Cover of Monsieur Vincent

The year is 1617, and a new priest, Vincent de Paul, arrives in a French town which has had no priest for a long time.

It shows.  One of the themes of the 1947 biopic, Monsieur Vincent, is the demanding struggle of the clergyman to tame the unchurched, the brutish, the shallow.  Father Vincent’s first stop in the little town is the filthy, abandoned local church, an enormous hovel with cobwebs.  Many, not all, of the townspeople are dirt poor, and Vincent, formerly a priest in Paris, wishes to live with and help them.  At first they are also sorely afraid of a nonexistent plague.  The sequence in which Vincent holds a funeral service for a woman thought to have had the plague, while a crowd of reluctant people walks up and starts crossing themselves, points up a European Catholicism still perfectly imperishable, of course, in the seventeenth century.  Director Maurice Cloche handles this scene, and all the other scenes, as he ought to have.

The best handling is by the playwright Jean Anouilh, who wrote the script, purveying such other themes as the question of what to devote one’s life to and the rich’s responsibility, if any, to the poor.  With flair Pierre Fresnay enacts Vincent, and the good costumes make us wish the film was in color.  All in all, a worthy motion picture.

(In French with English subtitles)

Spring Breakdown (2010), by Melody Carlson, is one of the short books in a series, for young adults, about six teenaged girls.  As a brief summary inside the book puts it:  “The wealthy fashion students in Mrs. Carter’s boardinghouse spend a quiet spring break in Florida until . . .”  Well, until spring breakdown hits.  Fun time is over.

The girls are typical teenagers except that two or three of them are Christians, among them DJ and Taylor.  Like the unsaved girls (and lover-boys), these two have their faults, albeit for Taylor one of them isn’t boozing now that she is a spiritually delivered ex-alcoholic.  THIS isn’t ordinary, but all kinds of ordinary incidents roll into this little bailiwick.  The only bailiwick the girls know, it is a mixed bag of the mundane and the fleshly.  There is a Rockabilly dance.  DJ and Taylor do some harmless skinny dipping at night.  Two other girls, Eliza and Casey, get drunk after a bumpy photo shoot.  There are, however, some spiritual and emotional challenges for DJ (the main character) pushing to the side all the kids-will-be-kids occurrences.

Carlson’s prose is imperfect—for one thing, she keeps misusing “hopefully”—but her narrative is entertaining and her dialogue is serviceable.  It’s a Christian book, but not a preachy one.  And it’s meant to appeal to a broad audience.  I would rather see devout teens reading Spring Breakdown than buying a fundamentally insignificant Adele or Beyoncé CD.

Cover via Amazon

The commercial Western novels from earlier decades usually had their cowboy heroes fall in love with a young woman who had not yet married.  The 1956 Western movie, Seven Men from Now—it too is commercial, of course—offers a hero with a sure liking for a young woman who is married, but he staunchly refuses to start anything.  A man of principle, he is played by Randolph Scott, and the seven men of the title are the gold robbers who murdered Scott’s wife and are now being pursued by him.

‘Tis strange that Ben Stride, Scott’s character, doesn’t appear to be suffering much over his wife’s death, and neither does the aforementioned young woman (Gail Russell) seem devastated by the vile murder of her husband (Walter Reed).  It’s as though the producers opposed any big-deal, negative emotion (and if they hadn’t, could Scott have delivered?).

All the same, this Budd Boetticher Western, written by Burt Kennedy, is dramatically piercing.  A perfect, and not strident, performance comes from Lee Marvin with his big personality.  Russell, Reed and others provide a handful of not-bad performances. . . In more ways than one, Seven Men is colorful, another ’50s picture proving how well literal color works for Westerns.  Above all, it is just as entertaining as those Western novels from earlier decades—those I have read, anyway.

The nocturnal robber in the 1948 He Walked by Night ends up murdering a police officer and thereby brings down on himself a load of professional energy for his seizure.  Played by Richard Basehart in what is supposed to be a true story, Roy The Killer is a loner obsessed with electronics, for, after all, he himself is an alienating machine.  No emotion, no conscience.  He even shoots and leaves paralyzed a second cop.

He is L.A.’s public enemy no. 1 (so it seems) and gets his comeuppance in the huge dark city sewers.  The pursuit there is a visually striking scene, with direction by Alfred L. Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann.  Crane Wilbur is the main writer for this filmic procedural with good gunfights.