Anthony Balducci's Journal: My Mom's Favorite Actress

I once asked my mother, "Who was your favorite film actress when you were growing up?" I was almost certain that she would say, "Bette Davis, of course!" My mother loves to see Davis lugging about buckets of angst in Dark Victory (1939), The Great Lie (1941) and Now, Voyager (1942). She knows those films forward, backwards, and sideways. But my mom told me that her favorite actress was Jane Wyman. She said that Wyman was good at playing ordinary women. These were characters with which my mother could easily identify. I started bringing Wyman films to my mother's house and watching them with her. My mother openly cried watching Wyman in Miracle in the Rain (1956). I had never before seen my mother burst out in tears watching a film. Davis would have wrung the melodrama out of the role, but Wyman made the role painfully real. Miracle in the Rain is a beautiful film about love, faith and spirituality.

Miracle in the Rain is a film that could never be made in today's Hollywood, which is obsessed with CGI fakery, grotesque imagery, political propaganda, twisted philosophies, and empty notions about humanity.