The story takes us into a Liverpool rectory where the senior priest sleeps with the pretty black housekeeper, and the younger priest removes his Roman collar for nighttime soirees to gay bars. When he and his partner are caught in a police sweep, he is disgraced, but the older priest is pleased that the young man has finally gotten in touch with his emotions, and begs him to return to the church to celebrate Mass with him. (The bishop, who advises him to “piss off out of my diocese,” is portrayed, like all the church authorities, as a dried-up old bean.)
The question of whether priests should be celibate is the subject of much debate right now. What is not in doubt is that, to be ordained, they have to promise to be celibate. Nobody has forced them to become priests, and rules are rules. The filmmakers seem to feel that since they wouldn’t want to live that way, of course it is wicked that priests must.
I am aware that the touchy-feely movement is so well established that no commercial film could seriously argue for celibacy. What I object to is the use of the church as a spice for an otherwise lame story; take away the occupations of the two central characters, and the rest of the film’s events would be laid bare as tiresome sexual politics. The most obnoxious scene in the film is the one where the young priest, tortured by the needs of the flesh and by another problem we will soon get to, lectures Christ on the cross: “If you were here, you’d . . .” Well, what? Advise him to go out and get laid?
The priest, named Father Greg and played by Linus Roache, picks up Graham (Robert Carlyle) for a night of what he hopes will be anonymous sex, but later Graham recognizes him on the street, and soon they are in love. This is all done by fiat; the two men are not allowed to get to know one another, or to have conversations of any meaning, since the movie is not really about their relationship, but about how backward the church is in opposing it.
Instead of taking the time to explore the sexuality of the two priests in a thoughtful way, Priest crams in another plot, this one based on that old chestnut, the inviolable secrecy of the confessional. Father Greg learns while hearing a confession that a young girl parishioner is being sexually abused by her father. What to do? Of course (as the filmmakers no doubt learned from Hitchcock’s I Confess) he cannot break the seal of the confessional—a rule that, for the convenience of the plot, he takes much more seriously than the rules about sex. This dilemma also figures in his anguished monologue to Jesus.
Once again, the church is used as spice. (Can you imagine audiences getting worked up over the confidential nature of a lawyer-client or a doctor-patient relationship?) But here the movie leaves a hole wide enough to run a cathedral through. The girl’s father confronts the priest in the confessional, threatens him, and tells the priest he plans to keep right on with his evil practice (we don’t simply have a child abuser here, but a spokesman for incest). What the film fails to realize is that this conversation is not protected by the sacramental seal, because the sinner makes it absolutely clear he is not asking forgiveness, does not repent, and plans to keep right on sinning as long as he can get away with it. At this point, Father Greg should pick up the phone and call the cops.
The unexamined assumptions in the Priest screenplay are shallow and exploitative. The movie argues that the hidebound and outdated rules of the church are responsible for some people (priests) not having sex although they should, while others (incestuous parents) can keep on having it although they shouldn’t. For this movie to be described as a moral statement about anything other than the filmmaker’s prejudices is beyond belief.
Prison Girls
(No credits—not listed on the Internet Movie Database; 1973; also includes references to The Devil’s Window and The Blind Dead)
During the past week, I have seen the end of The Blind Dead, the beginning of The Devil’s Widow, and two of the three dimensions of Prison Girls. Here is my report.
Prison Girls was the toughest because the right lens fell out of my 3-D glasses and got lost on the floor. That was the whole ball game right there.
From what I could understand of the dialogue, the movie was about a group of girls in prison who were given two-day leaves in order to go home and appear in sex scenes for the movie.
There were very few scenes in the prison itself, I was sorry to see. From what I could determine (it was a little hard with the 3-D images overlapping), there was a scene in the prison psychiatrist’s office, and that was about it. Why no prison?
The first explanation that leaps to mind is that the movie was so cheap they couldn’t afford prison sets. But, no, that doesn’t make sense, because the current wave of prison movies was invented to save money on sets. If you shoot a whole movie in a motel room, the audience is going to notice the cheap sets. But if you shoot a whole movie in a prison cell, everybody understands because the characters are locked in anyway. So I guess Prison Girls didn’t have a lot of prison sets because it was a big-budget exploitation movie. Maybe.
Anyway, I was disappointed, because whenever I go to a prison movie, I always look in the cell next to the cell where the main characters are. Burgess Meredith always used to be the guy in the next cell, and I wanted to see if he ever got out.
The Devil’s Widow was a movie I wanted to see because I saw Roddy McDowell, the director, on a TV talk show about three years ago and he was talking about it. He said he made it because he wanted to make a tribute to Ava Gardner, and the movie was a gesture of love. I hope Ava Gardner appreciated it. The movie was finished two years ago but has only been released now because it took the brains in the promotion department all that time to figure out that the movie’s original title, Tam Lin, sounded like a Cantonese restaurant. The Devil’s Widow, I am sure you will agree, is a title with a lot more class, although I, for one, did not even know the devil was dead. I guess he got lonely after God passed on.
The Blind Dead is a movie about centuries-old corpses who rise from the dead and chase people around cemeteries and churches. They are blind. After being dead 200 years, I think it’s pretty good that they can even walk.
They have to listen for you before they can chase you. Sometimes they ride slow-motion horses. The horses are not blind, but they do have arthritis, and the lead horse suffers from the heartbreak of psoriasis. The way to escape from the blind dead is to keep real quiet. Then they don’t know where you are, and the movie would be over. To avoid this, the people in the movie bang on doors, shout, breathe heavily, scream, gasp, cough, clear their throats, snap their fingers, tap their toes, step on twigs, grind their teeth, and ream out their ears. Then the blind dead chase them, catch them, and eat them.
Prom Night
(Directed by Paul Lynch; starring Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis; 1980)
Prom Night is merely an execrable movie—not despicable, like I Spit on Your Grave. But the experience of watching it at the Adelphi Theater last week was the worst of my moviegoing career. On one of the hottest nights of the year, the theater had no air conditioning (a fact revealed only after customers had entered). There was no ice for the soft drinks. The management relented and opened the theater’s exit doors, and some of the crowd stood outside in the marginally cooler summer night. When a scream went up, they dashed back inside to see what moment of violence they’d just missed.