Reviews

I first saw "Storm Center" when I was eight years old. Even though the film was meant for adults, my parents respected my intelligence and maturity to think I would get the film's meaning. I did. Even though I didn't see the film again until I was an adult, I understood how brave and daring the film was. An example of this might have been that my next door neighbor kids didn't want to play "Cowboys and Indians." It was "Americans and Communists" for them. That was the mentality of 1956 America. Fear was everywhere. A right to voice an unpopular opinion was not only unpopular, but made one suspicious. Bette Davis' role as Yankee liberal librarian Alicia Hull perfectly fit in with our family. She wasn't a left-wing radical, but she did want to have the radicals have a right to speak, no matter how odious. My thought is that when this film shows up at 3 am, some Tea Party types will stay up to watch and pray Bette gets burned at the stake.

I first saw "A Man Called Peter" as a seven-year-old child in 1955. As the years pass, sometimes you forget films, even those you liked as a child. When I saw it recently on TCM, it reminded me of how I was so touched by a film meant for adults but seen through the eyes of a kid. Rev. Marshall's Jesus was seen as the guy you talked over the fence with, someone you joked with, not as a stern "Thou-Shalt-Not" type. Richard Todd was a "human" hero in Henry Koster's film, not someone with a halo attached above his brow. One other thing. One other reviewer referred to AMCP as a "Christian film made for Christians." That's a little arrogant and in many senses, untrue. Director Henry Koster made some fine films with Christian themes like this one, as well as "The Robe" and "The Bishop's Wife," but Koster's real name was Hermann Kosterlitz, who worked for the UFA studios before barely escaping the Nazis because he was Jewish. The film's beautiful score was written by Alfred Newman, the head of music at Fox then. Newman was American-born, but was of Russian/ Jewish background.