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...