Catholic Novels
Film adaptations of Catholic novels. These are novels written from a Catholic perspective, which is not to say that these novels look at all like the pious trash that is so often associated with overtly Christian works. This is also not a definitive list and the films are listed in no particular order. I will be adding more titles as I go along.
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- DirectorRonald NeameStarsMaggie SmithGordon JacksonRobert StephensAn eccentric teacher's romantic ideas about life and love impress her young pupils in 1930s Edinburgh, bringing her into direct conflict with the school's conservative headmistress.This is by far Muriel Spark's best-known work. It is witty and charming, which also leads us to forget that it is also a novel about betrayal, redemption, the inability to find redemption, and finding grace and redemption in the wrong places. The novel, even though it reads quite well, handles time in a very daring and experimental manner and the narrative constantly plays with flashbacks and flashforwards. One of the problems with this movie version is that, unlike what happens in the novel, time is reduced to a purely chronological sequence. However, some of these deficiencies in the film (which have to do with the film medium itself) are compensated by Maggie Smith's wonderful portrayal of the character of Jean Brodie.
- DirectorJohn HustonStarsBrad DourifJohn HustonDan ShorFresh out of the army, Hazel Motes attempts to open the first Church Without Christ in the small town of Taulkinham.An interesting adaptation of O'Connor's novel. The novel is both a tragedy and a comedy, and the film captures a sense of that (which also means that it can be difficult to make sense of story). O'Connor was a devout Catholic and saw the world from very much a Catholic perspective, but she lived in Georgia and the people she wrote about were Bible Belt Protestants. Both the novel and the film are interesting because what we see is a Catholic tapestry but where the actors in this tapestry are all Protestant (or semi-Protestant or Protestant-ish). To make sense of O'Connor, we need to see her stories working at two levels. The term "analogical imagination" applies very much to her work.
- DirectorJulian JarroldStarsMatthew GoodePatrick MalahideHayley AtwellA poignant story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence set in England prior to World War II.
- DirectorsJohn FordEmilio FernándezStarsHenry FondaDolores Del RíoPedro ArmendárizAnti-Catholic and anti-cleric policies in the Mexican state of Tabasco lead the revolutionary government to persecute the state's last remaining priest.John Ford's version of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. While Ford was a brilliant director, the constraints of the period and the fact moralistic Catholic groups had some such an influence in determining how priests should be represented in Hollywood films meant that his portrayal of the "whiskey priest" in the film is not altogether faithful to Greene's original version. There was something very honest about the priest in Greene's novel, and the "power and the glory" in the title paradoxically had to do with the fact that the main character was frail and all too human.
- DirectorRobert BressonStarsClaude LayduNicole LadmiralJean RiveyreA young priest taking over the parish at Ambricourt tries to fulfill his duties even as he fights a mysterious stomach ailment.Perhaps only a director like Bresson could have captured the essence of Georges Bernanos's novel. It is a story about suffering and spiritual disquiet.
- DirectorClaude MillerStarsAudrey TautouGilles LelloucheAnaïs DemoustierAn unhappily married woman struggles to break free from social pressures.François Mauriac was the great French Catholic novelist, although there was something Jansenist (or almost Calvinist) about his vision.
- DirectorMasahiro ShinodaStarsDavid LampsonDon KennyTetsurô TanbaTwo Jesuit priests encounter persecution when they travel to Japan in the 17th century to spread Christianity and to locate their mentor.This is a version by a Japanese director of Shûsaku Endô's famous novel about Jesuit missionaries in Japan. Martin Scorsese seems to be working on another version based on the same novel.
- DirectorsMichael PowellEmeric PressburgerStarsDeborah KerrDavid FarrarFlora RobsonA group of nuns struggle to establish a convent in the Himalayas, while isolation, extreme weather, altitude, and culture clashes all conspire to drive the well-intentioned missionaries mad.A film adaptation of Rumer Godden's novel Black Narcissus, originally published in 1939. Godden wasn't yet a Catholic, but the high Anglicanism which permeates the novel is close enough to the Catholicism she later came to embrace.
- DirectorCarol ReedStarsOrson WellesJoseph CottenAlida ValliPulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, Harry Lime.
- DirectorRobert BressonStarsNadine NortierJean-Claude GuilbertMarie CardinalA young girl living in the French countryside suffers constant indignities at the hand of alcoholism and her fellow man.
- DirectorNeil JordanStarsRalph FiennesJulianne MooreStephen ReaA desperate man tries to find out why his beloved left him years ago.Graham Greene's novel came out in 1951. At the time, some Catholics were quite upset with the novel, but this also shows that Greene was not a propagandist, and that he was quite wiling to explore complicated moral issues. The virtue of this adaption by Neil Jordan is that the director actually understands the context, the dynamics of the context, as well as the tension involved.
- DirectorLiv UllmannStarsElisabeth MathesonBjørn SkagestadSverre Anker OusdalKristin, a medieval Norwegian noblewoman, grows up expecting an arranged marriage. She falls in love with knight Erlend despite social boundaries. Their affair causes scandal and political upheaval before her father permits their marriage.Sigrid Undset's great trilogy was an attempt to reclaim the forgotten history of Scandinavia's Catholic past. The sweep is epic and the canvas is vast. I don't know to what extent the film captures that.
