I loved this film as a teenager and also read the book several times. It almost led me to become a priest, a fate I happily escaped. Nevertheless, it remains an author's foolish fantasy luckily (for him) published and made into a movie.
American bishops (cardinals if you must) were and are comparative idiots. They are selected for their loyalty and tolerated for their cash. The multilingual international sophisticate Stephen Fermoyle, a working class Bostonian with a melodramatic family history, is an impossibility.
Only Otto Preminger could have selected such a distinguished cast and then chosen a nobody like Tom Tryon, who went on to write horror novels, as the lead. It is a bit like casting Richard Beymer in West Side Story. I have always wondered if there hasn't been a male version of the casting couch going around.
It is in fact quite difficult to convey the complexities and inanities of the 20th century Catholic church in a movie. Shoes of the Fisherman, Monsignor, even that one with Jack Lemmon, they all get it wrong. Make a movie about blankety-blankety, the pastor of the church where I grew up. A former chief of navy chaplains (that's a two-star admiral, folks), an alcoholic who can't face the outrage from people when the archdiocese of blankety-blankety forces him to build a new church outside the bounds of custom, a man who has to deal with both the prior and the current obviously gay cardinals. Make that movie, and get it right.
American bishops (cardinals if you must) were and are comparative idiots. They are selected for their loyalty and tolerated for their cash. The multilingual international sophisticate Stephen Fermoyle, a working class Bostonian with a melodramatic family history, is an impossibility.
Only Otto Preminger could have selected such a distinguished cast and then chosen a nobody like Tom Tryon, who went on to write horror novels, as the lead. It is a bit like casting Richard Beymer in West Side Story. I have always wondered if there hasn't been a male version of the casting couch going around.
It is in fact quite difficult to convey the complexities and inanities of the 20th century Catholic church in a movie. Shoes of the Fisherman, Monsignor, even that one with Jack Lemmon, they all get it wrong. Make a movie about blankety-blankety, the pastor of the church where I grew up. A former chief of navy chaplains (that's a two-star admiral, folks), an alcoholic who can't face the outrage from people when the archdiocese of blankety-blankety forces him to build a new church outside the bounds of custom, a man who has to deal with both the prior and the current obviously gay cardinals. Make that movie, and get it right.