Holiday for Sinners

There are some top-notch performances here, particularly by Keenan Wynn as a has-been boxer. I can't help but think Robert DeNiro watched it as he was preparing for Raging Bull. I also especially enjoyed watching Janice Rule in an early role. Script-wise, the dialogue is pretty true to life, but the plot is not as fully developed as it had the potential to be. The lighting, set decor, and cinematography are all very respectable, and the film does a great job of capturing the look and feel of New Orleans. Mardi Gras attendees sure did dress nicer back then! Not a great movie, but definitely worth your time, especially if you love NOLA like I do.

Richard Anderson may have given the best performance in the movie, but his seemingly major character simply disappears for most of the story.

Young is as bad as usual, but Campbell was pretty good. Wynn was over the top.

Played against the festivities surrounding Mardi Gras, this drama highlights the frustrations of a doctor and priest respectively: the former because his dedicated work cannot relieve the pain and suffering that fill the world he knows; the latter because his idealistic intentions are victimized by the church's bureaucracy. Most notable in this film is an outstanding performance by Keenan Wynn as a punchdrunk former fighter, a childhood pal of the doctor and priest. Surely his finest performance, in a role that challenges him as no other had done, Wynn is heart-rending in developing a character who is trying, without success, to retain a last shred of dignity and sense of self-worth. What could easily have been over-played is handled with sensitivity and restraint. Keenan Wynn.....of all people!

From a naturalistic Hamilton Basso novel, Days Before Lent, this is an adult melodrama about three childhood friends, a doctor, a priest, and a boxer,who develop in very different directions, but all leading to a dead end. The priest (Richard Anderson) wants to create a clinic for the poor but is frustrated by the church hierarchy, the doctor (Gig Young) wants to leave his hardscrabble practice and join a research team in India but discovers that he would have to leave his aristocratic fiancée (Janice Rule) back in New Orleans, and the battered boxer, a has-been who is going blind (Keenan Wynn), is merely trying to survive from drink to drink. The performances are more than merely competent, Keenan Wynn's in particular, but the delight is in the urbane and intelligent dialogue by Albert Bezzerides. The melodrama unfolds against Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but very little of what happens is peculiar to that unique city (even the breakfast pastries are called doughnuts rather than beignets).

But I think that Keenan Wynn is the main thing to remember from this movie, the most interesting. For the rest, the characters study is not always exciting, just a common drama which has many difficulties to find its marks. Not bad, but not more. Gerald Mayer is a director whose films have never excited me that much, mostly dramas such as this one. I suppose he wished to be too much intellectual, and his movies were not distributed, released in France; so no one knows his filmography from this side of the Atlantic, except maybe DIAL 1119. The most worth from him. That's my opinion. This one is not a junk, just a common drama.