The Best Movies About...Being a Pastor?

Althouse links to a Washington Post article that's based on the response of twenty-four people to the question, "What's the best film about your profession?"

That got me to thinking about movies that depict my own work as a pastor.

Film pastors seem mostly to fall into several categories:

• clueless innocents 
• fire-breathing moralists (who are unrepentant hypocrites) 
• sociopaths 
• money-grubbing manipulators 
• sexual predators

There are and have been pastors for whom these descriptions fit, of course. But it's odd to see how consistently these stereotypes are portrayed in films and TV shows.

Some of my favorite portrayals of clergy appear in:

1. The Keys of the Kingdom starring Gregory Peck. Peck plays a priest packed off to China as a missionary who remains faithful despite the suspicion among his superiors that he's a failure. Thomas Mitchell plays Peck's spiritually skeptical friend, a relationship that's portrayed without a hint of heavy-handedness or sentimentality.

2. Bishop's Wife with David Niven as the spiritually-struggling bishop. This is one of the best Christmas films of all time. The movie isn't entirely satisfying though, ending with a Christmas Eve sermon that's more American civil religion than it is Christian.

3. Alias Nick Beal, with the aforementioned Mitchell as a district attorney standing off against an evil Ray Milland. George Macready turns in an interesting performance as a clergyperson who helps call a friend who has lost his spiritual compass to account and to renewal. Released in 1948, I had never seen Beal until this year. It's a great film, a seemingly forgotten classic. (The film's title song is an embellishment on Martin Luther's most famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.)

4. Luther with Joseph Fiennes in the title role. Martin Luther, of course, was a theological genius, but he was, at heart, a pastor. He was also imperfect. That complexity of character comes across in this movie.

On television, Father Mulcahy of MASH is a variant of the clueless innocent type. Over the course of the series, Mulcahy's character was given greater depth than in the early seasons. (This is the opposite of what was done with Radar O'Reilly, who moved from the early episodes in which he was portrayed as sort of a sly conman to being an Iowa naif.)

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Last 'Casablanca' Cast Member Dies

Madeleine Lebeau, the last surviving member of the cast of Casablanca, has died at the age of 92. Lebeau played the part of Yvonne, introduced early in the film as a jilted French expat in love with Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine.

In a subsequent scene, she walks into Rick's Cafe Americain on the arm of a German soldier. But when an underground leader seeking to flee the clutches of Nazi Germany, Victor Lazlo, played by Paul Henreid, leads the cafe patrons in singing La Marseillaise, Yvonne chokes back tears and reclaims her patriotism.

As such, she foreshadows a similar transformation on the part of Bogart's Blaine. Near the film's end, Claude Rains' police prefect, Captain Louis Renault, remarks, "Rick, you've become a patriot." Says Rick: "It seemed like a good time."

Lebeau's performance was affecting and, according to this piece from deadline.com, the tears she shed during the La Marseillaise scene were genuine. Lebeau, who was Jewish, and her husband fled from France as Nazi Germany occupied and overran their homeland.

She wasn't the only member of the Casablanca cast to know first hand about the savagery and antisemitism of the Nazi regime. Most notable among them maybe, was Conrad Veidt, who played the villainous Major Heinrich Strasser.

Casablanca is one of my favorite movies ever. I rarely pass up the chance to see it when it airs on TCM. Part of it is that the performance of Bogart, my favorite screen actor of all, and his costar, Ingrid Bergman, are perfect. No matter how they felt about each other personally, they convey the deepest poignance as two people who love each other and can never be together. (Though they know that they "will always have Paris.")

But, beyond Bogart and Bergman, the entire film deserves the label classic. The script, the supporting cast, the direction, the music, and the plot all combine to produce a compelling story of people running from a cruel madness, coping often with a cynicism which they drop before the bold idealism of Victor Laszlo.

Lebeau was an old woman when she passed and the world of Casablanca seems as removed from today as the Dark Ages. And yet, the movie continues to stir and people resonate to the astounding performances of Lebeau and all who made this a film worth seeing again and again.

Vive Casablanca!

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

[Thanks to @The_News_Diva for putting me onto this story.]

Edward Herrmann Has Died

Edward Herrmann, one of my favorite actors, has died at age 71, from brain cancer.

He played FDR in Eleanor and Franklin, later voicing Roosevelt in the Ken Burns documentary on Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor, televised earlier this year.

And he was wonderful in The Gilmore Girls. Herrmann was also in The Paper Chase.

Loved his voice; it lent both vitality and heft to History Channel documentaries on both the American Revolution and the US presidents.

Because Herrmann was in it, I actually went to a theater in 1979 to see him a forgettable Walt Disney studio production called The North Avenue Irregulars. (This was one of those films produced after Walt's death and before Michael Eisner revitalized the Disney brand. You get the idea.) Nonetheless, even in this movie, Herrmann turned in a creditable performance as a young Presbyterian pastor.

Is 'Interstellar' Too Loud?

Our son called last night with a glowingly positive review of the new Christopher Nolan-directed epic, Interstellar. It made me mildly interested in the film, which has been promoted like crazy on TV during recent sporting events, because my son and I usually have similar tastes in movies. (We both love classics like Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life, The Maltese Falcon, and Field of Dreams, for example, though I can't for the life of me figure out what he sees in Gladiator.]

But according to Washington Post film critic Anne Hornaday, the film deserves criticism for being too loud. She's not alone, apparently:

By now, audiences eager to see “Interstellar,” Christopher Nolan’s hotly anticipated space epic starring Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, have heard the word on the movie, which has received mixed-to-positive reviews.

The unanswered question is whether they’ll hear a word in the movie.

In what is becoming a distressingly predictable ritual for Nolan’s movies, “Interstellar” has been dinged in recent weeks by critics and other gadflies for a muddy, thuddingly loud sound design, in which Hans Zimmer’s booming score (he’s all about that bass) and similarly thumping sound effects render spoken dialogue a submerged garble. The sound was “so bassy and woofer-throbby and aimed at my rib cage that I couldn’t hear half the dialogue,” complained Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffery Wells after an October screening. “My ears felt left out, not to mention the part of my brain that enjoys hearing words and sentences.”

Movies are frequently louder these days, crowded by frenzied film scores from composers seemingly emulating John Williams' work in the Star Wars franchise. The films are also crowded by frenzied action and often, cartoon-like character development.

I don't know if this is true of Nolan's film, but I do think that Hollywood is in defensive mode, seeing movie audiences continue to shrink as consumers increasingly opt for pulling up the drawbridges around their houses to for in-home entertainments, serving up loud, crowded stews that are more like video games or roller coaster rides than movies. It's as though Hollywood is screaming, "Hey, look at us! There's nothing to see, but we will put you through a buzz saw of sensory overload!"

Interstellar may be a great movie. But I think Hornaday and others raise a good point.

I love cranked up tunes at rock and hip hop concerts and in my car. Sometimes though, I think, all that "loud," along with the visual pyrotechnics, take away from films.

[HT to Instapundit for linking to Hornaday's article.]