Holiday for Sinners

Dr. Jason Kent (Gig Young), Father Victor Carducci (Richard Anderson), and Joe Piavi (Keenan Wynn) are childhood friends from a poor New Orleans neighborhood. They have followed different paths. Kent is tired of working tirelessly in a clinic for the poor. He is quitting to join a comfortable, lucrative job. His girlfriend Susan Corvier (Janice Rule) is uncertain. Carducci is considering leaving the church. Former boxer Joe Piavi is a drunk and broke. He is obsessed with collecting $1500 from his former manager. It's Mardi Gras. Crooked reporter Danny Farber (William Campbell) will do anything for a story.

This needs a ticking clock or a definitive approaching end or something to heighten the intensity. The plot mostly meanders as Joe spirals downwards. Maybe Kent and Carducci should team up to track him down. The three friends premise is almost unnecessary. The most compelling part is really the story about Farber and Piavi.

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!

In brief, the screenplay is a mess, lacking in both direction and point. It looks like it's supposed to follow three story threads, namely, three childhood friends still living in a seedy part of New Orleans. However, one thread, the priest, pretty much evaporates, while the other two, the ex-fighter and the doctor, simply flounder from one scene to the next, reaching a climax so abruptly awkward, they may have run out of film. If there's a governing concept to the pottage, I can't find it

Too bad, because there's a lot of talent involved. Campbell and Rule especially shine in supporting parts, even though Wynn spreads on the punch-drunk fighter pretty thick. What really puzzles me, however, is the talent behind the scenes. Writer Bezzerides is responsible for some of the best noirs of the time, e.g. On Dangerous Ground (1952), Thieves' Highway (1949); at the same time, producer John Houseman was a long-time prestige producer and collaborator with Orson Welles. Given these proved track records, what's on screen here stacks up as a genuine puzzlement. There must be an inside story and I suspect it has something to do with the studio, MGM, which was a late comer to B-movie b&w and not much good at it, anyway. Whatever the reason, at least this odd misfire plays off the colorful background of New Orleans Mardi Gras, which is about the only reason to watch.

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.

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.