- DirectorBill AndersonStarsWill AdamsdaleNick BartlettChristopher BenjaminGuy Crouchback, heir to a declining English Roman Catholic family, returns to England from Italy at the start of World War II, and joins the Royal Corps of Halberdiers along with various eccentrics, though his attempts to get back with his wife Virginia, from whom he is separated, fail. After being implicated in a colleague's death, he is sent to train a commando brigade on a Scottish island, and ends up on Crete, taking part in its evacuation, and escaping to Egypt with fellow officers Ludovic and Ivor Claire. He is returned to England courtesy of Mrs. Stitch, to possibly prevent him from naming Claire as a deserter. Guy marries Virginia a second time, by which time she has a child by ex-lover Trimmer. While Guy is in Yugoslavia having a confusing time with the partisans, Virginia is killed, along with Guy's uncle Peregrine, by a doodlebug bomb. Guy returns to England after getting involved in charitable agencies, and eventually remarries.This is an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961). As always, in the later work by Waugh there is a blurring of the distinction between what are Catholic and what are aristocratic values.
- DirectorRowan JoffeStarsSam RileyAndrea RiseboroughHelen MirrenCharts the headlong fall of Pinkie, a razor-wielding disadvantaged teenager with a religious death wish.
- DirectorJohn BoultingStarsRichard AttenboroughHermione BaddeleyWilliam HartnellIn Brighton in 1935, small-time gang leader Pinkie Brown murders a journalist and later desperately tries to cover his tracks but runs into trouble with the police, a few witnesses, and a rival gang.The first film adaptation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.
- DirectorMaurice PialatStarsGérard DepardieuSandrine BonnaireMaurice PialatA priest stuck in a rural congregation and burdened with his overwrought spirituality, finds purpose in a troubled woman accused of murder.An adaptation of the novel by Georges Bernanos.
- DirectorCarol ReedStarsRalph RichardsonMichèle MorganSonia DresdelA butler working in a foreign embassy in London falls under suspicion when his wife accidentally falls to her death, the only witness being an impressionable young boy.The film is based, not on a novel, but on a short story. The author collaborated with the director in the making of the film.
- DirectorMichael Lindsay-HoggStarsGlenda JacksonMelina MercouriGeraldine PageIn a Philadelphia convent, two nuns battle it out to be elected to the position of head abbess, and neither is about to let anything stand in the way of getting what she wants.This is film version of Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe. The novel was ostensibly a send-up of the Watergate scandal, and it is quite funny. Behind the comedy was an altogether more complicated story about the nature of mockery. The problem with the film is that all we seem to see is Henry Kissinger and friends in drag.
- DirectorCharles SturridgeStarsJames WilbyKristin Scott ThomasRichard BealeThe wife's affair and a death in the family hasten the demise of an upper-class English marriage.
- DirectorGiuseppe Patroni GriffiStarsElizabeth TaylorGuido MannariIan BannenA mentally-disturbed spinster experiences a series of bizarre encounters in Rome as she searches for someone she feels she'll know--when she finds him.This is an adaptation of The Driver's Seat, a difficult and disturbing novel by Muriel Spark. The novel explores the question: "Who is ultimately in control? Who is ultimately in the driver's seat?" The film version was made by a distinguished Italian director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. Critics generally misunderstood the film, just as they probably would have misunderstood the novel (if it can be said that any of them read the novel).
- DirectorsVolker SchlöndorffMargarethe von TrottaStarsAngela WinklerMario AdorfDieter LaserA young woman's life is scrutinized by police and tabloid press after she spends the night with a suspected terrorist.Heinrich Böl, the author of the novel, was a Catholic and Socialist. Towards the end of his life, he left the Church. This also shows that a Catholic perspective does not always coincide with membership of the institutional church. For English-speakers, this was probably his best-known novel.
- DirectorTony RichardsonStarsRobert MorseJonathan WintersAnjanette ComerSatire on the funeral business, in which a young British poet goes to work at a Hollywood cemetery.Evelyn Waugh's novel was a satire about death and dying and the whole funeral industry. It was funny and wicked. The problem with the film is that it seems to have lost the novel's satiric edge. There is something realistic about the film. If the story is seen as realistic, then everything that happens seems to be plain weird. I don't think the film is at all funny.
- DirectorGeorge More O'FerrallStarsTrevor HowardElizabeth AllanMaria SchellAn unhappily married British security officer stationed in Sierra Leone during World War II falls in love with a young Austrian woman and starts an affair. He soon starts feeling guilty.A adaption of Graham Greene's novel.
- DirectorJean RenoirStarsPatricia WaltersNora SwinburneEsmond KnightThe growing pains of three young women contrast with the immutability of the holy Bengal River, around which their daily lives unfold.Rumer Godden's semi-autobiographical The River can hardly be classed with her later, more overtly Catholic novels (such as In This House of Brede), but it is a good enough entrée into her narrative world and the sorts of themes she was interested in. The film adaptation was by Jean Renoir.
- StarsJohn CarsonElizabeth ShepherdJanet MawAdaptation of a series of novels by Antonia White about a young girl challenging her authoritarian Catholic environment as she grows up.An adaption of four novels by the British writer Antonia White: Frost in May, The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House & Beyond the Glass. The novels were partly autobiographical, and they function as a type of the portrait of the artist as a young girl.
