Book Review, 29 February 2008
Reviewed by Isabel Quigly

In the climate of their time

Catholics in the Movies
Ed. Colleen McDannell
Oxford University Press, £60
Tablet bookshop price £54 Tel 01420 592974

As a convent schoolgirl I passionately loved the cinema (only in the holidays, of course) but it never occurred to me to consider films sociologically. Mostly they reflected America, as this book does, and Catholic fans like me were just part of a huge worldwide audience that learned to accept Americanisms as part of everyday life. This interesting collection of essays on important films which reflect the climate of their time (from the days of the silent movies to more or less the present) now seems intensely American in content, manner, style and everything else, treating American mores as central to life in general and ignoring the rest of the world. Even the style of writing is so American as occasionally to be almost incomprehensible to an outsider. (Where else would a serious gathering of film buffs - cinematic intellectuals - be called a "flat-out fun time"?) No other point of view, no other place on earth, is considered throughout the book. America dominates everything.

Nonetheless, it is full of interest to outsiders as well as natives. Each of the 14 essays deals with a particular film, taken as a model of its time and place, examined from every angle, social, historical, artistic. So each essay conjures up a world, not just recalling key cinematic figures in it - directors, actors, scriptwriters - but remembering the time and atmosphere in which huge audiences went to the cinema, their tastes, mannerisms, speech patterns, prejudices, likes and dislikes, all their concerns. As a history of "middle America" (the book is addressed to an "average" reader, not a highbrow) it is full of interest, some of it disquieting, particularly to the orthodox Catholic, some reassuringly liberal and candid in its assessment of religious or social trends.

Packed tightly with opinions, Catholics in the Movies may startle some and stimulate others. It covers in detail films familiar to many with a Catholic background - The Song of Bernadette or Going My Way, up to the 2004 The Passion of the Christ, or in 1973, the once considered horrific The Exorcist. Plenty to bite on, plenty to remember. The fact that old films can still be seen on television or DVD etc. means that the historical record is rich; and even if much silent film is lost, there are still careful analyses like the essay here on Regeneration (1915) or, perhaps, even elderly memories of certain famous films such as D.W. Griffiths' The Birth of a Nation.

A theme that runs through many of the essays is that of Catholics (and Catholic life, communities, ideas) as patriotic Americans, part of a central, heroic line of lowly-born immigrants from Ireland or Italy adjusting to a new world and coming to love its way of life. "Catholics were not foreign aliens bent on destroying democracy but facilitators of the American dream", as Anthony Bushe Smith writes in "America's favourite priest" - that is Bing Crosby as Fr Chuck O'Malley, a lovable, modern Irish American who saves a decrepit parish from financial ruin, in Going My Way (1944). Shades of Crosby are still with us, it seems; so pervasive was his influence nearly 10 years ago that Fr Chuck characters, according to Smith, have become a staple in popular Catholicism.

With his laid-back manner and panama hat, Crosby became the perfect vehicle for ideas of modernity, liberal values and cosy friendliness, the American ideal. If you smiled and sang like him, or looked as ravishing as Ingrid Bergman in a nun's habit (The Nun's Story), you couldn't be part of a sinister conspiratorial Church. Popish plots were almost suddenly out.

Darker aspects of Catholic morality appeared in films like The Godfather trilogy or The Exorcist (1973), examined in detail, sympathetically and with careful technical skill. A "biopic" of Dorothy Day (1996) is an example of another kind of Catholic film, well-meaning but considered shallow. For further insights into American and Catholic culture, there are other films with less influence than The Song of Bernadette or Going My Way, but worth their careful sociological examination for the light they throw on attitudes and ideas either at the time the films were made or now, in retrospect.

In the 1950s, Britain became a haven for refugees from Hollywood who could not take the terrible McCarthyite persecution. This is not touched upon in the book but it hovers in the background. Politically, we were much freer than the Americans. I remember, for instance, the film critic of the Daily Worker (a practising Communist, if not Stalinist, in those days) hoped to join the important Critics' Circle in London and needed three sponsors to do so. Her three were me, a Catholic priest and a third, practising Catholic; so in she sailed, to our great pleasure. It upset some bien-pensant Catholics. "A Communist!" they shrieked. But shrieks tailed off in time and I still hope we were right in our liberal interpretation of things.

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