Holiday for Sinners

Played against the festivities surrounding Mardi Gras, this drama highlights the frustrations of a doctor and priest respectively: the former because his dedicated work cannot relieve the pain and suffering that fill the world he knows; the latter because his idealistic intentions are victimized by the church's bureaucracy. Most notable in this film is an outstanding performance by Keenan Wynn as a punchdrunk former fighter, a childhood pal of the doctor and priest. Surely his finest performance, in a role that challenges him as no other had done, Wynn is heart-rending in developing a character who is trying, without success, to retain a last shred of dignity and sense of self-worth. What could easily have been over-played is handled with sensitivity and restraint. Keenan Wynn.....of all people!

From a naturalistic Hamilton Basso novel, Days Before Lent, this is an adult melodrama about three childhood friends, a doctor, a priest, and a boxer,who develop in very different directions, but all leading to a dead end. The priest (Richard Anderson) wants to create a clinic for the poor but is frustrated by the church hierarchy, the doctor (Gig Young) wants to leave his hardscrabble practice and join a research team in India but discovers that he would have to leave his aristocratic fiancée (Janice Rule) back in New Orleans, and the battered boxer, a has-been who is going blind (Keenan Wynn), is merely trying to survive from drink to drink. The performances are more than merely competent, Keenan Wynn's in particular, but the delight is in the urbane and intelligent dialogue by Albert Bezzerides. The melodrama unfolds against Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but very little of what happens is peculiar to that unique city (even the breakfast pastries are called doughnuts rather than beignets).

But I think that Keenan Wynn is the main thing to remember from this movie, the most interesting. For the rest, the characters study is not always exciting, just a common drama which has many difficulties to find its marks. Not bad, but not more. Gerald Mayer is a director whose films have never excited me that much, mostly dramas such as this one. I suppose he wished to be too much intellectual, and his movies were not distributed, released in France; so no one knows his filmography from this side of the Atlantic, except maybe DIAL 1119. The most worth from him. That's my opinion. This one is not a junk, just a common drama.

This belongs to a small and select group of movies. These are the big-studio movies with known performers that are, nevertheless, absolutely awful. Another in this category is "The Guilt Of Janet Ames," which is at least more amusingly terrible.

Maybe Gig Young wanted to play an idealistic tough-guy doctor. Maybe Keenan Wynn wanted to show his chops playing a down-and-out fighter battling blindness. Someone must have had a reason of some sort for casting them in these roles.

The story about three boyhood friends takes place in New Orleans; yet many of the players, Wynn most noticeably, affect heavy Bronx accents. (The third friend is a Roman Catholic priest. His part seems to have been trimmed to almost nothing in the print I saw.)

Wynn seems to be wearing contact lenses that make his pupils appear cloudy. His performance isn't bad, really, but he is cast against type and in a one-dimensional role. It's a no-win situation. As is the whole movie.

In brief, the screenplay is a mess, lacking in both direction and point. It looks like it's supposed to follow three story threads, namely, three childhood friends still living in a seedy part of New Orleans. However, one thread, the priest, pretty much evaporates, while the other two, the ex-fighter and the doctor, simply flounder from one scene to the next, reaching a climax so abruptly awkward, they may have run out of film. If there's a governing concept to the pottage, I can't find it

Too bad, because there's a lot of talent involved. Campbell and Rule especially shine in supporting parts, even though Wynn spreads on the punch-drunk fighter pretty thick. What really puzzles me, however, is the talent behind the scenes. Writer Bezzerides is responsible for some of the best noirs of the time, e.g. On Dangerous Ground (1952), Thieves' Highway (1949); at the same time, producer John Houseman was a long-time prestige producer and collaborator with Orson Welles. Given these proved track records, what's on screen here stacks up as a genuine puzzlement. There must be an inside story and I suspect it has something to do with the studio, MGM, which was a late comer to B-movie b&w and not much good at it, anyway. Whatever the reason, at least this odd misfire plays off the colorful background of New Orleans Mardi Gras, which is about the only reason to watch.