STRANGE CARGO (1940)

This Frank Borzage movie is always described as an "allegory", which is Hollywood-speak for, "If you buy this stuff, great and God help you, but if you don't, it's symbolic, okay?" It begins as a steamy, or at least sweaty prison melodrama, with Clark Gable leading a gang of cutthroats (Peter Lorre, Eduardo Ciannelli, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, et al.) on an escape attempt from Devil's Island, with pop-eyed hooker Joan Crawford in tow. Their number also includes Prisoner No. 36, played by an actor named Ian Hunter, who disappointingly does not wear shades and lead the cast in a rousing chorus of "All the Young Dudes." But he does demonstrate navigational skills that would blow Captain Bligh's mind, a talent for the occasional miracle, and a general omniscience. It's as if Steve McQueen's character in The Great Escape had turned out to be the Messiah in human form, in which case he probably would have been able to have cleared that barbed wire even without a motorcycle. Under this joker's smiling influence, Gable starts pitching woo at Crawford by reading her the hottest passages in the Bible, the most hardened sinners in the company are made to see the small-minded errors of their ways, and the repentable start repenting all over the place. If this spirit of wanting to make up for past sins had reached the filmmakers, they would have burned the negative, but miracles can only go so far in Hollywood.




THE EXORCIST (1973)

William Friedkin's horror blockbuster is an odd memento of a moment when the forces of liberation and repression were going at each other tooth and nail; taking full advantage of new standards of what could be shown in mainstream American movies (and of what special-effects artists could do), it uses then-unprecedented levels of violence, profanity, and scare imagery to pound home its story about how the Jesuit supermen of the Catholic church use the tools of their faith to battle a demon and save a little girl, whose mother may have left her vulnerable to attack by the forces of darkness by being an elitist Hollywood liberal and working woman who's gotten a divorce. But what's really impressive in terms of religious propaganda is how cleverly the filmmakers protected themselves against attack by the forces of censorship. A few years earlier, the Catholic Legion of Decency, with its condemnations of such films as Baby Doll, Breathless, and Jules and Jim (not to mention Strange Cargo!) had been the censorious bane of Hollywood. By 1973 they were much diminished but still around, and they and other religious groups might have been expected to raise holy hell about The Exorcist, especially since this mega-budgeted major-studio release managed to evade an X rating. Thinking ahead, Friedkin made the film with the "cooperation" of Georgetown University and hired three Jesuits to serve as advisors, even using them in the movie; one of them, William O'Malley, wound up with the substantial supporting role of Father Karras's best friend and confidant. (Friedkin also responded to tabloid rumors of eerie things going on during production by asking a priest to "exorcise" the set.) Once the film was ready for market, he sent forth his paid spokesmen to assure the world that the movie was, if not officially church-approved, a basically edifying experience whose obscenity was meant to make viewers hate obscenity. It worked — in the end, there were probably more secular liberals who publicly objected to The Exorcist than there were religious protesters. (That year, the Catholic Legion of Decency gave the movie a pass while wagging its wrinkled finger at High Plains Drifter and The Wicker Man.) Friedkin was lucky he made the movie when he did. By the end of the seventies, the Protestant-identified religious right had taken over from the Catholic Church as the national scold, and if they'd been around in 1973, they probably would have demanded to know why a good Southern Baptist couldn't have cured little Regan by whupping the devil out of her with a good hickory switch.



