The Mission

One of those movies that I had heard about when it was first released but was too young to see in the theater was The Mission. Eventually, it showed up on TCM last year, and so I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it.

The movie starts off in 1758, as a Cardinal Altamirano is writing from Asunción to Rome informing the Vatican of the status of the Guaraní, which had been the subject of some controversy over the preceding several years. The Guaraní are the native people who lived in the region of what is now roughly where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet. The Jesuits, by the time the movie is set becoming a political problem themselves in Europe, had been sent to try to convert the native peoples of South America to Christianity, and set up several rural missions.

Flash back some years, to about 1750. Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is sent from the metropolitan diocese of Asunción out to the jungle after the martyrdom of the previous priest. Irons plays the oboe on his way to the jungle, and that appears to be his saving grace, as the locals seem to be interested in the music. That's what makes Gabriel able to start a bit of a frienship with the locals, as well as set up those missions.

Meanwhile, in the city, Capt. Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) has some problems of his own. He's been hunting for slaves, something the Portuguese don't have a problem with, in the area where Fr. Gabriel is planning on building the mission. That mission would be a haven for the Guaraní, especially since the Spanish don't have slaves the way the Portuguese do. (Indeed, Brazil didn't abolish slavery until 1888.) But more pressing is Mendoza's personal life. He's got a wife, but she doesn't love him. Instead, she loves his brother Felipe (Aidan Quinn in a small role), and that causes Rodgrio to challenge Felipe to a duel in which Rodrigo kills Felipe. Rather than have Rodrigo face the death penalty, Fr. Gabriel is able to get the colonial governor to release Rodrigo to Gabriel's custody as part of Rodrigo's penance; he'll spend his life out at the missions working with the Guaraní, even though they'll be certain to recognize him from his attempts to capture them and sell them into slavery.

Fr. Gabriel and Mendoza work together to try to convert the Guaraní as well as to build for them about as prosperous a life as you could hope for in that part of the world at that time. And indeed, when Altamirano comes to visit, he finds that the missions are doing an exceptionally good job. But there's a catch. Back in Europe, Spain and Portugal have signed a treaty which will result in awarding the section of land on which the missions have been built to Portugal's colony of Brazil. They would be perfectly happy destroying the missions and enslaving the Guaraní. The Spanish don't want this, but they also know that if they try to prevent Portugal from doing this, it's going to set off some serious problems with the Jesuit order, which is already being perceived in Europe as having too much power.

It's clearly going to come to war, although not between Spain and Portugal, but with them ganging up on the Guaraní. Fr. Gabriel and Mendoza don't want to lose the missions, but disagree on how to deal with the colonial powers' plans for the missions.

I have to admit to not knowing all that much about the period of history covered in The Mission before seeing the movie, and apparently there is some fair degree of liberty taken with the history, both conflating events and more starkly delineating between good guys and bad guys. Some of that is always going to be a requirement for a movie, and what results in The Mission is a pretty darn good movie. I'm glad that I finally got the chance to watch it.

The Passover Plot

If I read the calendar correctly, yesterday evening was the first night of Passover. With that in mind, I decided to watch a movie that I'd first read about several years ago, but never got around to watching since I didn't really have any streaming options at the old house. That movie is The Passover Plot.

Pretty much any American of whatever Christian denomination will know the basic history of the Holy Land around Jersulam at the time when Jesus (played here by Zalman King) is said to have lived. Judea and Samaria, along with everywhere else around the Mediterranean Sea, had been taken over by the Romans, who were most decidedly not Jewish. The Jews felt subjugated, with the result that there was a rise in messianic, end-of-days fervor among Jews. Part of the belief was that a new King, descended from King David, would return to save the Jewish people. This would obviously be a threat to Roman authority, so when Jesus (called Yeshua here since the movie was filmed in Israel and produced in part by Golan-Globus) arrives and presents himself as a sort of political dissident, it's no wonder the Romans want to deal with him.

The Passover Plot takes these basics and weaves them into a story that deals a lot more with Jesus as he would have affected the political situation and less with the miracles that believers believed he was performing. British biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield did a lot of research into both the Bible and the history of the era, and came up with some conclusions that lead to the plot of this movie and its mildly controversial thesis.

In this telling, there's the obvious debate we've seen over and over among the oppressed over how much to resist peacefully and how much the resistance should be direct and physical. Yeshua has decided that he would be the peaceful resistance, while his brother Yaocov (Dan Hedaya) would foment the more violent resistance. They still need outside help, however, which is where Judah (Scott Wilson), the 13th apostle who would betray Yeshua, comes in.

