The Cardinal

One of the other big films of 1963 was Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, which won the Golden Globe for Best Drama (it was the last film to win that award yet not be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar). Preminger, who specialized in long films about controversial subjects, did that again here in the story of a young priest who climbs the ladder to cardinal.

Based on a novel by Henry Morton Robinson, which was loosely based on the life of Cardinal Spellman, the film succeeds because it is so even-handed. It is not an indictment of the Catholic Church, and showcases the noble efforts of its priests to do good work. But it also is not an advertisement for it, pointing out the problems of the faith and its bureaucracy.

The film covers the period from before World War I to just before World War II. Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) is a young priest who has studied in Rome. He comes back to work as a curate in his local Boston parish. His sister (Carol Lynley) wants to marry a Jew. This man (John Saxon), considers converting, but sees the clubby way the Irish Catholics look down at others and passes. Tryon, seeing himself as a priest first and a brother second, tells Lynley to give him up. She leaves home and ends up in dance halls. Later she will get pregnant, and when advised by doctors that giving birth will kill her, Tryon anguishes but can not let them do that, so his sister dies.

Later he will get sent to a poor parish by the domineering cardinal (John Huston, in an Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning role) as a means to curb Tryon's ambition. He works with a kindly but ill priest (Burgess Meredith). After that man dies, Huston, grudgingly admiring Tryon, takes him on as secretary. When Tryon is offered a job with the Secretary of State in Rome, he tells Huston that the ordeal with his sister has given him doubts, and he wishes to leave the priesthood. Huston asks him to demure, and take a leave of absence.

Tryon does, and teaches English in Vienna. He falls in love with a winsome student (Romy Schneider), but eventually returns to the priesthood. He will battle racial prejudice in the American South and then try to stop the Cardinal of Vienna from cozying up to the Nazis. At this time he will become reconnected with Schneider, and witness firsthand the annexation of Austria by Germany.

The film is three hours long, but moved along at a terrific clip--I was never bored. Some of this, in the retrospect, seems like heart-on-the-sleeve liberalism, but the script, by Robert Dozier, recognizes the blinders that progressives can wear. When Tryon arrives in Georgia, to stop the segregation of Catholic schools, he is warned by the bishop there that he doesn't know what he's getting himself into, and indeed he is assaulted by Klan members. The same happens when confronting the Austrian cardinal, who tells him pointedly, "Hitler doesn't respond well to criticism."

Incidentally, Tryon later turned to writing horror novels, and including The Other, which made a very spooky movie, and Harvest Home, which I read and was enthralled by when I was a teenager.