Nick-Davis.com: The Cardinal

The Cardinal
First screened and reviewed in June 2021

Director: Otto Preminger. Cast: Tom Tryon, Raf Vallone, Josef Meinrad, Carol Lynley, John Saxon, Cecil Kellaway, John Huston, Ossie Davis, Jose Duvall, Dorothy Gish, Bill Hayes, James Hickman, Peter MacLean, Maggie McNamara, Burgess Meredith, Robert Morse, Loring Smith. Screenplay: Robert Dozier (based on the novel by Henry Morton Robinson).

In Brief: Started with wide frame and epic length, then worked backward into admirably tough but unevenly served plot and theme.

VOR: ③ However trapped in bright, monumental format specific to its era, the movie at least takes thematic risks and tries delving into murky terrain.

Tom Tryon, star of Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, is handsome in a strange way—a sort of cross between Tyrone Power and Denis Lavant, with some features that pull you closer and others that shove you away. I'm not sure I would make an extraordinary case for his acting, but it's visually inspired casting, since his titular character, Fr. Stephen Fermoyle, is both easy and hard to get to know. (Learning later of his long years in the closet, before dying in 1991 of "stomach cancer," makes his ongoing air of opaque uncertainty more interesting.) Sometimes the movie captures these competing attributes of Fr. Fremoyle's manner, his thinking, and his faith within single sequences. More often, long narrative passages incline in different directions (Stephen is wise, Stephen is at sea, Stephen is devout, Stephen is questioning, Stephen is rash, Stephen is serene, Stephen for better and worse is principled), so you arrive over time at a duly complex assessment.

No question, The Cardinal is one of those stately three-hour dramas that proliferated across the 1950s and 1960s, cleaved by intermissions and heavy with noble intent. Like many of those movies, and others in the waning days of the Production Code, it's an odd mix of stodgy aesthetics and sharp-tongued jabs at longstanding taboos. Abortion, lynching, white supremacy, interfaith marriage, struggles with celibacy, and the encroach of the Third Reich: all of these emerge as major narrative concerns, with an admirably low ebb of euphemism. Still, the conservative widescreen framing dilutes the issues a little; we're aware of our own distant looking. As talented as d.p. Leon Shamroy is with color and framing, his shots don't wend all that far into the visual or moral points of view of people on any side of these conflicts. We mostly listen attentively to the lecture that's been written for us, with fingers crossed it will move at a steady clip.

Mostly, The Cardinal does that. Preminger unmistakably courts "prestige" here, but he also gives the movie some bite and some perverse edge. The sequence where Fr. Fremoyle refuses to intervene on his dying sister's behalf during a nightmarish childbirth is pretty harrowing, all the more so for following so soon after the tender way he chaperoned an ailing pastor (Burgess Meredith) through his final days. I'm less sure about the long, bloody standoff between Fr. Gillis (Ossie Davis), a Black priest in Georgia, and the local Klan members intent on routing him out. As he does with the Nazis in the third hour, Preminger evokes the curdled inhumanity of the KKK. In look, sound, motion, and behavior, they have an active degree of menace that makes them more than cardboard villains. On the other hand, the Black priest's victimization is taken almost as a given, and the Black community is mostly abstracted. By contrast, Fr. Fremoyle's own tribulation, stripped to the waist and whipped before a burning cross, is staged at some length and offered as an apex of outrage. At the end of that sequence, as of many others, Preminger seems to check his watch and realize how much of his plus-sized runtime he's already used up, so he hustles to the next chapter before this one is plausibly resolved. Best of luck, Black folks—we hardly knew ye!

Preminger, notorious for his own temper and capacities for abuse, is acute at capturing other people's nastiness, from the folksy anti-Semitism of the Catholic Fremoyles to the oddly rationalized sincerity with which one KKK foot-soldier shows up the next morning to tend his victim's wounds. These scenes, smaller in scale than more epochal or melodramatic events in The Cardinal, leave a long and bitter aftertaste. Unquestionably the movie could cut deeper, as I imagine the original novel probably does, especially regarding a midfilm quasi-romance with Romy Schneider's Viennese schoolgirl, which comes off a little dopey. You feel throughout like you're getting the Cliff's Notes to what may or may not be great literature (probably not, I'd wager). Still, I felt grateful for its risk-taking, including its refusal to make the Catholic Church the clear hero or villain of the whole, or even in most of its parts. 60s studio cinema wasn't too skilled at moral or visual messiness, but The Cardinal knows it's a dirty world and doesn't pretend that anybody's hands, including its own, are clean. Grade: B

P.S.: Nine more Best Director nominees to go, excluding the two that are lost! Only one on my list was also up for Best Picture.

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)

Academy Award Nominations:
	Best Director: Otto Preminger
	Best Supporting Actor: John Huston
	Best Cinematography (Color): Leon Shamroy
	Best Art Direction–Set Decoration (Color): Lyle R. Wheeler; Gene Callahan
	Best Costume Design (Color): Donald Brooks
	Best Film Editing: Louis R. Loeffler

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
★	Best Picture (Drama)
	Best Actress (Drama): Romy Schneider
	Best Actor (Drama): Tom Tryon
	Best Supporting Actor: John Huston
	Best Film Promoting International Understanding

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