Le Cardinal

The Cardinal tracks the life of a young priest through an upwardly-mobile career to the point just prior to his being elevated to Cardinal. The historical time frame falls between the beginning of WWI and the beginning of WWII, and this volatile time in our country's history is reflected by the career of Father (later Monsignor, then Bishop) Fermoyle. Fr. Fermoyle encounters many people who touch his life and have an impact on his career which shakes his faith, and even threatens to end it at one point. You don't have to be Catholic to enjoy this film, but it would certainly help!

The location scenes in Rome, Vienna and Boston give this film a feel which helps the viewer really get involved in the plot. The moral values truly reflect the era depicted; I only wish that a return to those values were possible today.

If you like a good, dramatic story that develops characters you really get to know and care about, please see this film!

Tom Tryon is one of the better but less appreciated actors of the '50s and '60s when mature top stars were the likes of Rock Hudson. Tryon, however, is not only an excellent actor but a good writer as well with a number of books to his name just like Sterling Hayden, another almost forgotten actor of the period.

This movie should be required viewing in Moral Theology as it provides guidance on how a serious practicing Catholic should act when faced with moral dilemmas. With the current moral divide on the question of abortion, I am reminded of that crucial scene in the movie when the character portrayed by Tryon had to decide on what medical procedure to choose in the case of an emergency arising out of a childbirth gone awry. He was the nearest of kin of the woman involved and the doctors advised him that there was a choice as to whether to abort the baby (by crushing its head with forceps) or let the childbirth proceed in which case the mother's life would be compromised. In such cases, Catholic morality requires that the best effort should be made to save both infant and mother but in no case may an intervention be made to kill either one of them.

TOM TRYON has the central role in Otto Preminger's majestic looking film version of THE CARDINAL, but he's one of those handsome actors with an impassive face whose emotions never come to the surface. Instead, we get a hint of what he might be thinking without any real clue. And since the film is all about the moral and personal issues facing him as he enters the College of Cardinals, an actor with more emotional capabilities would have been more impressive.

The other flaw is the three hour length for a film in which the story is simply not that compelling. Furthermore, director Preminger has chosen to direct whole scenes at medium length lensing (no close-ups inserted) which gives a flat affect to the dynamics involved.

Aside from these weaknesses, the film has a lot about it to commend. All the interiors of church activities are impressively staged and photographed in beautiful WideScreen photography. The performances around Tryon range from good to excellent, including John Huston, Carol Lynley, Bill Hayes, John Saxon and Burgess Meredith. Huston is particularly commanding as the brusque Cardinal Glennon, who confronts Tryon with: "You're not afraid of me, are you?" when the young man speaks his mind.

All of the technical aspects of the film are professional, giving the story more credibility than it deserves from a rather lumbering script. The icing on the cake is the rich musical score by Jerome Moross.

Holds the interest despite the length as it deals with a young man confronting bigotry, Naziism, and his own personal beliefs as he ascends the ladder of success in the Catholic Church.

I don't care if anyone believes this but I was actually "attracted" to this film via its incredible, grandiose and very emotional soundtrack which I heard on a Frank Chacksfield Cd ! I thought, with an incredible score like that, the film just cannot be bad ! Might sound stupid, but there it is ! So I found this on a DVD from the USA - very nicely presented in colorful red packaging together with a bonus DVD about the life of O Preminger !

In fact, I did enjoy the film quite a lot ! Excellent picture quality and reasonable sound. Being a Roman Catholic, and always educated in catholic schools, jesuits and De La Salle Brothers, having often attended Holy Mass, I felt, on watching this film to be on familiar ground, so to speak. I thought the film illustrated well certain contradictions within the church, notably of course with regards to "racism" and the "Nazis" in the World War II where its rôle seemed to have been ambiguous to say the least.

I am one of those people who believed that the doctrines of religion have been fixed by God for eternity - you must either accept them as they are or reject them - no one said it would be easy, for this reason I believe that you can not and must not modify religious doctrine to suit the fashion at a given moment in time. If you cannot accept the church's position on one or other point, then you are perfectly free to refuse the Church, the time of the Inquisition is long past, but you certainly should not try to change the doctrine of the Church to suit your own particular views. Only God can do that ! For this reason I agree with the reaction of Fermoyle confronted with various "crucial" situations .... abortion, inter-faith marriage, racism, Nazism etc etc. Sometimes unpopular stances have to be taken and it is good to see Fermoyle have the courage of his convictions even if we do see at times that he is no more than a human being who has doubts about what he is doing and his own weaknesses.

The film is a series of very intense episodes, each one being good to watch but the linking together of them not very smooth, just as you're getting involved in one of these, begorrah ! You're whisked onto the next one without knowing really how the one before resolved itself.

I had never heard of the actor Tom Tryon ! He was not bad but I think the part could have been played better by certain other more well known actors. Tryon had a good, powerful and imposing physique but in some scenes he appears rather emotionless or should I say not emotional enough.

