Journey Into Light

The Hollywood film industry has often been accused of ignoring the issue of religious faith. This is probably not because (as some people no doubt think) that the film industry is filled full of Godless Satanists. Rather, it is because filmmakers simply do not wish to offend.

Here is a rare film that has a clergyman as a protagonist. Sterling Hayden portrays the Pastor who has a very deep crisis of faith after his alcoholic wife commits suicide. He finds his way to and around skid row. His Journey is a path to a redemption that he has not actually been seeking.

Thomas Mitchell is great in this as well. Actually, he's doing his Doc Boone act from STAGECOACH all over again.

This independent production could easily be taken for one of those semi-professional cinematic Sunday school sermons intended for church halls were it not for the menacing presence of Sterling Hayden in the lead and the contradictory visual stimuli of Elwood Bredell's crisp, unsparing documentary-style photography of skid row (Weegee, no less, was a technical consultant on the film), yet populated by an extraordinary collection of familiar Hollywood faces ranging from H.B.Warner to former Keystone Kop Hank Mann. (John Berkes, who is a standout as the piano-playing Racky, died shortly after the production wrapped.)

After feeling that both God and his congregation have forsaken him by abandoning his alcoholic wife to a miserable fate, the Reverend Hayden angrily rejects both, tears off his dog collar and spends a remarkable amount of the film's relatively short running time scraping ignominiously along the lower depths of Los Angeles while vehemently badmouthing God at every opportunity. This being Hollywood during the early fifties, surely he's eventually going to regain his faith and it will all end upliftingly? It sure takes him a long time, and comes suspiciously abruptly!

Sterling Hayden makes a strong impression in this severely dated story about a man's loss of faith, and his reclamation. For a 1951 major studio release, it plays like a Depression Era programmer, although sanitized due to post-early '30s industry censorship.

When his alcoholic wife Peggy Webber commits suicide, Hayden the reverend rebels and thinking God doesn't exist and men of the cloth are hypocrites, he quickly becomes a bum, with director Stuart Heisler depicting a quaint, stereotyped milieu of the Lower Depths filled with bums and flophouses. He's befriended by a charlatain (warm and fuzzy Thomas Mitchell) who's a petty criminal lording over the bums, but at the halfway point, the movie takes a corny turn as New World Mission preacher Ludwig Donath takes Sterling under his wing and he soon falls in love with Donath's blind daughter Viveca Lindfors. The movie turns overly sentimental at this point en route to a contrived, convenient happy ending.

Hayden is quite convincing as a bitter, self-pitying guy with a chip on his shoulder, but turning him into a romantic do-gooder hero is completely unbelievable. Lindfors' acting chops punch across her ultra-sympathetic character.

Yes if I had closed my eyes I could almost swear it was Ingrid Bergman speaking the female lead as the minister's blind daughter.Sterling Hayden usually played unsmiling granite face parts and this was no exception but I did see him smile once on the fairground ride as he accompanied Viveca.Thomas Mitchell crops up in many Hollywood films most notably as Gerald O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" (1939) and "It's Wonderful Life" (1946), the year of my birth.I believe one of the "bums" also was in the latter film as this actor made a speciality of playing these drunks/down and out parts.The film is about spiritual redemption for an ordained minister who loses his faith and has to come to terms with the death of his drunken wife, (who incidentally had a passing resemblance to the late Jennifer Jones in some scenes).

I found some scenes rather mawkish and over sentimental and found it hard to believe that an intelligent man could stoop so low as to reach the lowest rung on the social ladder.Tonight was my first viewing of this film courtesy of Youtube.com and I rated it 6/10.

When Pastor Sterling Hayden's wife kills herself, he loses all faith in G*d, abandons his comfortable suburban parish and winds up on the Bowery. He's mentored by sly Thomas Mitchell, who collects commissions from every bum. He thinks he sees great possibilities in Hayden .... by his standards. But when kindly Ludwig Donath and his blind daughter, Viveca Lindfors, rescue him and give him a job as janitor at their mission, he drifts into an armed truce with G*d.

Hayden grumbles his way through the role, with most of the interest being provided by the bums, including H. B. Warner, Jane Darwell, Paul Guilfoyle, Billie Bird, and O. Z. Whitehead. For a trained cleric, Hayden keeps making theologically unsound arguments in a very unpleasant way. However we can be certain that under the direction of Stuart Heisler, things will turn out as ordained.