One Foot in Heaven (Warner). They have just put the "old preacher" on the morning local when the Rev. William Spence (Fredric March) and his pretty bride (Martha Scott) arrive to take over their first parish. To the ardent young pastor, brimful of Methodism, the whistle-stop town of Laketon, Iowa (circa 1904) looks ripe for good works. To his comfortably nurtured, loving wife, its rutted streets, clapboard buildings, grass-roots manners seem as meager as her husband's yearly salary ($385).
Thus do the Brothers Warner introduce their cinema version of Author Hartzell Spence's biography of his father (One Foot in Heaven). It is a notable adaptation. The lively, humane, very worldly doings of Parson Spence have been transferred to celluloid with intelligence and charm; for the first time Hollywood has created a U.S. pastor with marrow in his bones. Human and humorous, Heaven is a bracing pastor's-eye-view of the Midwest U.S. of two wars ago.
First lesson the parson's wife learns is that the parsonage belongs to the ladies of the congregation. She cannot so much as remove a boar's head from the living-room wall without causing talk. Nor can she wear fine clothes; that would be unseemly, might mortify the good ladies. As her children grow up, their problems multiply hers. Says her teen-age son: "The worst part [of] being a minister's son [is] it ruins my technique with women." His sister has the same trouble in reverse.
The pastor himself soon discovers that "poor as church mice" is an apt description. When the family larder is down to non-subsistive proportions, he writes a sermon on the five loaves and two fishes, in the desperate hope that someone in the congregation will be bright enough to take the hint and invite the family to dinner. He visits the marriage-license bureau, hoping to turn an honest wedding fee (generally $2).
No prude, the parson wisely reinterprets the Methodist Discipline to fit changing times. Discovering that his son has been to a movie (forbidden), he takes him to another, to point out what there is in the picture that is bad for him to see. The picture (a 24-year-old William S. Hart film, The Silent Man) so thoroughly wows the pastor that he uses the movie as a text for his Sunday sermon.
Unbelievers who do not see the show may doubt that Heaven's closing sequence (Pastor Spence playing The Church's One Foundation on his new church's new carillon for the hymning townfolk in the street below) has the kick of a Missouri mule. But it has.
Heaven is a happy joining of an honest, gusty book, a corking good script (Casey Robinson), slick production (Robert Lord) and direction (Irving Rapper), with a big and superior cast. It also has the one essential ingredient it had to have: the right man to play Pastor Spence. Backed up by the superbly restrained performance of delicate, big-eyed Martha Scott, Fredric March poses, postures, struts his Shakespearean dignity to his heart's sweet content. It is a first-rate job—possibly because in many a good minister there is a forgivable touch of theatrics.