Joan Carroll is persuasive as a child who understands more than she can put right. We value her restraint, though The Bells of St. Mary's makes her serve a lesson when she deserves a fuller character.
Fi1m perspective
As Patsy Gallagher in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Joan Carroll plays a child's unhappiness without making a display of it. Patsy has separated parents, and Carroll treats the resulting distress as something worth attending to. We rate the care in her performance, although Leo McCarey's film is too ready to turn the girl into a lesson in patience. Her restraint is useful in a film so fond of reassurance. It gives us a reason to worry about someone.
Her earlier parts allowed for more liveliness. In Primrose Path (1940), she played Honeybell, Ginger Rogers' younger sister, before taking the lead in two RKO comedies with Ruth Warrick: Obliging Young Lady (1942) and Petticoat Larceny (1943). The latter cast her as a radio star going undercover, a premise with more to offer a child actor than the usual demand to look appealing. By Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), where she played Agnes Smith, she was taking supporting parts in ensembles. These parts make useful context for Patsy: Carroll could be lively as well as sensitive, and solemnity was not her only resource.
What suits her is the child who has something to deal with beyond being a child. Younger sisters and children under family strain recur in her work, and her unaffected manner keeps them from becoming exercises in cuteness. That quality helps Patsy, but it cannot repair the writing around her. We felt smothered by the kindness in The Bells of St. Mary's, because the film repeatedly treats waiting patiently and singing a hymn as sufficient answers to people's difficulties. Carroll's careful work makes the thinness of her story more noticeable.
Ingrid Bergman carries much of the film, and Carroll is not given enough to change that balance. The limitation matters when choosing where to begin with her: Patsy shows how seriously she takes a child's feelings, but offers little opportunity for the liveliness of her comedy work. It was effectively her last substantial film part, which makes it tempting to ask the performance to explain too much. See it for Bergman, but do not overlook the girl being asked to wait so patiently.
Biography
Joan Carroll (born Joan Marie Felt) was an American child actress. She was born on 18 January 1931 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and began her career in the late 1930s after training at the Fanchon and Marco Dancing School in Hollywood. She appeared in supporting roles in films including Tower of London (1939) and Primrose Path (1940), in which she played Ginger Rogers's younger sister.
Carroll gained wider recognition for her roles as Agnes Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Patsy Gallagher in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945). In 1940 she became the first child star from Hollywood to take a leading role in a Broadway musical, appearing in Panama Hattie. She retired from acting after 1950 and died on 16 November 2016 in Mexico.
