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,…
There must be a factory somewhere producing films that attack the Catholic Church exclusively. The amount of them seems relentless at times. Shiny modern liberal Ireland seems so lacking in confidence that it has to keep hammering home the message. The latest iteration was Pray for Our Sinners (RTÉ One, Wednesday) an authored documentary by…
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:…
Nationwide (RTÉ One, Saturday) featured a special programme on St Oliver Plunkett to mark the 400th anniversary of his birth. Presented by Colm Flynn, it was a concise but comprehensive overview of his life and death. We heard from Fr Mark Mohan, Parish Priest of Oldcastle Co. Meath, home of the Plunkett family – a…
Last week I wrote about Will Hays, Fr Daniel Lord and the formation of the Production Code Administration (PCA). This prohibited the release of films deemed anathema to a Catholic ethos in early Hollywood. I mentioned the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal. Some years before, there was the drug death of Wallace Reid and the murder of…
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan