The Miracle Woman is perhaps the first American commercial feature film to deal intelligently with the less savory aspects of popular evangelism, showing it as a secularized merchandising of life and hope at the hands of ruthless opportunists….

[The] film carries another implication more specifically pertinent to its immediate cultural and social context: Fallon's message of salvation on earth carries a special significance for the disadvantaged of Depression America. Her adherents, which include tenement families, middle-class citizens, and disabled veterans of the Great War, are a cross-section of those most desperately in need of hope and promise amidst a society plunged into economic chaos. The Miracle Woman, like so many other films of the 1929–1934 period, seems preoccupied with examining the nature and methods of those pretending to lead society out of financial, political, and spiritual troubles. Like Gabriel over the White House, Duck Soup, and Diplomaniacs, to cite just a few examples, it presents an ambiguous, if not overtly troubled portrait of the leaders of the times. Through The Miracle Woman we realize that not only were contemporary political and military issues in question, but those of the popular spiritual guides as well. (p. 293)

The film elaborately reveals the rigged aspects of Fallon's Temple. It is packed with shills planted into the audience by Hornsby to come forward to attest to Sister's healing powers. (p. 300)

Miraculously, the fakery in the film operates on a charming and whimsical level also, especially in the scenes between Fallon and her new-found love, the blind John Carson. Putting it bluntly, their courtship is itself one shill after another. (p. 302)

Consistent with her own preachments, her redemption is not one of religion so much as it is of love. What she really had been lacking all along was, apparently, the love of a man. From the beginning she had been isolated, with only the curt and surly relationship with Hornsby. It was as if her own religion of hoaxes was exacting its own peculiar kind of celibacy. But with John she achieved the traditional fulfillment of frustrations commonly ascribed to be the basis of activism among females of the day….

From the opening sermon to the spectacular fire to the final shot, Capra achieves a carefully balanced variety of tones and textures. The opening and closing shots, for example, are quiet, statically lit, Fallon's garb simple and severe. In between, a more dynamic interplay of light and texture prevails. Her second sermon is a spectacular baroque play of spotlights, flying flower petals, and shimmering, almost transparent white robes halating in the light. (p. 303)

Capra knows that the key to our acceptance of this potentially disagreeable character lies in this variability. He shrewdly manipulates the ambivalence. At the same time she is conning the suckers in the Temple, we are gasping at her transformed beauty. Even before her confession to Carson, she is uncomfortable with her chicanery….

We come away from her with the same kind of confusion felt toward her fictional and real life counterparts like Sister Falconer, Sister Aimee, the Reverend Dylks, and the like. Is she really a fake or not? Every time she tries to tell the truth her listeners, at the beginning and the end, flee from her. Even when she confesses to John, he too refuses to listen. It is striking that the truth always falls upon deaf ears, that only when she speaks her diluted version of the Gospel do her listeners flock to her. They will believe only what they are ready to believe, and in a setting appropriate to that: not the drab severity of a rustic church and the words of a dry, pinched woman, but the glittering panoply of a Temple and the Hallelujah's of an entranced goddess; not denunciations but praises; not damnation but hope. (p. 304)

In her blend of fraud and sincerity, glamor and seduction, Fallon is emblematic of the kind of leader Depression audiences were so willing to respond to. A politics was preferred that, like her religious message, was wiped free of "denominational" affiliations and thereby free to make a basic appeal to everyone. So much the better if the message was itself devoid of specific tenets, principles, and applications—its very ambiguity would strike a response in its auditors. Capra would carry this thematic material into the overtly political arena ten years later with Meet John Doe, when Long John Willoughby would appeal to an audience of a world poised upon the brink of another kind of catastrophe. If Florence Fallon could be called a religious figure turned secular prophet, Long John is a secular figure turned Messiah. Both are the agents, however unwillingly, of good works. Ironically, in each case it is the audience that has to reassure the prophet—Carson affirms that to Fallon, and the "John Doe's" plead the same case to Willoughby as he stands on the skyscraper balcony.

It is typical of Capra and the times that the final answer lies with the listeners and not with the prophet. In the case of The Miracle Woman Fallon's chief auditor is the blind John Carson—emblematic of the confusion felt by the masses in the early thirties. Because he is blind, he tells Fallon, he is free to invent his own world. Fallon was merely the core around which those fancies were wrapped. That was all that was needed in a leader. And perhaps it was enough. (pp. 306-07)