Clerical Errors

Here we get into one of the more troubling areas of le bad-priest cinema. Anytime a bunch of people living in Hollywood, New York or London--whose last names do not end in "i" or begin with "O"--decide to get together and make a film about the Catholic Church, they run the tiny risk of misinterpreting esoteric points of Catholic theology, and frequently end up with movies that are even stupider than they had intended them to be. For example, in The Rosary Murders, Donald Sutherland is told by his pastor that Catholic dogma forbids baptizing children born out of wedlock. This is not true: ask the millions of Chinese babies baptized against their will in the 1940s. The same is true of A Prayer for the Dying. Once a priest has witnessed a murder, he is under no obligation to suppress the identity of the criminal, even if the criminal subsequently confesses his guilt to the priest. This is particularly true if the criminal looks like Mickey Rourke. The lesson to be learned? When making a movie dealing with subtle nuances of Catholic theology, hire a screenwriter named Patrick O'Shaughnessy, not one named Elmore Leonard.

Priest movies are loaded with repeat offenders. Jason Miller appears in three priest movies (The Exorcist, The Exorcist III, Monsignor), as does Robert De Niro (We're No Angels, True Confessions, The Mission) and Charles Durning (Mass Appeal, True Confessions, The Rosary Murders), who bounces back and forth between being a fat, low-energy Brian Dennehy and a thin, low-energy John Goodman. Richard Burton also appears in three (The Robe, Becket, Exorcist II: The Heretic), while Anthony Quinn actually appears in four: The Shoes of the Fisherman, Guns for San Sebastian, Behold a Pale Horse and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Bill Conti rewrote Samuel Barber's music for Mass Appeal before rewriting The Chieftains' music for A Prayer for the Dying. Jogging clerics figure prominently in The Exorcist, Mass Appeal and The Rosary Murders. And even though Daphne Zuniga has only appeared in one bad-priest film to date, she is still young enough and awful enough to have at least three more cracks at it. The one bright spot in all this: Zeljko Ivanek is probably not going to reprise his role as a brash, bisexual seminarian in Mass Appeal II.

Watching movies about priests drives home a number of important truths about life on this planet, truths that are all too easy to forget as we blindly pursue our daily tasks. Here are a handful of these truths: Christopher Reeves really is the worst actor that ever lived; Donald Sutherland really is a charter member of Bob & Ray's Slow. . . Talkers. ..of. ..America . . . Club; when Robert De Niro is bad (_We're No Angels_), he is worse than Sean Penn. (What can you say about a movie in which Sean Penn and Robert De Niro are out-acted by Hoyt Axton? Well, for starters you can say, "Boy, that movie sucked.")

And then there is The Strange Case of Linda Blair. When Blair starred in The Exorcist 19 years ago, she received almost universal acclaim for her portrayal of a sweet, 12-year-old girl whose body is suddenly taken over by Satan. But with the passage of time, it has now become apparent that Linda Blair was always possessed by Satan, and that the kudos she achieved should have been for being a 12-year-old demon talented enough to deceive an audience into thinking she was ever a sweet, 12-year-old girl.

Much the same thought occurred to me after watching The Poseidon Adventure, one of those brain-dead, big-budget, all-star extravaganzas that could only have been made in the 1970s, the era of disco and legionnaires' disease and The Bay City Rollers and Jimmy Carter. Although Gene Hackman plays a minister rather than a priest in this film, he is such a complete asshole that he could easily be mistaken for many Catholic priests, or, for that matter, for Charles Durning, so we will include him here. The Poseidon Adventure chronicles the daring efforts of nine characters played by Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall, Red Buttons, Pamela Sue Martin and Jack Albertson to escape from an ocean liner that has turned completely upside down. Watching the movie, I could not help thinking how much fun going to the movies would have been in the ensuing decade if Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall, Red Buttons, Pamela Sue Martin and Jack Albert-son had actually been on a real-life ocean liner and had drowned. Still, T_he Poseidon Adventure_ is worth seeing for four reasons: 1) Carol Lynley wears hot pants the entire movie; 2) Pamela Sue Martin wears hot pants the entire movie; 3) Stella Stevens wears panties, high heels and a man's shirt the entire movie; and 4) Shelley Winters keeps all her clothes on for the entire movie.

In addition to Gene Hackman's insane tirades against God, the last one conducted while suspended above a fiery cauldron--not a good place to be fucking with the Lord of All Creation, Whom you will be seeing in about 20 seconds on the other side of reality--the movie is memorable because it confirms that Pamela Sue Martin has the most enormous forehead in the history of show business; because it dispells any lingering doubts anyone might have that Ernest Borgnine is the second-worst actor of all time; and because it allows the moviegoing public to see Shelley Winters act underwater (she's better down there,- she can't talk). After her dip, Winters succumbs to a stroke and tells Hackman: "Enough is enough." I think Shelley knew the score.