But in addition to the resistance, there are also always those who collaborate with the authorities. Pontius Pilate (Donald Pleasance), whom the Romans have sent to quell the Israelites, knows this, which is why he works with the Jewish high priests led by Caiaphas (Hugh Griffith). He knows that once Yeshua has entered Jerusalem and declared himself King, that should give the high priests an opening to have Yeshua declared a blasphemer so that Rome doesn't have to crucify him.

But Yeshua here is extremely calculating, which is really the most controversal thesis of Schonfield's book and this movie. Yeshua as presented here isn't the Son of God, and frankly knows it. He is, however, a canny political operator. Indeed, he's timed his whole entrance into Jerusalem and later betrayal so that he'll be crucified on a Friday morning. By Jewish and Roman law, Jews were not allowed to be crucified over Shabbat. Crucifixion wasn't immediately fatal the way that a conscientious, non-sadistic hangman's noose was. Instead, those crucified suffered until they could no longer hold up their heads, suffocating to death when this closed their airway. (They also weren't nailed to the cross through their palms, as there wasn't enough support in the palms to keep them naied to the cross. The nails actually went through their wrists.) Yeshua has planned to have himself drugged so that it will look to everybody like he's died on the cross, only to make a miraculous recovery once one of his connected supporters is able to get him down from the cross.

It's an interesting, if obviously controversial theory. Nobody knows anything close to what really happened because, as the film informs us in a scrolling text at the end, there are no extant sources from the time that Jesus was actually alive. The Gospels were only written 40-80 years after his crucifixion. I do think it highly likely that there was one (or more likely more than one) man who was the real life inspiraton for the Jesus as resistance figure. As for the miracles, well, I'm not going to get into them here.

Having said all that, it's a bit of a shame that the movie doesn't present any of this material fairly well. The acting is mostly wooden, other than of course Donald Pleasance whom you would never expect to be anything less than over the top, bringing a spark every time Pontius Pilate shows up. And I don't think the script helps much. Perhaps this is material that needs to be told in a more academic tone. But even with all those flaws, The Passover Plot is worth watching and probably deserves to be better known.

The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima

Tomorrow (August 25) in Summer Under the Stars, TCM is honoring Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso, better known by his stage name of Gilbert Roland. One of his movies that I hadn't seen before is The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, airing at 4:00 PM. With that in mind, I recently watched it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

Catholics are probably aware of Fatima becoming one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sights, much like Lourdes in the French Pyrenees did after young Bernadette claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary, something which was also turned into a major Hollywood movie, The Song of Bernadette. Fatima is a village in central Portugal where, in 1917, three children claimed to see a lady they referred to as the Lady of the Rosary, who told them to come back every month, which resulted in thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of Portuguese peasants going to Fatima with the children in the hopes they too could have the vision and be saved by the Virgin Mary's grace, she being the person Catholics pray to when they pray the rosary.

That much I knew, but there's more of a back story to the events in Fatima. In October, 1910, Portugal had a revolution that resulted in the young king being forced to abdicate. The parties who deposed the king were also extremely anti-clerical, in part because the Catholic Church had a lot of influence in the running of the country under the monarchy. (By the same token, the Spanish republicans of the 1930s were also highly anti-clerical, something usually downplayed in most retellings of the Spanish Civil War.) Portuguese rurals were, like a lot of peasants, much stronger believers of Catholicism than the ruling classes, leading to conflict. In the movie, the republican government is clearly portrayed as analogous to Marxists, since the movie was made during the anti-Communist era of the early 1950s; the fact that one of the pronouncements of the Lady of the Rosary had to do with consecrating Russia to the western version of Christ.

One day in May, 1917, young Lucia dos Santos (Susan Whitney) and her cousins Jacinta (Sherry Jackson) and Francisco (Sammy Ogg), had that fateful vision and told their families about it. This caused all sorts of problems since most people weren't going to see a vision, even if they had a lot of faith. But when you add in the fact the the government was trying to suppress the Church, you can imagine how dangerous it would be for the villagers in Fatima to have all those pilgrims coming. The kids, however, keep insisting that they saw the Lady of the Rosary no matter how much pressure the local government officials try to put on them.

As for Gilbert Roland, he plays a completely fictional character, Hugo da Silva, the sort of lovable rogue who shows up a lot in "kids in danger" pictures. He keeps having run-ins with the law, isn't particularly religious. Not out of the sort of anti-clericism the government has, mind you, but since the petty crimes he and the other rough male prisoners commit are usually things the Church would find sinful, how often would you see such men in church? But the kids are so pure, and Hugo is such a good guy at heart, the he eventually helps the kids out, even if he tries to find a way to make a buck off the pilgrims.

