glciii

For the First Time is a very beautiful movie worthy of a Lanza. We saw it when we were beginning to see the difference between the birds and the bees.¨For the first time, for the first time, I'm in love...¨ After that, all of us pre-teeners were trying to do a Lanza. Ít is extremely hard to find this kind of movie nowadays. The hundreds of million dollars needed to make a movie like this exceeds all our expectations, and the results often leave us frustrated, disgusted and disappointed. Maybe I'm down with Norman Desmond Syndrome, but I prefer the movies of the yesteryear, like this one. It is said that before one kicks the bucket, even if one is sick, one looks good. Eeriely, this is so with Mario Lanza. He gives his all here, and unsurprisingly so. After the decade of the fifties, gone forever is the Golden age of Hollywood when art is done for art's sake. Then came the Beatniks and the Hippies and the GenXers. Suddenly we are left with performers who challenge the lucidity of Ms. Anita Bryant and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Our so-called movie moguls nowadays sadly lack the will to tap the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, José Carreras or Andreas Bocelli. O Sole Mio seems to belong to another dimension. Ubinam gentium sumus?

The Catholic Church is a church of sinners. Every Christian, in fact, is a sinner struggling to become a saint. The Lady of Monza is one such sinner. That's why the movie is riveting, because everyone identifies with the hypocrisy, the cover-ups, and everything understandably expected of in a regimented life as the nunnery. It is a well defined movie. It knows what it is telling about. At the end of the day, the nun is locked up, or rather appears to be entombed, inside what seems to be an ecclesiastical dungeon. This is the redeeming virtue of the movie: Crime must be punished. Never mind if the nun is the Mother Superior. Never mind if she is a lady with connections to the Royal Court of Madrid. The characters are tri-dimensional. Each one prepares his own bed. This, per se, makes the film so irresistibly captivating in its brilliance. Like it or not, this film deserves a flat 10 pure and simple.

This is a very beautiful movie, a must-see for those who value history. This is a prelude to Dolores Hart's great leap forward that landed her in the nunnery where she is until now enjoying her life as Christ's bride. I was still in my teens when Dolores Hart entered the nunnery and disappeared, so to speak, from mundane Hollywood. I was heartbroken, for she was my favorite actress...will always be. She enthralled me, especially when she appeared in a movie about the life of St. Francis of Assisi--as St. Clare no less. But maybe it was the best decision she ever made. Come to think about it, she left the world to make it better.