Assim Quis o Destino

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.

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!

This belongs to a small and select group of movies. These are the big-studio movies with known performers that are, nevertheless, absolutely awful. Another in this category is "The Guilt Of Janet Ames," which is at least more amusingly terrible.

Maybe Gig Young wanted to play an idealistic tough-guy doctor. Maybe Keenan Wynn wanted to show his chops playing a down-and-out fighter battling blindness. Someone must have had a reason of some sort for casting them in these roles.

The story about three boyhood friends takes place in New Orleans; yet many of the players, Wynn most noticeably, affect heavy Bronx accents. (The third friend is a Roman Catholic priest. His part seems to have been trimmed to almost nothing in the print I saw.)

Wynn seems to be wearing contact lenses that make his pupils appear cloudy. His performance isn't bad, really, but he is cast against type and in a one-dimensional role. It's a no-win situation. As is the whole movie.

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).

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.