--- title: "One Foot in Heaven" year: 1941 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/one-foot-in-heaven" fi1m_score: 74 critics_reviews: 2 published: "2026-09-20T00:33:24.729060+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T00:33:42.543324+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # One Foot in Heaven (1941) Directed by Irving Rapper · 1h 48m · MPA NR · Drama **Fi1m score: 74** · Critics: 2 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Forty years of leaking parsonages, and the Lord provides while the congregation mostly does not > Irving Rapper’s film about a Methodist minister’s working life is mild, episodic and slow to get going, and Fredric March holds it together with a performance that never once asks to be admired. The last forty minutes pay for the first sixty. ## Synopsis Stratford, Ontario, 1904. William Spence (Fredric March), a medical student, tells his fiancée Hope Morris Spence (Martha Scott) that he has felt a call to the Methodist ministry and is giving up medicine. Her father, John E. Morris (Ernest Cossart), takes this badly. They marry and the church sends them to a first parish in Iowa, where the parsonage roof leaks and the salary depends on what the congregation feels like giving. The bishop moves the family from one town to the next; children arrive, among them Hartzell (Frankie Thomas), and each parsonage seems worse than the last. Spence wants a congregation that will follow him and, eventually, a church worth preaching in. In the way stand the comfortable citizens of each town, who prefer their minister grateful. ## Review Irving Rapper’s film is taken from Hartzell Spence’s memoir of his father, a Methodist minister who spent his working life in small Iowa parishes, and it has the shape of a memoir rather than a plot. William Spence (Fredric March) gives up medicine in 1904 to preach, marries Hope Morris Spence (Martha Scott), and goes wherever the church sends him. The film follows them from one draughty parsonage to the next over some thirty years. Nothing is at stake beyond a roof, a salary and a congregation’s good opinion, and the film is content with that. So, for the most part, were we. March plays Spence as a man who is certain of God and rather less certain of people, and who knows it. He is stubborn, vain about his sermons, quick to take offence and quicker to laugh at himself once he has calmed down. The performance is built out of small things: the way he bargains with a board of trustees, the way he pauses in a doorway before delivering bad news to his wife. He is never pious in the way film clergymen usually are. He is a working man whose work happens to be souls, and he complains about the pay like anyone else. The scene most people remember, and rightly, has Spence learn that his son has been to the picture house, march down to see the William S. Hart western for himself so he can condemn it properly, and find a story about honour and sacrifice that he could have preached on a Sunday. We laughed at March leaning forward in his seat with his hat forgotten in his lap, and then something else caught. The film understands that a man can be surprised by his own pleasure and be improved by it, and it does not make a fuss about saying so. Charles Rosher shoots the parsonages in flat interior light, kitchen tables and bare walls, so that each move looks like a demotion; the churches get the only soft light in the film. Max Steiner builds the score out of hymn tunes and keeps it under the dialogue for long stretches, which is not how Steiner usually behaved, and the restraint suits him. Milo Anderson tracks the decades in Hope’s dresses, from high collars to dropped waists, and it is often the only way you know time has moved. That is because Warren Low’s cutting carries the years by dissolve and caption, and here is the fault. The first half wanders. Whole stretches of the family’s life go by in a title card while a quarrel over a stove gets ten minutes it does not need. Martha Scott has the harder job. Hope is asked to give up a settled life and then to give up every home she makes, and Scott plays her without martyrdom, one sharp look at a new kitchen doing the work of a speech. Beulah Bondi, as Lydia Sandow, a widow who takes against the new minister on sight, is the film’s best evidence that not every parishioner is a saint. Gene Lockhart and Laura Hope Crews, as the Thurstons, are the moneyed couple whose approval a small church cannot do without, and Lockhart makes Preston Thurston’s smile carry a great deal. Harry Davenport, as Elias Samson, gets less time than we wanted. The last forty minutes are where the film finds its purpose, in a fight over a new church building and a piece of gossip that puts the family in front of the whole town. We will not describe how either turns out. What we can say is that a passage near the end moved us more than we expected from a film this gentle, because by then we had lived in enough of those bare rooms to know what a proper church would cost, and who would pay. It is a sermon, and it knows it. Everyone in it is fundamentally decent and even the gossips come round, so if you want your films about faith to have doubt in them, look elsewhere. But it is a sermon delivered by an actor who never raises his voice, and at 108 minutes it does not overstay. Watch it on a Sunday afternoon, which is the time of day it seems to have been made for. The first hour will test you a little and the last will pay you back. *Fi1m score 74, published 20 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (2) - **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (85/100, inferred): The critic praises it as a beautifully balanced and richly human account of a minister's life and faith, calling it a fine and brilliant picture that is a rich experience. March and Scott's performances under Rapper's direction are singled out for infusing the characters with warm and sentient life. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1941/11/14/archives/one-foot-in-heaven-a-fine-and-human-story-of-a-ministers-life-at.html) - **Variety** (**): The critic calls it a warm and human preachment for godliness based on the best-seller biography of a Methodist minister. The main faults noted are slowness in the first half and skipping over certain years, with most dramatic impact in the final section. [Read](https://variety.com/1940/film/reviews/one-foot-in-heaven-1200413526/) ## Details - **Director:** Irving Rapper - **Director:** Irving Rapper - **Writer:** Casey Robinson, Hartzell Spence - **Cinematography:** Charles Rosher - **Editor:** Warren Low - **Music:** Max Steiner - **Costume design:** Milo Anderson - **Producer:** Irving Rapper - **Cast:** Fredric March as William Spence; Martha Scott as Hope Morris Spence; Beulah Bondi as Lydia Sandow; Gene Lockhart as Preston Thurston; Elisabeth Fraser as Eileen Spence at Age 17; Harry Davenport as Elias Samson; Laura Hope Crews as Mrs. Preston Thurston; Grant Mitchell as Clayton Potter - **Runtime:** 1h 48m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 1 November 1941 - **Genres:** Drama ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1942: Best Picture (nominated) ## If you liked this - *I Remember Mama* (1948): Another family getting by on very little, told with the same patience and better pacing - *Diary of a Country Priest* (1951): Bresson’s parish priest has all the doubt Spence never does, and it is harrowing - *Ordet* (1955), Fi1m 86: Dreyer’s Danish farm family argues about faith until something happens that ends the argument — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/ordet.md) - *Tender Mercies* (1983): Robert Duvall, a Texas motel and a baptism; the quietest film about grace we know - *Calvary* (2014), Fi1m 81: A good priest in a bad Irish town, and the congregation is the problem — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/calvary.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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