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PRETENDERS The Shoes of the Fisherman belongs to Anthony Quinn who, as a Russian pope sounding like Spyros Skouras, walks around with a surprisingly subdued and occasionally winning ingratiation to help prevent the eggshells underneath him from breaking. A losing battle: the mini-cracks already apparent before his papal election open as fissures once we hear the embarrassing dialogue. Listening to David Janssen as an adulterous network correspondent bickering with his wife-doctor Barbara Jefford isn’t meant to be camp, not even with the lowest standards applied, but we wish it had been. Why they’re married isn’t made clear; they’re not hitched in the book. And Janssen’s got a scolding coming from his boss: detailing to his television audience the pomp and circumstance governing the death of the pontiff (who else but John Gielgud), his voice so pours on the soothing reverential solemnity as to be a mockable breach of journalistic neutrality. Is the camera still transmitting live when he gestures the sign of the cross? Laurence Olivier, Vittorio De Sica, Leo McKern and Gielgud struggle against the odds, and no one more hopelessly than Oskar Werner who as the self-tortured Telemond has one incredulous scene after another explaining away his philosophy about God. Author Morris L. West can’t blame adapters John Patrick and James Kennaway too much: West’s own philosophic theology mumbo-jumbo must have caused his editors fits. (Except for this one wower about what Catholicism preaches that doesn’t make it into the movie: “Transcendent nonsense, which we trust in the end will make a divine logic.”) When Papa Quinn announces his meant-to-be jaw-dropping solution to feed the Chinese in order to avert a world war—absent in the highly readable, sometimes prescient novel—the St. Peter’s Square crowd, gathered from stock footage, reacts as if it’s just another Sunday blessing for the tourists. Movie audiences have been known to wonder if Jefford’s a drag queen and she doesn’t dispel the suspicion here, especially when wearing a red and white atrocity at a cocktail party hosted by the Marchesa Isa Miranda. Reliable workhorses George W. Davis and Edward Carafagno admirably replicate interiors of the Vatican, which granted some location shots. Michael Anderson directs, if we judge by what the credits tell us. Filmed in Panavision, with 70mm blowup. (Opening 11/20/1968 at the McVickers, running 14 weeks.) Oscar nominations for best art direction and original score (one of Alex North’s worst, some of which was originally intended for Kubrick’s 2001). ROLL OVER IMAGES
Text COPYRIGHT © 2000 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