BRIGHTON ROCK (1947)

There was never any question that this worthwhile proto-noir adaptation of Graham Greene's fantastic gangster novel would have a strong religious content. Greene's novels always did — usually featuring, as William Burroughs put it, "a bad Catholic on a mission he didn't believe in". Teenage gangster Pinkie Brown — played here with a combination of innocence and menace by a young Richard Attenborough — is a bad Catholic, all right: he cares nothing for God or Heaven, but believes only in Hell and damnation. What makes the film really surprising is the final form the religious content takes. In the book as well as the movie, Pinkie cajoles an innocent young girl, Rose, into marriage in order to prevent her from testifying against him in court; she knows a secret that could put him away for murder. But he despises her, her sweetness, her stupidity and her humble dreams, and when she asks him to record a message on a novelty record machine confessing his love for her, he instead records a message of vile hatred, resentment and loathing. In the book, after Pinkie's death, the record is all Rose has left of him, and we are left with the certainty that she will listen to his hateful words and be damned as surely as he was. This grim ending was apparently a bit much for the British film censors, who decreed not only that the record be made to skip so that all she hears is Pinkie saying "I love you" again and again, but that the film end with a close-up of the light hitting a crucifix in her shabby apartment — implying that Pinkie Brown, one of the most terrifying, soulless, nihilistic villains in modern fiction, may in fact have been saved by a grace that completely subverts the intentions of the man who created him.




THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Directed by the devoutly Catholic author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, it was again no surprise that The Ninth Configuration — a little-seen film of astonishing power with a tremendous script — would have some religious content. The intriguing part is how it develops — slowly, confusingly, subtly — from a hilarious, gripping psychological thriller into a full-blown Catholic apologia, a filmed theodicy where Stacy Keach (as the tortured Marine, Colonel Kane, standing in for Jesus as he desperately attempts to prove to his battle-maddened patients that goodness still exists in the world) and Scott Wilson (as the stand-in for Adam, the lonely and cynical astronaut Billy Cutshaw, who won't go to the moon because if there's no God, and he dies so far away from home, he'll be more alone than anyone has ever been) give the performances of a lifetime. Blatty's convictions creep in gradually, until an almost unbearably hokey miracle ending that only doesn't sink the whole film because it's been so electrifying up until that point. How successful Kane's (and Blatty's) act of heroism truly is might still be open to debate, especially given the shocking manner in which it plays out, but what precedes it — hilarious, compelling, violent, frustrating and surreal by turns — is definitely worth watching.




INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

Inherit the Wind — the play and the film — dramatizes the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s, when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan went head-to-head over the teaching of evolution in a Tennessee public school. It was a creative interpretation, to be sure, and meant more to act as a hedge against anti-communism than to extend arguments about natural selection. But it was also based on actual court testimony, and much of its anti-clerical tone was genuine; the character of Matthew Brady accurately reflects the hysterical fundamentalists arguments coughed up by Bryan during his testimony, and the end result of the trial — thanks in no small part to the huge amount of publicity it generated — was to embitter generations of evangelicals against the secular world, from which they largely retreated. Until the 1950s, that is. In the Eisenhower era, charismatic fundamentalism was on the rise again, and Inherit the Wind was already at risk of being tarred as subversive, thanks to its thinly veiled critique of McCarthy. In order to make its message palatable to viewers, the writers made a number of changes; the character of E.K. Hornbeck (based on the immortal skeptic, H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial) was shown in the end to be something of a sad clown who tore down a great man to fill the aching hole where his soul should be. Bad enough that the role went to Gene Kelly, a gregarious actor entirely unsuited to play a raging cynic like Mencken; the portrayal was also entirely unfair to the real Mencken (who had recently died). Mencken and Darrow were both proud of what they'd done in Tennessee, and Mencken, far from slinking away with his tail between his legs, left in triumph, having seen the defeat of a know-nothing fundamentalism he saw as poisonous and the demise of a politician he saw as insincere at worst and ignorant at best. The script's most ridiculous bit of public assurance, though, comes at the very end, when Drummond (the character meant to be Darrow, played by Spencer Tracy), having spent the film's entire running time mocking the notion that the Bible should be used as a guideline for the teaching of science in school, picks up a copy of the Good Book, weighs it alongside Darwin's Origin of Species, and places them both in his briefcase, clearly sending the message that they're of equal value. Don't worry, America: nothing to see here!

— Kent M. Beeson, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce