Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

It’s Day 16 of ‘Bradley’s Basement’s Advent Calendar 2024.

Here’s the sixteenth Christmas recommendation by me on ‘Bradley’s Basement’.

This is a Christmas film that I first saw at the cinema in 2019. ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ was released in 1947. It stars Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven. I didn’t anticipate that I would like this film so much, but it’s something my parents and I enjoyed watching.

We tend to watch this film every year, ever since I purchased the DVD of it in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. And that’s something that’s considered a positive from that year, as ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ helped us to brave through a trying year, especially at Christmas. 🙂

There are echoes of ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ featured in the film, particularly with Cary Grant playing a guardian angel character helping David Niven as a troubled bishop trying to get the funds for a new cathedral. Of course, ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ was a film released in 1946.

People are bound to remember ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ more than ‘The Bishop’s Wife’. But ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ is certainly worth checking out, and it’s very nice how the Christian messages about Christmas are put across in this film compared to other Christmas films.

It’s nice to see the film in its black-and-white form. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t a colour version of the film like there has been for ‘It’s Wonderful Life’ and ‘Holiday Inn’. ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ doesn’t need to be in colour. It feels more Christmassy in black-and-white.

Thanks for reading!

Check out what Day 16 of my ‘Bradley’s Basement’s Advent Calendars for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 were about!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