The Jesuit priest, Charles Dismus Clark, must have been an interesting guy. He went about doing good, or trying to, and hung with thieves and other young criminals, trying to reform them with kindness. He himself came from a terrible background, poverty, coals mines, and union conflicts.
This movie leaves you wondering what he was like. Hardly any of it, outside the fleshless skeleton of narrative facts, is believable. The story is mostly a tract in favor of humanism. It was co-written by Don Murray, the actor who plays Father Clark. The priest is shown as, perhaps a little naive and socially clumsy, but otherwise without flaws, unshakable in his faith in God and in his boys.
But even Mother Teresa had her unpleasant traits. Reporters who tried to interview her might find themselves scrubbing pots and pans while talking to a stern and demanding subject. Father Clark died in 1963, having devoted most of his life to helping reform recently released prisoners in what would now be called a Halfway House but was at the time a new concept. But he was a man, not a saint.
The real story is probably fascinating but the movie is awkwardly written. Clark gets to give a couple of speeches along the lines of Father Flanagan in "Boy's Town." Some speeches are also given to Larry Gates as Louis Rosen, a high-end Jewish lawyer who discovered that his interests were parallel to those of Clark. Clark is close to many of his released inmates and was evidently told of some of their criminal plans before they were carried out -- not during confession, so privilege doesn't apply. But if Clark mentioned this to the police, he'd lose the trust of his wards and be unable to talk them out of other illegal enterprises. That makes him particeps criminis, doesn't it? Of course, undercover policemen are in the same bind. The moral conundrum is mentioned in passing but not explored.
On the plus side, neither Clark nor Rosen are shown as sanctimonious or sentimental in any blubbering kind of way. And the other side of the argument is presented concisely. Clark may be opposed to capital punishment and so are Rosen and the governor of Missouri, but the governor can't pardon the condemned kid (Kier Dullea) because the voters elected him to uphold the law, and the law requires that Dullea be gassed.
There's an awful scene on death row. First, Dullea is visited by the rich girl he was getting to know before he committed homicide. Then we are taken in graphic detail through the process of the execution itself. The camera remains in the chamber with the terrified Dullea as the gas is released and Dullea struggles and dies. There weren't many execution scenes in the movies when this one was released but now they've become almost de riguer. It's a pretty sickening tendency. Some of us get a thrill out of seeing others of us destroyed. There's a name for that in psychology.
Murray, for all his good intentions, isn't the right actor for the part of Father Charles Dismus Clark. Don Murray is a middle-class urbanite burdened with problems, as in "The Bachelor Party" and "Hatful of Rain." Here, his grammatical transgressions aren't really convincing and his secular sermons are mannered.
For its time it was something of a shocker. The seedy neighborhoods of St. Louis are niftily captured by photographer Haskell Wexler. The released inmates, however, look very 1950-ish. They all seem so clean, so neat, so white. The moral position of the movie anticipates the 1960s, which converts the perp into the vic. The villain is society, as represented by a skanky reporter who fights every move Clark tries to make. It was a necessary corrective to the prevailing notions of causality at the time -- bad blood, willfulness, the devil. What's needed now is the synthesis. At the moment we can't seem to find it. Political debates are interrupted by wild applause, by cheers, when capital punishment is brought up. Maybe the whole dialectic is misguided. We never find the synthesis, just swing from pole to pole like brachiating apes.
This movie leaves you wondering what he was like. Hardly any of it, outside the fleshless skeleton of narrative facts, is believable. The story is mostly a tract in favor of humanism. It was co-written by Don Murray, the actor who plays Father Clark. The priest is shown as, perhaps a little naive and socially clumsy, but otherwise without flaws, unshakable in his faith in God and in his boys.
But even Mother Teresa had her unpleasant traits. Reporters who tried to interview her might find themselves scrubbing pots and pans while talking to a stern and demanding subject. Father Clark died in 1963, having devoted most of his life to helping reform recently released prisoners in what would now be called a Halfway House but was at the time a new concept. But he was a man, not a saint.
The real story is probably fascinating but the movie is awkwardly written. Clark gets to give a couple of speeches along the lines of Father Flanagan in "Boy's Town." Some speeches are also given to Larry Gates as Louis Rosen, a high-end Jewish lawyer who discovered that his interests were parallel to those of Clark. Clark is close to many of his released inmates and was evidently told of some of their criminal plans before they were carried out -- not during confession, so privilege doesn't apply. But if Clark mentioned this to the police, he'd lose the trust of his wards and be unable to talk them out of other illegal enterprises. That makes him particeps criminis, doesn't it? Of course, undercover policemen are in the same bind. The moral conundrum is mentioned in passing but not explored.
On the plus side, neither Clark nor Rosen are shown as sanctimonious or sentimental in any blubbering kind of way. And the other side of the argument is presented concisely. Clark may be opposed to capital punishment and so are Rosen and the governor of Missouri, but the governor can't pardon the condemned kid (Kier Dullea) because the voters elected him to uphold the law, and the law requires that Dullea be gassed.
There's an awful scene on death row. First, Dullea is visited by the rich girl he was getting to know before he committed homicide. Then we are taken in graphic detail through the process of the execution itself. The camera remains in the chamber with the terrified Dullea as the gas is released and Dullea struggles and dies. There weren't many execution scenes in the movies when this one was released but now they've become almost de riguer. It's a pretty sickening tendency. Some of us get a thrill out of seeing others of us destroyed. There's a name for that in psychology.
Murray, for all his good intentions, isn't the right actor for the part of Father Charles Dismus Clark. Don Murray is a middle-class urbanite burdened with problems, as in "The Bachelor Party" and "Hatful of Rain." Here, his grammatical transgressions aren't really convincing and his secular sermons are mannered.
For its time it was something of a shocker. The seedy neighborhoods of St. Louis are niftily captured by photographer Haskell Wexler. The released inmates, however, look very 1950-ish. They all seem so clean, so neat, so white. The moral position of the movie anticipates the 1960s, which converts the perp into the vic. The villain is society, as represented by a skanky reporter who fights every move Clark tries to make. It was a necessary corrective to the prevailing notions of causality at the time -- bad blood, willfulness, the devil. What's needed now is the synthesis. At the moment we can't seem to find it. Political debates are interrupted by wild applause, by cheers, when capital punishment is brought up. Maybe the whole dialectic is misguided. We never find the synthesis, just swing from pole to pole like brachiating apes.