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It’s always fascinating to see Hollywood tippy-toeing around the subject of religion, particularly during the golden age, when the urge to avoid offense trumped any kind of dramatic sense. Alien beings—and Scotsmen such as I—would have to presume from the state of the nation’s movie product that the dominant religion in the country, and certainly among studio heads, was Catholicism, so celebrated is it in nearly every picture with a religious subject.Douglas Sirk’s The First Legion (1951), playing in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective on the director, chooses, via its title, a military metaphor for the Jesuits who are its main protagonists, anticipating the later Battle Hymn (1957) in its blend of the martial and the spiritual. A shame this promising idea wasn’t carried further, so that the various ranks of priest might have been presented in the manner of their equivalents in,...