Eventually, the kids have one final mass gathering, which results, as it did in real life, in what's known as the Miracle of the Sun, in which many of the pilgrims claimed the sun danced across the sky and not only stopped a cloudburst but dried their clothes impossibly quickly, as well as other similar things. The way it's presented in this movie, however, is faintly ridiculous, leading the movie to have less power then the earlier The Song of Bernadette.

There is a plus, however; the movie has an epilogue showing color documentary footage of the 1951 pilgrimage which was addressed by a papal legate. The film itself won't make anybody believers, but it's certainly an interesting example of an era when Hollywood had much more reverence for religion than it does today.

Doubt

Yet another of the more recent movies I had a chance to DVR during one of the free preview weekends was Doubt. It's going to be on again tomorrow (April 9) at 3:35 PM on 5Star Max, with a couple of airings the following week on various channels within the Cinemax family.

The setting is the autumn of 1964, at St. Nicholas Catholic Church and the attached parochial school in the Bronx. Fr. Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the priest who is relatively new to the parish. But, a lot of the parishioners seem to like him, as do the students at the school, since some of the students are altar boys at Fr. Flynn's Masses and Fr. Flynn also teaches the boys' PE classes.

Meanwhile, it's the nuns who do the teaching at the school. Sr. Aloysius (Meryl Streep), a widow who only took vows after her husband was killed in action in Italy 20 years earlier, is the principal of the school, and she's a pretty strict headmistress, believing in the old traditions of the Church. Now, for those who aren't from a Roman Catholic background, it should be pointed out that 1964 was smack dab in the middle of the Second Vatican Council, which rather drastically changed Church practices, most notably the presentation of the Mass. This wasn't a cut-and-dried matter, and there were traditionals who were very displeased with what was going on.

Changes were also going on in American society in terms of race relations, and the school has its first black student in the Donald Miller, a nice enough kid who's one of the altar boys but is otherwise a bit shy. He's a student in the class of Sr. James (Amy Adams), a much younger teacher who likes both Sr. Aloysius and Fr. Flynn despite the fact that those two have profound differences.

One day, Donald is called from class down to the rectory to talk to Fr. Flynn. Sr. James only sees the aftermath of that conversation, and it gives her some questions that she brings up to Sr. Aloysious so that everything can be straightened out. First, Donald seems extra sullen on getting back to class. Also. Sr. James has seen Fr. Flynn putting a shirt into Donald's locker. Finally, Sr. James claims she smelled alcohol on Donald's breath. I don't know if the children would have gotten any of the sacramental wine at Mass, but it wouldn't have been much, and this meeting wasn't at Mass, so it's a much bigger problem.

After a meeting between the two nuns and Fr. Flynn, and further conversations with Fr. Flynn's superiors, the story everybody is going to stick with is that Donald decided to drink some of the Communion wine, and that Fr. Flynn tried to keep this from becoming public because he knew it would mean being forced to kick Donald out from being an altar boy, which is something he didn't want to do. That seems to satisfy Sr. James, but there's no way on God's green earth that it's going to satisfy Sr. Aloysius, who suspects something much more obvious to viewers in the period the movie was made, but might have been a bit less obvious to the people of 1964.

So it's with that in mind that Sr. Aloysius calls Donald's parents in order to talk with them and find out if they can shed any light on what might have happened. Donald's father isn't able to attend the meeting since it's during working hours, but Donald's mother (Viola Davis) is, and she has some rather surprising revelations for Sr. Aloysius. Mrs. Miller simply wants her son to be able to finish the school year because that means he'll have good prospects of getting into a good high school, which would mean the possibility of college, a huge thing for a family trying to deal with racism and climb the economic ladder.

The movie goes on for another 30 minutes or so, but my ending here isn't meant to gloss over the film's denouement or suggest that it overstays its welcome. Instead, the whole movie deals with doubt. What really happened in the rectory between Fr. Flynn and young Donald? Which of the characters handled things the best? The film lets the viewers judge for themselves, and that's an extremely intelligent thing for the script to do.

The movie is unsurprisingly helped out by extremely good acting, which you'd come to expect given the strong cast. At times, some of them have dialogue to deliver that sounds out of character, however, which is probably the one weakness of the movie. Streep, Hoffman, Adams, and Davis were all nominated for Oscars, although none of them won.

Even though Doubt is firmly rooted in the world of Catholicism, it's also a movie that touches on universal themes. Thanks to the excellent acting, Doubt is a movie that you should definitely see.

The fisherman's shoes

Another movie that I had sitting on my DVR for quite some time is The Shoes of the Fisherman. In order to try to free up some room on my DVR, I recently finally got around to watching it.

