MIRACLE IN THE RAIN: look past the leads to find the real star

There's not much to recommend this 1956 World War Two-based weepie from Warner Bros.
Certainly not the sappy performances by its stars Jane Wyman and Van Johnson, and definitely not the tedious story or lifeless black and white photography.

The only reason to suffer through this dragged out tale of love, loss and longing is to marvel at the wonders actress Eileen Heckart achieves with the typically thankless role of the heroine's best friend.
According to the ABC of Hollywood romance/drama/rom-com storytelling the sole responsibility of the heroine's best friend is to make the heroine look good. Sure, she can provide a shoulder to cry on when the romance goes wrong and she might even be the purveyor of nuggets of wisdom which get that romance back on track, but she can only land a fella for herself once the heroine's fixed up, and she must never NEVER be more attractive than the female lead.
It's not kind of role many actresses aspire to. Not just because it doesn't say much about your looks but also because there's also not a whole lot of scope to stretch one's acting chops. The best friend is there to loyally back-up the star and ensure her on-screen life builds to a bed of roses, while hers - more often than not - remains a bed of rose thorns.
Heckart grabbed my attention because she transcends these cliches and expectations to create in Grace Ullman a three dimensional living and breathing character that I actually cared about and empathised with. 
Yes, Grace is there to encourage and support friend and work colleague Ruth Wood (Wyman) in her budding romance with soldier on leave Art Hugenon (Johnson), but we're also given a real sense that she also has a life and dreams of her own. Grace lives alone and would like to be in a relationship but she isn't living her life vicariously through Ruth and Art.
When Ruth brings her along for moral support on her first date with Art, there's no sense of Grace being the intrusive, unwanted third wheel. Socially she's considerably more adept than Wyman's awkward over-age spinster and contributes enormously to the success of that first night.One senses that without Grace's participation Art would have scared off the timid Ruth with his overbearing good nature and relentless chatter.

But the moment that absolutely confirmed to me that I was watching a great actress at work (and in her film debut no less!) occurs an hour and 13 minutes in, when Grace finds a despondent Ruth moping in Central Park over her lost love. Wyman is the one weeping, emoting and wringing her hands, but Heckart was the one I couldn't keep my eyes off of as she offers just the right amount of consolation and reassurance, while only hinting at the pain she's experienced in her own life. It's understated, real and deeply moving, and on checking out her bio on imdb afterwards I wasn't surprised to learn that she went on to pick up numerous acting nominations and awards later in her career including - in 1972 - the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
The saccharine storyline may play havoc with your blood sugar level, but if you want to watch a great character actress at work, it's worth the discomfort. What Heckart achieves is the real miracle of MIRACLE IN THE RAIN.

HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE: the only victim here is the viewer

In his prime few could best Bob Hope in the delivery of a joke. His timing was impeccable even if the material was often corny. By 1969, when HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE was released, he'd slowed to the speed of an arthritic snail on sedatives and the gags were even worse.
They're as creaky as the knee and hip joints of Hope and his co-star Jane Wyman.
This film really had no business being made.

It's an embarrassment to everyone involved and it's difficult to discern just who the intended audience was.
It's clearly not the nation's groovy swinging youth who are relentlessly mocked and demeaned as gullible, simple-minded and vacuous, and it hardly paints a positive picture of the older generation either, the parents who were apparently so disapproving of the lifestyle of their teenage offspring.
Hope and Wyman are an old married couple who run out of patience for each other's annoying habits and decide to divorce. But their plans are interrupted by the unexpected arrival home of their angelic daughter Nancy (JoAnna Cameron) with fiance David (a very young Tim Matheson) in tow.  She wants to get married right away and live a life as full of love as her parents. Not wanting to shatter her illusions they conceal their divorce from her, but she finds out at the altar and decides to live 'in sin' with David instead.
I know this is going on a bit but I'm trying to keep it as short as possible so please stick with me.
They join a band, The Comfortable Chairs, managed by David's huckster father Oliver (Jackie Gleason), and when Nancy becomes pregnant they decide to give the baby up for adoption. Her appalled - and divorced - parents reunite under a fake name to adopt the baby and raise it until their daughter comes to her senses.
Hilarity ensues.
Actually it doesn't.

Hope has abandoned the earlier egotistical coward persona which had proved so successful in the 1930s and 40s and replaced it with a bland, self satisfied, corporate-America complacency which offers nothing to laugh at or engage with. He's just another wealthy Beverly Hills suit who's traded in his 'old' wife for a blonde, busty younger model, and is now going through the motions of life at a severely reduced speed.

Gleason substitutes bluster and noise for actual humour, while Wyman displays a shocking lack of talent for comedy but an impressive ability to look even older than Hope despite being 14 years younger. The only real laughs come from a trained chimpanzee inserted into the story for no good reason other than director Norman Panama needed to pad out the running time by an extra 15 minutes.
Dated even when it was made, HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE is tired, tiresome and pointless. It drags on like an over-long, unnecessarily elaborate and spectacularly unfunny sitcom and effectively ended the big screen careers of both Hope and Wyman. On the evidence of this film they must have wished they'd firmed up their cinematic retirement plans a little earlier.