The film is pretty long, there's an intermission which allows the spectator to take a breather,and I found the second part a bit more interesting and intense than the first. That said, the film doubtlessly needs several viewings to be fully appreciated. There are other intense moments, where Fermoyle has to choose between permitting the life of his sister or that of her child-to-be but not both of them, an extremely painful decision for anyone to have to make, also his priest friend who is dying of multiple sclerosis. I was reading the other comments about this film and one of them was limited to the episode of ROmy Schneider's husband who had been sitting at table one minute, hears the Gestapo comes, and in one-and-a-half shakes of a duck's tail, has precipitated himself out of the window to his death on the street below ! It's true that you don't see it coming and remain flabbergasted because it all takes place so quickly. Funny, though that that particular episode should have marked the commentator to such a point that it was the only detail of the film that he/she wrote about !

Another extremely emotional scene is when Fermoyle journeys to Georgia USA at the request of a black priest whose church has been burned down by KKK extremists. He takes a very strong stand against this and pays for it by being whipped by the KKK. A few hours later, one of those who has participated in the whipping ( the harmonica player ) comes back and helps him up ! Although Fermoyle realizes that he was one of the evil-doers, he just gives him a pat on the back and walks off with him. It's a difficult and very uncomfortable scene to bear. I could not forgive a man who had done that to me !

The scene in Vienna where the church singers are bothered by a band of marauding Nazis is extremely intense violent and uncomfortable for the spectator ... the way those Nazis just smash their way into the church building ...... Fermoyle manages to escape via a secret passage to the church crypt .

suddenly it just fades away and we jump forward in time. It was a little frustrating as that was the end of the film. I was surprised to see Romy Schneider in this film, I have seen her often in French and German films but did not know she had starred in American ones. She was very beautiful but her rôle was pretty limited. Perhaps a little more passion between her and Fermoyle would have added some spice to the story ......... never mind !

To conclude then, a fairly long film with intense moments. I'm absolutely not sure whether today many people would like it as unfortunately religion seems to be declining in Western society. But to those people who are religious or have an association with religion or concerned about its development, it is sure to have a certain interest and relevance.

Otto Preminger's blockbuster film, The Cardinal, is kind of like an ecclesiastical Winds of War with its priest/protagonist seemingly on the scene of a whole lot of history from before World War I until just before the outbreak of World War II. The church of those times is vastly different than the Roman Catholic Church of today.

Tom Tryon plays Stephen Fermoyle whose parents, Cameron Prudhomme and Dorothy Gish as did so many Irish married couples, determined that one of their kids would be a priest. They put aside money for same and the film opens with young Tryon completing his ordination in Rome and coming back to be assigned to the Boston Archdiocese.

Tryon undergoes many crises of faith, both personal and historical. As The Cardinal is history as how the church would write it for itself, a lot of things are passed over and answers we might come up with today would not be what Catholic folks especially would have thought back then.

One thing that did get me, though maybe it was in the novel the film is based on, is the big event for American Catholics in that time period was the 1928 presidential campaign and the nomination of Alfred E. Smith by the Democrats, the first Roman Catholic to be nominated by a major party for president. I could not believe that Preminger made a film about the Catholic church in that period with an American protagonist and didn't mention that at all in the film.

Preminger assembled a truly international cast of players of the second and third tier. Note the absence of any big name box office stars. He also shot the film in various locations around the world, Boston, Rome, Vienna and other places where the odyssey of Tom Tryon takes him.

Fellow director John Huston got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his role as Cardinal Glennon of Boston, loosely based on Archbishop of Boston at the time, William O'Connell. Preminger said that Huston was cooperative in every way and Huston said he resisted successfully the impulse to call his own shots on his performance remembering this was not his film.

Carol Lynley playing both Tryon's sister and niece does well in a dual role and Patrick O'Neal and Murray Hamilton play a contrasting duo of Ku Klux Klansmen in Georgia. Romy Schneider is fine as the Austrian woman who loves Tryon and nearly shakes him from his vows of celibacy. Austrian actor Joseph Meinrad is memorable as the only true figure portrayed by name in the film, Cardinal Imnitzer of Vienna who makes a devil's bargain with Hitler and has cause to regret it.

I think viewers will also like a pair of fine Italian players Raf Vallone and Tullio Carminati who play a pair Cardinals, the former the friend and mentor of young Tryon and the latter the Papal Secretary of State based on Cardinal Merry del Val.

My favorite moments in The Cardinal are with Burgess Meredith as the parish priest from a diocese in Northern Maine where Tryon is sent as a curate. He's a simple man of great faith who is dying of multiple sclerosis. He's an old friend of Huston's and their reunion scene on Meredith's death bed is touching and sublime. This may very well have been Meredith's best screen role and he never gets enough credit for it.

Curious also that in this day when there is so much controversy about openly gay actor Chad Allen playing a missionary, it's ironic that closeted gay actor Tom Tryon plays a prince of the church here. Tryon after he left acting and became a successful novelist came relatively out of the closet. Today there would be the same howls of indignation as there were for Chad Allen if The Cardinal were made now.

As this is history as the church would write it itself, The Cardinal misfires in making its main points. But the performances that Otto Preminger gets from his cast are dignified and in some cases very moving. Not a bad film, but definitely falls short of being a great one.