Anthony Quinn plays Kiril Lakota, a political prisoner in Siberia who had been the Bishop of Lvov in Ukraine, which from what I understand from a brief look on Wikipedia is part of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church but in communion with Rome. In any case, there are tensions between Communist China and the Soviet Union, so the Premier of the Soviet Union, Kamenev (Laurence Olivier), decides to free Lakota and send him to Rome in order to curry faith with the West. As for the Chinese, their crops are failing and there's the possibility this could lead to war with the Soviet Union over fertile land in southern Siberia.

When Bishop Lakota gets to the Vatican, he's elevated to Cardinal by the elderly pope (Sir John Gielgud), but there's a lot more going on at the Vatican. There's a younger, charismatic priest named Fr. Telemond (Oskar Werner) who has some views about man's relationship to Christ that the Church thinks are somewhat unorthodox. It's a subplot that's not really relevant to the movie other than the fact that it allows Kiril and Fr. Telemond to become friends and show that Kiril is different from the rest of the Vatican hierarchy.

The other big thing that happens is that the current pope finally dies. This means that all of the Cardinals (at least those who haven't reached the age of 80) are brought to Rome not just to attend the funeral, but more importantly for the election of the new Pope. The Cardinals are brought to a special chamber in the Sistine Chapel which is "sealed", and they hold two ballots a day on who should become the next Pope, until somebody gets two-thirds of the votes. If a vote fails to produce a Pope, the ballots are burned with some wet straw (I think nowadays, they also add a chemical to make the color clearer) which produces black smoke; if the ballot is successful, the ballots are burned alone producing white smoke.

In theory, the Cardinals are supposed to put God first, but since they're humans of course there's going to be politicking going on as they may prefer or dislike some particular prelate. Some don't even want the job. In any case, as you can probably guess, the College of Cardinals makes a shocking decision in selecting Cardinal Lakota, who becomes the first non-Italian Pope in over 400 years. (The movie was made 10 years before Cardina Wojtyla was elected and became John Paul II.) The new pope faces problems both within the Vatican and without, the latter being that crisis between the Soviet Union and China that's bubbling up. Pope Kiril decides to try to be mediator.

The plot lines that deal directly with Kiril are the best, as Anthony Quinn is quite good. Unfortunately, the movie is dragged down by two subplots. One, the Fr. Telemond plot, I've already mentioned; the other involves an American journalist, George Faber (David Janssen) who is sent to Rome to cover the conclave. He's got an estranged wife Ruth who is a doctor, but also has a mistress. Pope Kiril meets Dr. Ruth by chance and, one presumes, helps Ruth figure out how to solve her problem. But the rest of that subplot brings the movie to a screeching halt every time it comes up.

In addition to a fine performance from Quinn, there are also good performances from some of the Cardinals who have been in the Vatican too long (Vittorio De Sica and Leo McKern) and have lost touch with the changing outside world as a result. There's also some nice cinematography and use of documentary/newsreel footage. Unfortunately, the subplots make the movie run really long. A two hour movie tightly focused on Kiril and/or probably would have been quite good; The Shoes of the Fisherman, however, sags under its 162-minute running time.

The Song of Bernadette

Er, not that song of Bernadette

One of the movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation a few months back is The Song of Bernadette. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow morning at 3:10 AM (or overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

I have a feeling that the basic story is already reasonably well known. Bernadette Soubirous (Jennifer Jones) is an adolescent girl living with her siblings and poor parents (Anne Revere and Roman Bohnen) in the town of Lourdes in southwest France in the mid-19th century. Bernadette goes with a couple of her sisters to go fetch some firewood, something which requires crossing a creek. Because she's sickly, she has to stay behind while the others cross the creek. It's there that she sees an apparition of a lady that doesn't identify itself.

She doesn't want to tell her sisters, but they saw Bernadette acting strangely when they returned, so they know something's up and get her to tell about the vision, which they promptely report to Mom, Way to keep a secret, girls. And unsurpisingly, word is going to get out to the rest of the town.

Meanwhile, the apparition, which of course only Bernadette can see, has told her to keep coming back to the grotto where she first saw it because the apparition is going to appear again every day for the next 14 days. Bernadette goes, and others start following her.

However, there are people who don't like this, notably the local prosecutor Dutour (Vincent Price). As for the Catholic Church, well, let's just say that figuring out whether something is a miracle is highly political as well as religious. When it comes to a powerful person the Church wants to canonize, such as recent Pope John Paul II, they'll come up with a way to declare the existence of a miracle come hell or high water. But if some dumb schlub like Bernadette claims to see something, the Church is going to drag its heels and try to come up with every possible scientific explanation for the supposed miracle because they don't want the skeptics proving them wrong. And this puts local priest Fr. Peyramale (Charles Bickford) in a bind.

