Films of Faith Collection (The Nun's Story / The Shoes of the Fisherman / The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima)
by Fred Zinnemann, John Brahm, Michael Anderson
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Actor: Angela Clarke, Anthony Quinn, Audrey Hepburn, Gilbert Roland, Peter FinchDirector: Fred Zinnemann, John Brahm, Michael Anderson
Brand: Warner Brothers
Writer: Crane Wilbur
Writer: James Kennaway
Writer: James O'Hanlon
Writer: John Patrick
Writer: Kathryn Hulme
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 416 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-04-04
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 75622
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA: This story recreates the events that began in May 1917, when three shepherd children witness a vision of a beautiful lady in a grotto just outside the village of Fatima, Portugal. At a time when World War I rages across Central Europe and Portugal is locked in the grip of a repressive, anti-religious government, their report ignites the religious fervor of the villag
DVD Reviews of Films of Faith Collection (The Nun's Story / The Shoes of the Fisherman / The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima)
DVD Review: A mixed bag: one masterpiece, one melodrama and one mess
Summary: 4 Stars
Seen again for the first time in a couple of decades, Warner's beautifully restored DVD of The Nun's Story is a real surprise, avoiding the mawkish sentimentality that usually accompanied old Hollywood's approach to Catholicism with a sober, quiet unostentatious majesty and a mostly successful attempt to avoid cliché (there's no romance with Peter Finch's surgeon as you might expect). Fred Zinnemann, who now seems on the verge of being completely forgotten, constantly does things slightly differently - not just jump cutting from continent to continent, but avoiding convention in subtle ways. When Sister Luke departs for the Congo, not only is her departure handled in the bare minimum of shots but they're also not the ones you usually expect: no head on shots of the ship leaving for the open sea, but instead zooming out from a sideways view before cutting to the ship's wake. The visual economy never feels Spartan, but at the same time it fits the subject matter perfectly.
Audrey Hepburn too is something of a revelation. Too often an irritatingly kooky pixie clotheshorse, here she abandons many of her usual affectations that you either find charming or maddening to give the kind of sincere and grounded performance that was too rarely asked of her. It's a quietly powerful and surprisingly honest film that stands up to the test of time. Shame that for some reason Zinnemann gets Dean Jagger to voice one of the bit players as well, which briefly takes you out of the movie before a sudden act of unexpected violence shocks you back in, but there's little else to fault in it.
The only extra on the DVD is the original trailer.
As Pope operas go, The Shoes of the Fisherman is pretty enjoyable. Dated but shot on a lavish scale in the days when doorstop novels were turned into star-studded epics rather than TV miniseries, it skirts close to guilty pleasure territory without ever providing any unintentional laughs as Anthony Quinn's political prisoner is freed to act as a mediator between the Church and Russia only to find himself elected Pope. Laurence Olivier delivers the bacon as the Russian premier in one of the first of his hammy blockbuster supporting turns he took to supplement his meagre £150 a week salary at the National Theatre, with John Gielgud turning up for one scene as an ailing pontiff while Oskar Werner, Leo McKern and Vittorio De Sica get the more substantial roles. Too much screen time is wasted on David Jansenn and Barbara Jefford's marital problems, an irrelevant subplot that simply gets discarded entirely in the last third, and the political crisis in the background with a starving China threatening world war isn't entirely convincing. Yet there is some substance there even if the politics, both theological and secular, are somewhat confused - how many roadshow pictures feature a philosopher-priest (Werner) under investigation for developing the theories of Teillhard de Chardin? There's even one surprisingly touching scene between Leo McKern and Quinn near the end of the film about loneliness, and Alex North's grandiose score, incorporating as its main theme part of his rejected score for 2001, is quite magnificent. And if you've ever wanted to see Zorba the Pope reciting the Shema Yisrael, this is the movie for you.
It's just a shame that the recent DVD runs into synch problems in the last third and that the making-of featurette has been cropped from 1.33:1 to 1.85:1, meaning that the extracts from the film in it are cropped both horizontally and vertically!
