In 1943 in The Song of Bernadette, Jennifer Jones played Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant who claimed to have had a vision of Our Lady in the French village of Lourdes. Charles Bickford was Fr Peyramale, representing the Church’s initial discounting of her claim before the worldwide attention conferred on her resulted in a change…
Last week I wrote about The Keys of the Kingdom. Another 1944 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, explores the other pole of the heaven/hell divide. Telling the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil, it has a moodily atmospheric feel to it. German expressionism meets drawing-room comedy in an excellent…
I recently wrote about the clergy in 1940s films. Gregory Peck played a liberal Scottish priest in Keys of the Kingdom in 1944. The film was based on A.J. Cronin’s 1941 novel centering on the efforts of one Fr Francis Chisholm (Peck) to open people’s eyes to the wider message of the Gospels in China.…
Christy (15A) is an unflinching portrait of a 17-year-old reject from the foster care system struggling to get some stability into his life in a working-class district of North Cork. It oozes authenticity from every pore. You won’t catch anyone acting here. Christy (Daniel Power) is staying with his estranged half brother Shane (Diarmuid Noyes),…
The sexual assault at the centre of Sorry, Baby (15A) is transmitted to us effectively. We see the outside of a house with steps leading up to it in late evening. The bottom floor is lit. We then segue to the house sometime later. The same lights are on but evening has now turned into…
As I indicated last week, producers started taking liberties with the Legion of Decency and the Production Code in the fifties. In 1951 Roberto Rossellini directed The Miracle, a film in which the character of Mary Magdalene is aligned with the Virgin Mary. The Vatican condemned it for profanity. So did the Legion. Cardinal Spellman,…
The influence of the Church in films of the thirties and forties was evident in ones featuring priests working against juvenile delinquency, like Spencer Tracy in Boystown in 1938. Pat O’Brien did likewise as Fr Jerry Connolly in Angels with Dirty Faces, also in 1938. The film was a huge success, exploring the issue of…
The Church’s ‘war’ on Hollywood, which I’ve been writing about in recent weeks, was ratcheted up in the 1930s by Cardinal George Mundelein. One of America’s most influential figures, he urged his congregation to shun films of questionable ethics. As a result, over eight million Catholics took a pledge against watching ‘impurity’ on screen. That…
I recently wrote about the film industry’s problems with the Catholic Church in the early years of the last century. Falling audiences were an associated problem. The Depression almost killed off the industry. After it ended, a bacchanalian atmosphere reigned, leading to material unsuitable for family audiences appearing in a profusion of the works being…
Being July, the silly season, there are many blockbusters as well as sequels and remakes on our screens now. With the children being off school there’s much fare to suit them too, animated features like Smurfs, The Bad Guys 2 and The Girl Who Leapt Through Fire. Scarlet Johansson is the draw for Jurassic World:…