Of course, we know what happened, which is that the Church eventually declared the events miraculous and that Lourdes would go on to become one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites. Bernadette would go on to become a novitiate and die young thanks to her chronic asthma (in the movie, it's changed to a combination of tuberculosis and a tumor that's probably cancerous).

The movie states openly at both the beginning and the end that if you believe, no explanation is necessary, and that if you don't, no explanation is possible. As for the movie, it's clearly on the side of the believer; after all, the movie lets us in on the apparition, which reminded me of the dream sequence in Sparrows. But while the movie is reverent, I didn't find it obnoxiously so.

Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for Best Actress, but to be honest I felt like she didn't have a particularly difficult role to play. Multiple people received supporting acting nominations and frankly they all deserved it. Best among these is Gladys Cooper as Sr. Marie-Thérèse, a local nun teaching Bernadette at the beginning who shows up at the convent at the end. She's clearly deeply envious of Bernadette to the point that I was going to comment on her being a jerk. But she gets her comeuppance at the end of the scene and has a powerful resolution. Bickford and Revere also received nominations.

The Song of Bernadette is a well-made movie in the style of pre-TV era Hollywood biopics, and is certainly worth a watch. The TCM Shop lists it as available on what looks like a dodgy DVD, while Amazon has it available on streaming video.

Gospel Road with different music

If you can set the life of Jesus to country-gospel music, you can set it to almost any genre of music. Rock opera shows up tonight on TCM at 8:00 PM with the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar, which is followed by show tunes with Godspell at 10:00 PM.

The framing story is an interesting one. In New York City of the early 1970s (just before Gerald Ford was telling the city to drop dead), a bunch of people are having problems with their personal lives. One by one, each of them sees a bearded man, who through sheer force of personality gets them to go off with him! It's obviously an allegory to Jesus! Er, no it isn't. It's actually John the Baptist, as we see when he takes all of them to a fountain to have them baptized. This, of course, is where Jesus shows up, wanting to be baptized; at this point Jesus becomes the leader of the new group of believers....

In this telling of the story, it's an excuse for "Jesus" and his "apostles" to go around New York retelling the story of Jesus' life, and singing Broadway show tunes set mostly outside in front of suitably impressive backdrops of various locations in New York: Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grant's Tomb, and even one number shot in part on the World Trade Center which was still under construction at the time.

As with Gospel Road, it's a bit difficult to give a rating to a movie like this: it's much less about the story then it is about the music. That having been said, Godspell, I think, winds up quite a bit better than Gospel Road. It's not because I prefer show tunes to Cash's style of music; in fact I'm not that big a fan of Broadway. However, the "apostles" here have an enthusiasm that fits perfectly with the music, and the framing story is much better, effectively making its point about how God is (or should be, depending on your religious beliefs) relevant in modern day life. It's a statement that's particularly well-made at the very end, after the crucifixion of Jesus. (Oh, I didn't give away the story, did I?)

Godspell is not only available on DVD; you can get any of a large number of versions of the soundtrack on CD.

Easter Parade

Easter is this weekend, which means that the movie channels are once again bringing us Easter-themed movies. Most of them are on Sunday, but the Fox Movie Channel is kicking things off a bit early with The Gospel Road, tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM ET.

There's not much to this movie. Country singer Johnny Cash was also into southern country-style gospel music. So, he went to Israel and filmed a lot of places in the Holy Land that correspond to places in the life of Jesus as set out in the four New Testament Gospels. In addition to this, the story of Jesus' life is told in more or less silent movie format with the "dialog", such as it is, being narration from Johnny Cash himself, as well as him singing any number of gospel songs.

That's about all there is to it. As such, it's a bit problematic to review. It's the sort of movie that I suppose you'll find interesting if you like the sort of music Cash sings here. Country/gospel isn't really my cup of tea, so I personally don't care too much for the film. Still, that's a bit unfair to the movie. The cinematography is nice at times: it's tough to go wrong in Israel, at least not when you're trying to film the ancient bits. And Johnny's wife June plays Mary Magdalene, which is also worth a look. (Jesus, on the other hand, is a blond.) However, there's no new ground broken here. One other plus is that, unlike movies like King of Kings (even the silent version is around two hours) or The Greatest Story Ever Told, this movie tells the life of Jesus in a mercifully brief hour and a half.

The Gospel Road is certainly worth a look, at least for the curiosity value. And if you like the music, you might be happy to know the movie is available on DVD.