Shot in the spectacularly crappy WarnerColor system, the unconvincing color is the least of the credibility problems with The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, in which any relationship to the real events at Fatima in 1917 is purely accidental (no mention of any secrets here). The kind of film that gives atheism a good name, it could probably convert the Pope to the ranks of the unbelievers so outrageously heavy-handed is its Hollywood piety. But more bizarre than the clichéd sentimentality is the fact that this isn't a film about faith at all but an astonishingly crude and cynical McCarthy era bit of anti-Communist propaganda - hey folks, even God hates Commies! The one surprise is the outright hostility with which the local Catholic priesthood is depicted: disbelieving, antagonistic and clearly doing everything possible to hush things up to protect their jobs and to avoid giving the cartoon commies an excuse to persecute them again, it does hint that someone somewhere along the production line wanted to do something a bit more daring before the saccharine won out. The fact that the film's real-life leading character saw the film and didn't like it says it all.
The DVD transfer copes as well as can be expected with the vagaries of the color system, though some interior shots are particularly grainy and unnaturalistic. The only extra is the original theatrical trailer.
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Description of Films of Faith Collection (The Nun's Story / The Shoes of the Fisherman / The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima)
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 11/13/2007 Rating: NrFred Zinnemann's epic 1959 drama The Nun's Story is a splendid showcase for Audrey Hepburn, who stars as the young nun Sister Luke, who is deeply spiritual yet conflicted about whether or not she can conform to convent life. Though the film is a mesmerizing--and quite leisurely--two and a half hours, its plot is fairly simple--young Gabrielle (Hepburn) enters the convent pledging her life to God, learns the disciplines associated with the life, receives her dream assignment of going to the Congo as a missionary nurse, and once there, is forced to face whether she is meant for the rigorous life of poverty, chastity, and most difficult of all, obedience. The film does a marvelous job of portraying the challenges of cloistered life without being either off-putting or overly romantic. And Hepburn, sometimes with only her eyes, communicates all the drive, faith, and conflict of a young woman so torn.
If you find during the 160-minute running time of The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) that you don't like the plot, wait 10 minutes. It will surely change and there will be another story thread to entice you. The screenplay is literally all over the map: Siberia, where Archbishop Kiril Lakota, played splendidly by Anthony Quinn, has been exiled to a work camp in the oppressive Soviet regime; Moscow, where a genially scene-chewing Laurence Olivier plays a Soviet ruler with history with Lakota; China, where famine threatens to bring the world of the late '60s to the brink of World War III; and Rome, where Lakota travels after being freed (and where dissolute reporter David Janssen does his best to groove on the Swinging Sixties). Yet despite its flaws, the movie's central drama is riveting: the current Pope dies suddenly, and for a good bit of the film, viewers are treated to the Vatican's inner workings on the election of a new Pope. The events unfold at a leisurely pace, which allows you to drink in the spectacle and wonder of the ancient traditions. The Alex North Oscar-nominated score is lovely, and Quinn's performance is the somber-with-a-humble-twinkle glue that holds the film together. Anyone interested in the traditions and rituals of the Vatican will find plenty to savor.
The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima tells the story--through an admittedly Hollywood prism--of one of the most beloved Catholic legends of the 20th century. Three young shepherd children in the remote Portuguese mountain town Fatima reported seeing a vision in 1917 of "a beautiful lady" who spoke to them of strife, war and peace and the love of Jesus. Soon the word spread, and throngs, teetering on mobs, gathered near the site for a glimpse of what they believed to be Mary, mother of Jesus. The children remained steadfast in their account, despite threats from the church and the government, and the final appearance of the lady, on Oct. 13, 1917, was accompanied by strange apparitions in the sky that have yet to be explained by science. The movie is well-made and -acted, especially by a radiant Susan Whitney, who plays the oldest child, Lúcia Abóbora dos Santos. The screenplay takes some liberties with the facts: the lovable jokester-sidekick character of Hugo is fictitious, and one wonders if perhaps a few of Our Lady's cautions about the multitude of evil things happening in 1917 Russia might have been heard through a Cold War filter. But the 1952 film is moving and is a reminder that big studios once routinely, and profitably, released religious-themed movies, to audiences who surely would appreciate some of the same today. --A.T. Hurley
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