The Talkies / Archdiocesan Blues
Podhoretz, John
ARCHDIOCESAN BLUES by John Podhoretz I n Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, Bing Crosby played Father O'Malley, an idealistic young priest who tended to give his aid to confused opera...
...After the murder is solved in True Confessions, and Des's unimportant role in it revealed, he is sent in disgrace to a church in the desert outside Los Angeles...
...The priest would laugh, smile, and walk down the path in front of the church as the invisible choir burst out into an especially high-pitched hymn...
...he perhaps does not know that this is what Des needs--and wants...
...True Confessions, a new movie featuring Robert De Niro as Des Spellacy, a bureaucratic monsignor in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the 1940s, is a serious study of Catholicism and its demands upon its prelates...
...His is a performance that relies more on what is unspoken than on what he says, more on how he carries himself than on his words...
...Des met h e r once...
...he had no family ties to speak of...
...He reserved his passion for the altar...
...One sees his stride grow heavier, his mood darken...
...The plot concerns a murder Tom is investigating...
...We see him there thirty years later...
...Tom smiles oddly, as though he is enjoying his own humiliation...
...De Niro is astonishing...
...p e r h a p s even meeting h e r was enough to implicate him...
...Des, for his part, is made uncomfortable by Tom's presence, as though he fears Tom knows the truth about his crisis of faith...
...his eyes lose whatever brightness they had...
...It begins with a wedding performed by De Niro...
...In the car on the way home, Tom asks Des--to whom he feels close again--if he wants to go "do something...
...Amsterdam is furious...
...the humorous sips at the flask carefully concealed under the altar robe...
...his inner reserve has been replaced by contentment...
...This part of the movie is badly done...
...read the novel by John Gregory Dunne upon which the movie is based to have any idea of what is going on...
...The movie gives short shrift to the plot and emphasizes the tortuous relations between the two brothers, and this, I think, is the key to the film's triumph...
...When they meet, Tom reminds Des of the world from which he rose, while Des is a rebuke to Tom's failed expectations and hopes...
...Des looks over at Tom and suppresses a laugh...
...Des is the perfectly stolid man...
...Every woman he ever encountered fell in love with him (including the nuns), but O'Malley would have none of it...
...You put on a pretty good show...
...In previous religious movies, the priest always appeared out of nowhere...
...R e a l l y ? " Amsterdam replies."Yeah, I was your bagman when I was in the vice squad...
...Des is overpowered by ennui, and his dispiritedness is matched by that of his brother Tom (Robert Duvall), an occasionally corrupt police detective...
...One truly wonderful scene: Tom and Des go together to see their elderly, senile mother in a nursing home...
...In making a movie about the struggles of faith, the director Ulu Grosbard and the scenarists John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion have given us a clearer, more honest view of the American religious life than any of its more conventionally religiose predecessors...
...he goes through the service fluently but with an air of detachment and boredom...
...At times it has some of the spirit of the greatest religious film, The Nun's Story...
...Life began anew for him, we are led to understand, when he entered the seminary...
...envy that explodes whenever he sees his more successful brother...
...Des, it turns out, is in some extremely vague way implicated in the murder...
...She does not quite recognize Tom, but Des she knows well, and kisses his ring...
...Tom seethes with an unspecialized John Podhoretz is editor of Counterpoint and film critic of The American Spectator...
...standing beside the crusty but lovable elderly priest Barry Fitzgerald, he would cast his eyes upward and croon Vespers...
...This is all De Niro's acting, and, after years of screaming on screen, he proves himself an extraordinarily subtle actor...
...the thousand-voice choir...
...Tom does laugh, and for a moment, they are boys again...
...The mood of camaraderie is broken...
...In one scene, the crooked Jack Amsterdam (Charles Durning), who builds schools for the Archdiocese at bargain rates (using substandard materiel), comes over to a table in a restaurant at which Tom and Des are sitting...
...Apart from giving us a fascinating glimpse into the politics behind the altar, True Confessions delves as few films have into the relations between brother and brother...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982 21...
...Des says he would like to, but has to look at his appointment book...
...I used to work for you," Tom tells Amsterdam...
...Tom remains in the lower depths of their childhood, with the prostitutes and corrupt cops...
...But True Confessions gives us a brilliant portrait of the ties that still exist between the one who became sanctified and the one who knew him when...
...And, at last, he is able to make peace with his still-disappointed brother Tom...
...Des is an important man in the religious bureaucracy, has learned to play golf and to eat in the best restaurants...
...Mary's, Bing Crosby played Father O'Malley, an idealistic young priest who tended to give his aid to confused opera singers and equally confused nuns...
...The girl who has been murdered is a prostitute...
...Des sits absolutely still and expressionless, his eyes darting from one man to the other, struggling not to react...
...I used to pass on the money from the whores...
...Duvall, as Tom, is less good, but is still wonderful...
...and so, when he can no longer make the connection between his administrative work and the clerical life, he has no way to express his own doubts...
...These two movies were the great box-office triumphs of Hollywood's religious cinema, and in their crudity and sentimentality they represent a distillation of all those stomach-turning cliches: the yellow light suddenly streaming through the stained glass...
...Well," the unbeliever would say, "I guess I'll see you next week, Father...
...His passion in life is to see his brother laid low...
...one has to have "This is a point on which I am not all that certain...
...And, of course, the conversion of the stubborn unbeliever, who would be standing at the end of the greeting line at the end of the service...
...just as faith was the most important and the most impossible thing for Audrey Hepburn's Belgian missionary, so too is this the case for De Niro's Des Spellacy...
...the smile on the face of priest or rabbi infecting the faces of his congregants...
Vol. 15 • February 1982 • No. 2
