Courageous Mr. Penn

This is a slow-moving, stodgy, badly-photographed tale of William Penn and his journey from being a member of the upper class in England to his founding of the state of Pennsylvania in the U.S. The movie suffers from the pomposity that afflicted many British epics of the period. The hero is written as an absolute saint (you expect to see a halo around his head and hear a heavenly choir in the background), the secondary characters are completely uninteresting, and once Penn lands in the "new world", the film becomes almost laughable. The "Indians", for example, are dressed like and act like the kinds of Indians you see in westerns. The only thing wrong with that is that Pennsylvania is in the eastern U.S., not the west, and the dozens of tribes there have absolutely nothing in common--culturally, linguistically, ethnically, or in any other way--with what are known as the Plains Indians of the west, a fact that apparently the filmakers either didn't know or ignored.

The film is as slow as molasses, the photography is so dark at times you can barely see anything, the sound is tinny, and the acting is very much of the "old school" type--a lot of flaring nostrils, arched eyebrows, etc. William Penn was a fascinating man, and his life story could make a good movie, but this one isn't it.