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On succeeding evenings, the Voice is heard again at the same hour. It speculates on the need for 40 days & nights of rain—and a token cloudburst follows. It chides unbelievers and laggards: "Create for yourselves the miracles of kindness and goodness and peace. You are like children going to school. You have forgotten some of your lessons. I ask you to do your homework for tomorrow."
Skeptical and annoyed at first, Joe grows panicky, goes off on a binge, almost succumbs to "the voice of evil," personified in a badly played scene by a talkative bar fly. He comes home drunk and shocks his son into running away. But after remorse sets in, he regains his son and his faith in time for a happy ending: with the family wreathed in a glow of good will as the second baby arrives, and the world's churches filled to overflowing, the Voice is still.
Many of the film's good points are curiously bound up with its faults. By some elaborately contrived plotting, the Charles Schnee script has taste enough never to allow the voice of God to be heard on the sound track (though it cannot avoid letting the actors quote Him at second hand). It also sensibly refrains from letting the radio pronouncements touch off a spree of miracles. While trying to pave the way to heaven with good, nonsectarian intentions, it winds up as a naive theological hodgepodge, finally flattens its concept of God into a fuzzy, sentimental pantheism.
Other mortal weaknesses: some of the picture's homely details of lower middle-class life are theatrical and patronizing; William Wellman's uneven direction is inclined to be sticky; Actor Whitmore mars an otherwise good performance with a few grotesque excesses. As unmixed blessings, Next Voice offers a fine, attractive piece of well-balanced acting by Nancy Davis and the most refreshingly frank, unaffected view of pregnancy yet shown by Hollywood. Vulnerable as it is, the movie is largely successful, on its own terms: a low common denominator of emotional appeal.
* On a low-budget ($475,000), short (14 days) shooting schedule that almost passes for a miracle itself at a studio traditionally geared to costly, timeconsuming, star-studded production.