Cinema: A Priest’s Story

The Cardinal. Producer-Director Otto Preminger has a penchant for grand and explosive themes: the establishment of the Jewish nation in Exodus, Washington politics in Advise and Consent, race in Porgy and Bess. Now he catechizes all the hopes, strains, doubts and pains of Roman Catholicism in one big, bad movie that millions will flock to see. Cardinal is the story, based on the late Henry Morton Robinson’s 1950 bestseller, of a poor boy from Boston who rises through the priesthood to become a prince of the Roman Catholic Church. It is sure-sell religiosity.

Visually the film is often breathtaking, photographed in color on a vast canvas stretching from New England to Rome and Vienna. Tom Tryon, lithe and beatific as Father Stephen Fermoyle, plays the prospective prince. At first he falters. His sister Mona (Carol Lynley) tells him in the confessional that she has “slept with” a boy (John Saxon) whom she cannot marry because he is a Jew. Fermoyle never gives absolution, for he has long since despaired of converting the boy, who utters wisecracks like: “Hasn’t Darwin kind of put the skids to GenesisT’

It is Mona who hits the skids. She soon turns up doing the tango in a purple brocade dress, and next time Stephen sees her she is an expectant mother whose life hangs on a delicate thread of Catholic dogma. To save Mona, doctors ask permission to perform a fetal craniotomy, crushing the infant’s head. Fermoyle refuses, Mona dies in childbirth, and the baby grows up into a happy, well-adjusted niece, so that takes care of that.

Meanwhile Fermoyle brightens a poverty-stricken country parish and becomes a secretary to Cardinal Glennon of Boston, a role played by Director John Huston with a ripsnorting vitality that all but steals the show. Smoking an expensive cigar, raising the devil with a young curate, or getting riotously seasick en route to Rome, Huston is superb. He wangles a Vatican appointment for his bright young aide, but Fermoyle, inconsolable over Mona, gets a two-year leave from the priesthood. Such leave is rarely granted in fact, and even in the movie Fermoyle is still bound by vows of celibacy. While teaching in Vienna, he meets minx-eyed Fraulein Romy Schneider, who pledges herself to woo him away from God. He remains pure—his decencies are legion—but not without a struggle. “I cannot ask you to kiss me while you are still married to the church,” Romy purrs, “but in Vienna it is a sin even for a married man not to dance the waltz.” And Actress Schneider makes twice-around-the-ballroom seem a soul-shattering experience for any male.

Still to come are the least likely episodes of Preminger’s massive liturgy. On a visit to Georgia, Monsignor Fermoyle wins singlehanded a battle with small-town bigots after getting himself horsewhipped by the Klan. Years later, after he has reached his episcopacy, Fermoyle takes on Adolf Hitler: he returns to Vienna to talk sense to Cardinal Innitzer (the real-life churchman who welcomed Naziism to Austria prior to the Anschluss of 1938). The episode ends ludicrously: as Brownshirts riot around Innitzer’s palace, Soprano Wilma Lipp and 200 members of the Wiener Jeunesse Choir huddle primly in the plaza, singing Mozart’s Alleluia without skipping a half note. Will miracles never cease?

The Cardinal has something for every race, creed and collar. In one irrelevant sequence, it even has Broadway Comedy Star Robert Morse (How to Succeed, etc.) doing a song-and-dance routine with half a dozen Adora-Belles dressed up like Statues of Liberty. Preminger already knows how to succeed. “The church loves show business,”-Preminger said recently, while promoting the film among Catholic dignitaries at the Vatican. One U.S. bishop raised a wistful objection: “The picture makes clerical life a lot more exciting than it really is.” Amen.