In preparing this article, I watched 21 different films with priests as the major protagonists. While doing so, I mentally ranked the films in order of artistic excellence and faithfulness to Catholic dogma. I rated the films on a scale of 0 to 100, deducting points if a film omitted ominous Gregorian chants (5 points), belfries (3 points), statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary with eyes that appear to move (3 points), tunnels/catacombs (5 points), prostitutes with hearts of gold (7points), Latin mumbo jumbo (8 points), nuns making eyes at priests (4 points), the "Kyrie Eleison" (3 points) or Charles Durning (15 points). Based on these criteria, I provide the following rankings:

Clerical Rank Best Worst

Priest I Confess Last Rites

Fake Priest The Left Hand of God We're No Angels

Monsignor True Confessions Monsignor

Bishop The Bishop's Wife The Bishop's Wife*

Archbishop Becket Romero

Cardinal The Godfather, Part III The Cardinal

Pope The Shoes of the Fisherman The Pope Must Diet

Monks The Name of the Rose Stealing Heaven

Exorcists The Exorcist Exorcist II, III**

*This is the only movie about bishops that I could find.

**A tie. Only a Jesuit could tell which of these monstrosities is the worst. And whatever my other failings, I am no Jesuit.

Some of these movies contain memorable scenes that will remain rooted in my consciousness for decades to come. For example, I really enjoyed the scene in Monsignor where Genevieve Bujold says to Christopher Reeve: "Do you think God was planning to waste a miracle on us?" But Genevieve, he already had. He got both of you jobs in the movies.

Another line I cannot get out of my head is: "You might ask Sister Margaret Mary of the Holy Martyrs." This is a throwaway line someone says to Donald Sutherland in The Rosary Murders, yet for some reason within its terse, syntactical borders it seems to capture everything that one needs to know about the nunnish subculture. "You might ask Sister Margaret Mary of the Holy Martyrs." And if she's not available, try Sister Immaculata Redemptoris of the Holy Innocent Bystanders.

I also took solace from Sean Penn's sermon in We're No Angels, where he says: "Be nice to strangers, 'cause sometimes you're a stranger too." Add to that a hooker's remark to Father Tom Berenger in Last Rites: "I didn't know that priests hung out with assholes." Who did you think they hung out with, honey? Daphne Zuniga?

While watching these hopeless, immoral, cretinous priest films, one question that kept going through my head was: Who will burn in Hell the longest for making one of these things? Artistically speaking, it was hard to choose between the moronic We're No Angels, the depraved Last Rites, the sacrilegious Monsignor and the boisterously shitheaded A Prayer for the Dying. Yet, at the last moment, my Catholic upbringing told me to eliminate We're No Angels, which, despite its truly awesome stupidity, was only a misfiring comedy, and also to rule out A Prayer for the Dying, whose central character was not the good priest badly played by Bob Hoskins but the merry psychopath convincingly played by Mickey Rourke.

This narrowed things down to Last Rites and Monsignor. Speaking in purely cinematic terms, it was impossible to choose between these celluloid abortions. Last Rites featured a terrible actor playing a mob priest; Monsignor featured a terrible actor playing a mob priest. Last Rites featured a terrible actress playing a psychotic hooker; Monsignor featured a terrible actress playing a neurotic, slutty nun. In Last Rites, Tom Berenger's childhood friend is a Mafia hood; in Monsignor, Christopher Reeve's best friend is a Mafia hood. Deciding which of these two flicks is the worst is like being a judge at the 25th Annual Putrescent Fruit of the Year Awards and having to choose between a rotten apricot and a festering nectarine.

Ultimately, it came down to a question of good and evil. Since the artistic distinctions between these films were so negligible, the only way to decide which was the most morally repugnant film was to tote up the number of sins committed in each one. It was a pretty impressive list:

Mortal sins in Last Rites Mortal Sins in Monsignor

Priest sleeps with a hit Priest sleeps with a nun

woman who is not his sister

Priest sleeps with a hit Priest sells cigarettes to

woman who is his sister the Mafia

Priest leads Mafia to his Priest leads the Mafia to

girlfriend so they can ice her his best friend, so

they can ice him

Priest leaves Catholic Church Priest stays in church so

to become capo di tutti he can keep investing

i capi in his dad's company money with Mafia

Venial sins in Last Rites Venial sins in Monsignor

Repeated profanity, fantasizing Not much profanity,

about sleeping with one's but a lot of fibbing

sister, mild fibbing

On balance, I guess you would have to say that Last Rites is the more immoral movie of the two--this sleeping with your hit-person sister does not look good at all--and that everyone associated with it will burn in hell for all eternity. But we mustn't overlook intangibles. Last Rites is so bad that it immediately went to video, so the number of impressionable youths who have seen it is quite limited. But because Frank Yablans was the producer of Monsignor, it was actually released theatrically, and actually filled up movie screens everywhere, poisoning the minds of children all over the country, if not the world. In terms of evil inflicted on humanity, it has probably had a far greater and far more pernicious effect than Last Rites.

Then we have to factor in the Christopher Reeve thing. When I say that Christopher Reeve is the worst actor that ever lived, I am not speaking off the top of my head; I have seen all of Lou Diamond Phillips's movies, and am no stranger to the oeuvres of Don Johnson and John Ritter. Yet this guy is head-and-shoulders below these guys. Indeed, Christopher Reeve's continued ability to find work would seem to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the universe has no purpose and that life has no meaning. If God truly loved us, He still might not do something about Daphne Zuniga, but He would definitely do something about Christopher Reeve. Still, in God's defense, it is not His fault. Every human being possesses his own free will, and if we choose to exercise our free will by going to see movies like Monsignor and Exorcist II, then we all deserve to burn in hell.

See you in hell, Mr. Yablans.

___________

Joe Queenan wrote "The King and His Court" for our January/February issue.

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