, Greek, and Biblical sources, though. There’s nothing Roman at all in the novel, and only very tiny mentions of anything Egyptian. It’s also the angel who needs the Professor’s help in the novel, far more than the other way around, as it is in the film, where Dudley’s divine interventions give the Professor a whole new lease of life.

The Professor Wutheridge that Nathan created in his novel had a further afterlife, and one that is rarely mentioned. Professor Wutheridge is one of the three main characters in Nathan’s 1929 novel There Is Another Heaven. In this, three strangers, one of whom is the Professor, meet on the way to heaven, and interact in various ways when they get there, as they seek to come to terms with their new domain. A lot of the Professor’s life and his family feature heavily in this novel.

Now, quite why the Professor was changed for the film of The Bishop’s Wife into a Roman historian I don’t know. The film had a bit of a troubled production history, going through multiple directors, scriptwriters, and additional rewrites. Production was shut down at one point, there were cast changes, sets redone, and role reversals (with Grant and Niven originally down to play the Bishop and the angel respectively, the opposite to what they ultimately played in the film). The film script is substantially different to the novel in multiple regards, with Dudley purposely intervening to change many lives in positive ways, not just that of the Professor.

It's easier to see why the Professor Wutheridge of the novel was such an Ancient Near East referencing scholar. The continuing excavations at Ur (an ancient site in Sumer in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq) throughout most of the 1920s were greatly reported in the press and other media outlets at the time. They attracted a sizeable American interest in proceedings, being a Joint Expedition between The British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. 

The Joint Expedition made many discoveries related to Sumerian civilisation. The 1926 excavations in the newly discovered temple of the Moon Goddess at Ur revealed many objects, including a statue of the goddess Bau. In the novel, the Professor reads a newspaper report of these very finds (which is clearly based on the 1926 press accounts, and which very faithfully replicates their description in almost every detail). Almost every detail, that is – apart from the fact that Bau is said in the novel to sit on a throne supported by angels (reflecting the premise of the plot, the angel supporting mankind, and existing from the earliest times). In reality, on either side of Bau, and under her feet, are geese (Bau being associated with fowl).  This statue of Bau is now in The National Museum of Iraq.

Monty Woolly and Ida Lupino in Life Begins at Eight-Thirty

By the time the film was made (immediately post World War II), with the Ur excavations also completed a good ten years previously, Ur may have been thought not to have an easy recognisability, cachet or appeal, for inclusion. At least, not compared to Rome, Caesar, and Cleopatra. Hence the introduction of a memorable but very quick subplot reliant on preexisting audience familiarity with the characters and subject matter.

Every year I go and see The Bishop’s Wife in the cinema in December.  In recent years I sit there thinking that I really should write something about the film subplot, just to surface it for folk who may appreciate such things, but without giving away the actual content (in hopes I’ve persuaded you to sit back peaceably and watch it!).  And yes, I also naturally take great pleasure in the entirely blink-and-you-miss-it reference to Alexander the Great in Die Hard, another of the all-time great Christmas movies!

If any of the above sounds entertaining or of interest, then The Bishop’s Wife is often shown in various cinemas over Christmas (it’s part of the Christmas programme at the GFT in Glasgow for instance, as is Die Hard) and on television, or you can stream / dvd / blu-ray etc.  It was remade in the mid-1990’s as a film called The Preacher’s Wife starring Whitney Houston and Denzil Washington. This is a substantially different version again from the novel or the 1947 film, but still keeping the central premise. It’s very centred on being a vehicle for Whitney Houston with a lot of her gospel singing throughout it. However, you’ll find no Professor, or any ancient civilisations, referenced in this version…

Select viewing and reading:-

The films

The Bishop’s Wife (1947) Directed by Henry Koster.  [Feature film].  The Samuel Goldwyn Company.

IMDb The Bishop’s Wife.

URL: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039190/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_wr#writer

The Preacher’s Wife (1996) Directed by Penny Marshall.  [Feature film].  Buena Vista International.

IMDb The Preacher’s Wife.  URL:  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117372/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

The novels

Robert Nathan Library (the official website of author Robert Nathan).

URL: https://robertnathanlibrary.com/

Nathan, R. (1928) The Bishop’s Wife. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Nathan, R. (1929) Heaven Is Another Place. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Caesar and Cleopatra VII in Rome in history

Ashton, S-A. (2008) Cleopatra and Egypt.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Walker, S. & Higgs, P. (eds) (2001) Cleopatra of Egypt: From history to myth.  London: The British Museum Press.

The excavations at UR

Ur online: A collaboration between the British Museum and the Penn Museum made possible with the lead support of the Leon Levy Foundation.

URL: http://www.ur-online.org/

Amin, O.S.M. (25 May 2019) Goddess Bau from Ur.  World History Encyclopedia. 

URL: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/10793/goddess-bau-from-ur/

About the Author

Isabel Hood has two lives. One of these is her ancient life, in which she combines Egyptology and Classics. Currently she’s largely engulfed in reams of printout, writing a Masters dissertation on Alexander the Great in Egyptian Literary Tradition. She also edits the Egyptology Scotland society newsletter. In her other life, she works for the NHS in Scotland.