The Story of Alexander Graham Bell **** (1939, Don Ameche, Loretta Young, Henry Fonda) – Classic Movie Review 11,355

All four Young sisters appear in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) but it is Don Ameche’s show.

Director Irving Cummings’s 1939 20th Century Fox black and white drama The Story of Alexander Graham Bell [The Modern Miracle] stars Don Ameche in his quintessential acting part, and he eagerly grabs his chance to shine in this entertaining, attractive, sentimental biopic of the inventor of the telephone.

Bell starts trying to invent a means for telegraphing the human voice to help the deaf people he is teaching. Loretta Young plays Mabel Hubbard, the deaf young woman he falls for, while teaching the deaf, and who gets him to put off their intended wedding till the inventions pay off. Henry Fonda plays Bell’s helper, Thomas Watson.

Charles Coburn plays Mabel’s prominent businessman father Gardner Hubbard, who later backs Bell in his scientific work and business ventures.  Loretta Young’s real-life sisters, Sally Blane, Polly Ann Young and Georgiana Young, play her screen sisters, Gertrude Hubbard, Grace Hubbard and Berta Hubbard.

The film’s best moments are in the famous scene where Ameche’s Bell and Fonda’s Watson are trying to find how to send sounds to deaf people by wire, and Bell’s own voice goes over a wire for the first time. His subsequent patent struggles are also well chronicled in the screen story by Ray Harris.

The Story of Alexander Graham Bell is a careful all-round package, with a decent script by Lamar Trotti that sticks to most of the facts and is not too schmaltzy. But it is mainly sustained by the keenness of Ameche’s superb performance.

It was retitled The Modern Miracle for the UK.

Also in the cast are Charles Coburn, Gene Lockhart, Spring Byington, Sally Blane, Bobs Watson, Polly Ann Young, Georgiana Young, Russell Hicks, Paul Stanton, Jonathan Hale, Harry Davenport, Elizabeth Patterson, Charles Trowbridge, and Jan Duggan.

Don Ameche’s brother, Jim Ameche, later played Alexander Graham Bell in The Story of Mankind (1957).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,355

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